Tag Archives: Memory

Social Confidence

Give Away Yourself For Easy Conversational Power

I’ve been the best man a couple of times at weddings.

Both times, after giving the toast, it was a blast.

First, you’re wearing a tuxedo. Second, if you’ve given a halfway decent toast, everybody knows you.

Also, you feel like you have an “obligation” to mingle.

Which means you can “operate” pretty effectively. Work the crowd. Start conversations with attractive strangers.

Since it’s expected, and you’re part of the wedding party, there is ZERO CHANCE of getting rejected.

Now, here’s an interesting idea on human nature.

People will treat us EXACTLY like we treat ourselves.

If we think we suck, people will treat us AS IF we suck.

It’s as if we humans have this sixth sense. We see somebody approaching, and we’re sure what to do.

So we look for evidence to help us. If the person is smiling, confident and relaxed, and acting like they truly LIKE THEMSELVES, we are much more likely to like them.

On the other hand, if they are nervous, closed off and look like they’re scared of something, we will get scared as well.

Imagine how easy it would be to talk to people if you’re job was to give away hundred dollar bills.

Imagine if you had to approach however many people you wanted to and said your name.

If they said their name, you’d give them a hundred bucks and walk away. But if they didn’t, you wouldn’t give them anything, and walk away.

Pretty easy job, right?

Just doing this job for a few days would make you LOVE people.

Now suppose that you VALUED YOURSELF at more than a hundred bucks.

That you TRULY BELIEVED that somebody interacting with you was worth MORE than a hundred dollars.

And not only that, but THEY believed it ONLY BECAUSE you believed it.

How enjoyable would life be?

Pretty enjoyable! You would LOVE to meet new people.

And people would LOVE to meet you.

The truth is that “meaning” is pretty flexible.

And with consistent practice, you can “build up” how much you VALUE yourself.

So every time you do start a conversation with a stranger, you sincerely believe you are PROVIDING value to them.

This is easy to do with practice.

So start practicing. Click here to learn how.

You Can Always Find Your Way Back Home

Where Am I?

So what do you do when you suddenly find yourself lost? That’s what happened to me once. I heard from a friend of a friend about this magnificent party, and he’d heard from another friend some convoluted directions to get there. Both of us, and the friend, had only been living in the area for a few weeks, so it was pretty obvious what was going to happen. They were going to go straight after work, which was about 6 PM, while I had to work until a couple hours later.

I remembered the directions as best as I could, and decided I’d figure out how to get there on my own. It didn’t take long before I had no idea where I was, no idea where I came from, and no idea how to get back home.

I had a really interesting experience a couple of weeks ago. I had just moved to a new city, and a new apartment. I mean new for me, as well as a new building. Everything was new and modern and really cool. I had spent a few hours driving to this new town from my old town, which involved driving over this huge bridge (several miles long) since my previous apartment was on this big island. A really big island.

So there I was, about to drift off to sleep, when an idea hit me. I had spend all day packing moving, unpacking and setting things up in my new place, I looked around at my new familiar surroundings, and I predicted I would wake up in the morning and experience a few moments of absolute disorientation. When you look around and for brief moment, you don’t know where you are, how you got there, or the last few things that happened before you found yourself in your particular situation.

That has only happened to me a couple times, all after waking up in a strange place. Probably the most pronounced event was a night of heavy, um, entertainment after a Who concert. I woke up in my friends house, and for about five or ten seconds (which is a long time to have no clue where you are or how you got there) of complete discombobulation.

But as I lay in my apartment a couple of weeks ago, I looked around at my new furnishings, and actually predicted I would wake up in the morning and draw a complete blank for the first few moments.

And when I woke up, just as I thought, I drew a complete blank. But here’s the cool part: Before I remembered where I was and how I got there (moving and driving over the bridge) I remembered predicting that I wouldn’t remember, only then did I remember everything else.

It was like back in the old days of when they had to bootstrap the first computers. They had these giant machines that ran off of punch cards, and they had no memory at all. They didn’t have enough memory to turn on all their systems.

