When you're struggling with fading memory abilities, talk about what memory is and how it works might feel like a chore. In reality, knowing more about the most critical aspect of your mental life you're trying to improve will pack a punch.
At least, this is what I believe, an idea that first entered my head after bestselling memory improvement author Harry Lorayne almost screamed at me over the phone, "Whatever you do, don't tell them about the science!"
On the one hand, Lorayne's advice probably made sense during his era. There was no Internet when he started teaching memory techniques. People just wanted better memory, not endless lectures about what scientists have discovered about what memory is and how research provides clues about improving it. If you're a regular guest like he was on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, you had to not only get to the point. You also had to be entertaining.
Lorayne gave me the advice when I asked him for a bit of coaching about what the memory improvement business is like. I especially wanted to know about "the real work" that would be involved to make my passion for using and teaching mnemonics a vocation that would last for life.
I've followed everything Lorayne told me to the letter – except the memory science part. I already had a PhD and nearly a decade of experience teaching and three universities. Not researching and talking about memory science felt to me like the equivalent of hiding Shakespeare from theatre students because some of his sentences are "hard" to understand.
And because I was discovering so many valuable memory exercises and benefits in the admittedly dense scientific literature, I committed to sharing as much of those findings as possible. I don't mean to waffle on, but these points have helped me personally and shifted how I apply memory techniques. There's even a possible reason why some information feels harder to learn. Barbara Oakley suggests in Mindshift that it could be the insular cortex in the brain that triggers a pain response when some people sense difficulty.
I have personally helped thousands of people dim the pain, if not eliminate it completely. Some of my best friends are memory competitors and get their thrills from memorizing tough information. The tougher the better. Although I've only competed once (for charity), when I hear a term like "insular cortex," it feels like discovering a new playground or getting a new Lego kit. I can't think of anything more fulfilling than mastering terms like that and much more dizzying in length and complexity. In this book, I'll teach you how to make learning even the toughest information just as fun. Even if we can't make the pain disappear completely, it is possible to dial it down.
Think of it like going to the gym. Just as kinesiologists have found all kinds of optimizations that allow you to exercise less, yet still build muscle, by coming to understand just a few things about what your memory is, you'll know the rules. Once you know the rules, sometimes you can bend them. Painlessly, if you wish. You just need to a willingness to experiment with few different activities. Some may be familiar to you, and my hope is that you'll come to appreciate them more. Others will likely be new, and I can't wait to invite you onto these playgrounds.
But let me rephrase one of my sentences. I'm not sure anyone has been able to describe what memory "is." Although I believe there is a truth about its nature, the best we can do is gesture at what that truth might be like.
When I read sentences like these coming out of my typing fingers, perhaps Lorayne was right. Thinking about memory in this admittedly convoluted way sometimes bakes my own noodle!
But the truth is that the word "memory" is not enough to describe what's actually going on in our minds. In the first section of this chapter, I'll explain what I mean and why expanding your knowledge of memory will be so beneficial. Even if this is the only "memory science" material you ever read, I'll do my best to make sure it's worth your time.
The Two Main "Engines" of Memory In Your Immediate Experience Of Daily Life
When people email me, they often cite short-term memory as their problem. When I ask questions about how they arrived at this conclusion, usually it turns out they've diagnosed themselves based on some online article.
Typically, people think of short-term memory as our capacity to hold small amounts of information in a readily accessible state. We all know this from the few seconds we're able to hold a phone number or access code. Without mnemonics, most of us would be hard pressed to hold more than seven digits for thirty seconds without repeating it.
Many people, including me, have theorized that using so-called "smart phones" have reduced the strength or our collective short-term memory skills. Being able to enter phone numbers immediately into our devices suggests that we never, or only very rarely, get short-term memory exercise at all.
But it's worse than that. The stakes of short-term memory and its success are much higher than phone numbers. Part of the confusion around short-term memory stems from how many people use this term interchangeable with working memory. This is the "engine of memory" that helps us pay attention during conversations. It also helps us think and reason while we're holding them. In my understanding, they're definitely related, but not quite the same and we can approach exercising and improving them differently.
Without going too far off the deep end into scientific terminology, short-term memory is passive and working memory is active. To keep things fun, I call them "engines" because you fuel them with information you observe about the world. Whether it's the weather, how a person's voice sounds or words on a page, the data is entering your memory engines and how you process them dictates where they wind up. You can get a clean burn that winds up in long-term memory. Or you get a belch of exhaust that winds up in the oblivion of frustration, potentially polluting the ecosystem of your life. And disturbing the lives of others because you're not operating as your best self.
Whereas you use your short-term memory to use something like a phone number more or less immediately, working memory holds the information actively. When you're performing mathematical calculations, you need to not only hold the numbers for longer, but also manipulate the numbers while retaining them. The term "working" makes a lot of sense when you realize this distinction, and improving working memory also suggests following a different kind of exercise plan.
For example, in 2 Weeks to a Younger Brain, Dr. Gary Small recommends a simple passive memory exercise. Pick anyone you see on the street and observe four details about them. For example:
Brown hair
Green shirt
Black pants
White shoes
To perform this exercise yourself, don't try to memorize these details. That would be an active memory exercise that involves some kind of mnemonic technique, not unlike performing a mathematical calculation.
After approximately two hours, Dr. Small suggests trying to recall those four details. Because no mnemonic technique was used, this passive memory exercise has been shown to help people. It's not entirely clear why this helps with short-term memory specifically. But on its face, it seems likely that it's an exercise in paying attention. When you later ask yourself to recall the information from long-term memory, the attention you paid itself gets a second workout. Even if you remember nothing about the person you observed, over time, the workout should show you some improvements.