So the guy who was using the computer had to feed it a punch card that was only to tell the computer how to turn itself on and get started, and how to read the other punch cards. Once that “memory” was loaded into the computer, then you could stick other, more complicated, punch cards into the machine so it could finally be able to do what you wanted it to.

We take all that for granted, as all of our computers today are pre programmed with complex operating systems and software that makes virtually every machine plug and play. There’s a reason Bill Gates is one of the richest dudes on the planet.

That was a truly odd sensation, waking up in a strange looking around in complete and utter cluelessness, and then remembering that I wasn’t going to remember anything, and then starting to remember everything else.

And when I finally figured out enough to back track to someplace familiar, I was able to use that familiarity to backtrack to a road that I actually knew. And from there finding my way was home was easy. I had given up on going to the party (which I later heard wasn’t all that exciting, anyway) long ago.

No matter how far off track you get, your brain will always find ways to get back to what is familiar. That seems to be an underlying prime directive of our brains. Familiarity.

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Success with NLP

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This Big Breasted Beauty Revealed A Powerful Memory Technique

The Power Of The ABC’s

There is a radio show I listen to sometimes on the Internet. I work in Japan, and sometimes it’s nice to listen to American style radio. The particular show I was listening has a contest every year called Miss Double December, which is a beauty contest of sorts. The contestants, if you haven’t guessed by the name, must be well endowed to enter the contest.

One by one the girls come into the studio for the interview. That way the listeners can not only judge them based on their pictures, but their interview skills, personalities, and any other traits they may have.

The girl that was on the other night had an interesting skill. If you gave her any word, she could name each letter’s number based on its order in the alphabet. For example, cat would be 3-1-20. C is the third letter, a the first, and t the twentieth.

Now they were treating this as a cute trick, and making references to the movie Rain Man, where the main character was a genius but completely incapable of living an ordinary life without constant supervision.

The truth is that this is a powerful memory technique that can help you immensely to remember lists of items, as well as super charge your creativity, making people think you really are a genius. Here’s how.

First you need to understand something called mnemonics. These are so called memory “tricks” that are sometimes used in school to help you memorize things like musical scales, the order the planets, biological classifications and so on.

All Cows Eat Grass, for example is a mnemonic to help remember the musical notes on the spaces in the bass clef, starting from the bottom. A,C,E,G.

Kevin Put Crap On Fred’s Green Snake, helps you to remember the order of biological classifications:

FPCOFGS

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

These are pre-made mnemonics and can only be used for the particular case they were created. But when you create a system, Like Miss Potential Double D’s, you can use in a bunch of different ways that will make it really easy to remember a lot of stuff. There’s a little work required on the front end, but once you got the basic list memorized, you can use to remember virtually anything.

First you need to construct a list of words that start with each letter of the alphabet. Generally speaking, the best way to do this is to just say each letter to yourself, and choose whatever word comes to mind first. A..a..a..apple. B..b..b..banana (you can tell I’m hungry while writing this) C..c..cat etc. Go through your ABC’s a couple times to make sure you remember each word.

Next you want to connect each word to it’s particular order in the alphabet. So apple, and the number one. You want to make a connection that is as visually interesting as possible, so it will be easy to remember. Maybe you can imagine a birthday party, and everybody is wearing those goofy hats, and they bring out an apple with one of those big candles shaped like a number one. The birthday kid starts crying because he was expecting a cake. Or something like that.

Next, banana, two. Maybe imagine somebody holding their hand in the “peace” sign, except their two fingers have been replaced by bananas. Continue this with each letter, and each word you chose. By now you realize that it’s best to choose easy to picture nouns to fill out your ABC list.

It may take a while to completely commit this to memory, so you can spout off the numbers for the word “Thanksgiving” like the girl did on the radio the other day, but once you’ve got it committed you’ve got a powerful tool. Here’s a couple ways to use it.

Whenever remembering a list of items, either shopping list, or bullet points in a speech, simply attaches them to each particular alphabet picture. Do this in the same way as you did before. Whatever is first on your list, attach it to apple. If you’ve built your list correctly, you won’t need to consciously connect apple and one, whenever you think a, or one, or apple, you will automatically remember the other two items. (A will give you one and apple, one will give you a and apple, etc).

Another way to use this ABC list to help your creativity is whenever you have a problem; think of the main root word of your problem. For example, let’s say you need to write a report, and you have no idea how to start. Look up R, for report, on your mental ABC list. Let’s you chose racquet for R. Just start to mentally free associate anything and everything when you repeat the words “report” and “racquet” and let your mind go wherever your imagination leads. You’ll be surprised how quickly you come up with an answer that appears seemingly out of nowhere.

The trick here is to give your mind room to play around with different ideas and create space for you imagination to fill in the blanks. The way the brain is structured, each neuron is connected to every other neuron in your neural network via only a few degrees of separation. So just going back and forth between these seemingly unrelated words (report and racquet) you’ll be surprised how much you stuff you have up there between your ears.

Like I said, this takes a bit of work at the beginning, but once you’ve got a solid ABC list set up with numbers and objects, this can be very useful in a lot of different ways.

I initially learned this procedure from a product called “The Memory Optimizer” from Learning Strategies Corporation. If you’d like to powerfully expand your thinking capabilities and mental strength, give this program a once over.

How He Lost His Bad Habit

Watch Out For Ducks Who Stare

Once upon a time there was a family of ducks. These were normal ducks; they didn’t have a deformed kid who later found out that he grew up in the wrong family, like in that other story. This was your normal, every day run of the mill duck family. They, like all other ducks, had their own collection of problems.

The father duck didn’t really like his boss very much, nor his job, but he realized that as an adult, a wife and three little ducklings, he couldn’t really afford to go back to school to get an advanced degree. His wife was supportive, she realized he wasn’t fulfilling his dream sin his job, and went to work every day largely out of familial obligations, for which she was grateful, and helped to ease his pain any way she could. She was all too aware of the growing problem of duck fathers leaving their families for more personally satisfying pursuits.

The kids were just as normal, not the smartest ducks in the class, but not the dumbest. Their grades were ok, and if they continued to proceed, they would likely get into decent duck college. But this is where things began to get a little strange for this seemingly normal duck family.

As it turns out, the youngest duck, which happened to be a boy, had a collection of special gifts that he had known about since elementary school, but kept to himself, for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of. These gifts were very strange, and at first he was very worried when he found out about them. But as time went on, and he learned to accept them, he grew more accustomed to them, and even enjoyed them.

One of his special talents was to impose a momentarily bout of amnesia on anybody that he focused his mind on. They would be in the middle of a sentence, and then suddenly pause, completely unsure of anything. For several seconds, they would develop a complete and utter blank for everything. They would forget who they were, where they were, what their names were, who the people were around them, and even how to speak. This usually lasted about five seconds, and then everything came flooding back.

This young duck would have great fun playing with his teachers and friends with this secret trick of his. He dared not tell his friends or family about it for fear of what might happen.

When he was younger, there was a young boy who lived up the street who developed some strange behaviors, and they came and took him away. And nobody ever saw him again. So this young duck was terribly afraid that once they figured out he had this gift, they would sneak up behind him, and steal him away to the insane asylum, from which nobody ever returned.

And then one day, the duck made a startling discovery. By focusing his mind strong enough, he was able to permanently erase another’s memory completely. He was very angry with another boy who teased him at school when he discovered this. He focused his energy with great anger, and they boy stopped talking, and sat down with a look of complete and utter bewilderment on his face. And he never recovered. They came and took him away, drooling and smiling vaguely. His parents, especially his mother, wailed uncontrollably, as he was their only child.

They would visit him in the special hospital, but he never did anything to acknowledge them. He just sat with a blank expression on his face, and drooled, and occasionally mumbled strange, incoherent words that nobody understood.