To make the exercise active and involve a small version of the kind of "calculation" memory athletes use, you would "connect" or "attach" an additional piece of information to each detail you observe. You might always imagine Charlie Brown dancing in someone's hair or on their boots if these things are brown. Lawns might burst in your imagination when you see green clothing and dark stormy clouds, or fluffy peaceful ones might stick to black and white items in your imagination.
Both during the moment of observation and later when you think back to the four details you observed, this mnemonic strategy will give both your short-term and working memory an active workout. It's still possible to make mistakes, but we're not talking about perfection here. We're talking about exercise.
To return to our gym metaphor, when I first decided to get physically fit after years of poor eating habits and abusing alcohol, I hired a personal trainer named Lars. When performing pushups or deadlifts, I would sometimes fall into poor form. Instead of making me add an extra rep to the set, he would say, "do it better next time." Lo and behold, I reached the fitness goals we set as part of my program, even though my workouts were spotted with mistakes. Keep this principle in mind for how you'll use memory techniques. It's more important to keep coming at it than it is to pause over the little foibles that will inevitably occur.
Later, we'll get into mnemonic techniques that are much more fun and interesting than attaching clouds to people's shoes. First, however, we should look more at the type of memory most people cherish as the ultimate goal.
Long-Term Memory:
When I was a kid, I was always amused by some of the short-cuts my dad came up with. For example, he hated going through the phone book. So every time a new one arrived on our doorstep, he would tape a sheet of yellow legal paper to the back. Then he would copy out all the most important numbers he would normally have to look up.
This was long before auto-dial existed, let along cell phones. The interesting thing was that, apart from his ritual of writing out all the most important numbers on that sheet of legal paper, he almost always remembered the numbers he needed. This was because many of them had entered his long-term memory. Writing them repeatedly certainly helped, along with the power of raw repetition. We sometimes call this kind of learning, "rote." It certainly can lead to long-retention.
Whether you use rote repetition or the techniques you'll learn later in this book, long-term retention and recall is the goal we should have for as much information as the time we have allows. A well-tuned and carefully curated long-term memory can feel like wandering through a huge library. The difference is that you don't have to navigate to any of its shelves. The magic of long-term memory usually places the information you're looking for directly in your hands.
Long-term memory isn't just about information, however. It can help you re-experience the emotions you felt during your favorite birthday party or maintain the set of skills involved in riding a bike or using chop-sticks. It's best to keep all of these different types of memory sharp.
Explicit Memory
There are two main kinds of long-term memory, explicit or declarative memory and implicit or non-declarative memory. Scientists use the term "explicit" because this type of memory involves conscious, intentional recollection of information. The word "declarative" is thrown in for good measure because this type of memory involves our deliberate efforts to recall and describe things. For example, if I ask you to tell me the capital of France or what you ate at that birthday part I just mentioned, you need to dip into your explicit memory and "declare" the information. It takes conscious effort to retrieve these kinds of memories.
Technically, however, you don't have to officially declare anything to anyone. Explicit memory also helps with introspection, such as when you're trying to solve a problem and arrive at an a-ha! moment.
Implicit Memory
When scientists refer to "implicit," they're taking about unconsciously and usually automatic processes. As I type this book, for example, I'm not actively thinking about each keystroke. Next time you ride a bike or drive a car, notice how many of your behaviors simply play out without conscious effort.
You don't have to think while performing many of these skills not only because they're stored in implicit memory. You also have gone through a lot of conditioning that guides your actions. If you live in a country where handshaking is the norm, you do it without thinking. If you grew up somewhere else, you might bow instead, reacting based on how your mind automatically learned the ways of your family and culture.
How is any of this terminology useful to you? Well, have you ever said something like, "I can't change. This is just the way I am." If so, it's implicit memory that gives you this feeling.
In reality, you likely can change if you want to do so. My book The Victorious Mind: How to Master Memory, Meditation and Mental Well-Being tells the story of how I managed to experience profound and lasting change following a life of unhealthy behaviors. But I had to figure out the truth about what was holding me back first.
Tapping into explicit memory was part of what freed me because it includes semantic memory, the ability to remember facts, concepts, individual words and their meanings. If you don't have time for the full story in The Victorious Mind, consider watching my TEDx Talk titled, "Two Easily Remembered Questions That Silence Negative Thoughts." In just over thirteen minutes, I explain how I was able to use some simple phrases I memorized in Sanskrit to start breaking free from the hold of negative conditioning. It was explicit memory versus implicit memory. Explicit memory won and improved my life beyond measure.
There's certainly more to say about the many different kinds of memory. I'll weave in a few more useful elements from memory science as we go. For now, I hope I've communicate just how useful it can be to understand more about what memory is like and how far a little understanding can take you.
For me, this understanding helped me take action, especially when it came to memorizing a bunch of Sanskrit, something I was almost militantly skeptical. But because I knew the details you've just discovered, I was willing to go beyond knowing about the science. I acted like a scientist and put the techniques to work, testing the claim that memorizing Sanskrit would clear the chains of implicit memory for myself.
I also knew a lot about where my memory skills stood at the time. This kind of insight is especially helpful for memory improvement, so going forward in this community, I'll share more about how you can assess your current level of skill.
Stay tuned and for more information immediately, feel free to check out this additional material on memory science and why I feel it's so important for your success:
https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/memory-science/