The thing that surprised the duck the most was that he actually felt pleasure when he thought of him, alone in his small room, drooling with a blank look on his face. He started to look forward to doing this to other people.

Pretty soon he would go downtown, where nobody would recognize him. He would choose people at random, and “melt their brain,” as he thought of it. He would feel immense pleasure at seeing somebody who was otherwise normal, walking through their daily life suddenly turn into a drooling, nonsense speaking burden on society. Once he did it to a taxi driver, who promptly crashed, killing all the people in his car.

Then one day the unthinkable happened. He was getting ready to melt he brain of an unsuspecting girl, whom he smiled at but didn’t return the smile, when he heard a voice in his head.

“We know who you are. And we know what you’ve been doing. If you don’t stop, you will suffer unimaginable pain and anguish. Do not doubt us.”

The young duck spun around, but nobody was looking at him. Nobody even looked as if they were trying to ignore him. He shook his head, wondering if he imagined it. He focused his concentration back on the girl, and readied himself to erase her brain.

“You did not imagine this.” The voice said.

“This is your last warning. If you even consider meddling with the thoughts of another, we assure you your consciousness will be transported forever to a world of torment and agony.”

The duck looked at the innocent girl again, who looked at him finally, and smiled.

Easy Tips To Quickly and Powerfully Skyrocket Your Memory

Have you ever had to give a speech, and prepared as set of three by five cards, all bulleted with the points you wanted to cover? You perhaps practiced in front of the mirror several times, and ever were sure that you had memorized all the main points, only to forget them when you stood up in front of your audience?

How about going to the supermarket? Have you ever made a mental list of things you wanted to get, but mysteriously forget them as soon as you arrived? Then of course, as soon as you got home you instantly remembered what they were, and vowed to write out a list next time?

If you’ve ever had this happen, don’t worry. It’s extremely common. It doesn’t mean that you have a bad memory. It only means you are using it incorrectly. There are two kinds of memory. Short term, and long term. Your long-term memory is largely unconscious, and stores things that are important, and things that you use on a regular basis. Where you live, your friends’ names, all the important stuff.

But when you store something in short-term memory, it has a tendency to get thrown out. It isn’t something the brain deems very important, so it doesn’t use a lot of resources to save for any long period of time. Of course if you repeatedly use the information, your brain will get the hint. If you buy a jar of salsa every single time you go to the store, pretty soon your brain will figure it out that salsa is important, and you will remember it after a trip of two.

But what do you do if you want to be able to remember something you store in short term memory, without all the hassle and repetition usually required to convert short term memory into long term memory?

You want to remember your shopping list, but you don’t want to study it every night for a week before going to the store.

The answer is pegging. This is a memory technique that has been around for a while, and despite most people knowing about this, it is not usually used. Most people have a misconception about memory. Most people are under the assumption that it is the job of memory to recall information, and how you first input the information has no impact on this ability. This probably stems from most schools teaching that the only way to remember something is through rote repetition. As a consequence, most people spend very little effort inputting information, and a lot of effort (usually fruitless) trying to recall the information.

Luckily, this isn’t the case. How you store information has a dramatic impact on how easily you can recall it. And by putting in a little effort up front, you can dramatically increase the ease with which you remember stuff.

Ok, back to pegging. What you do is simply connect the thing you want to remember, to something you are already intimately familiar with. Something that is so deep in your long-term memory, there is no chance you will forget it.
And when you connect them together, do so with in a way that will naturally lead you to make the connection.

In order to do this, you will need to create a “peg list.” This is a list of things that you know by heart. Like parts on your body, rooms in your house, things in your bedroom, or the ingredients to your favorite recipe. Any list of things that you will have no problem remembering the name and order of.

Most people start off with a list of body parts, from the ground up. So lets go with feet, ankles. Shins, knees, thighs, hips, stomach, shoulders, face, head. And lets remember a shopping list.

The first item on the shopping list is tomatoes. So you will need to attach the new information (tomatoes) to the known information (your feet). The best way to do this is to create a fantastic, obscene, graphic, cartoonish moving picture connecting your feet and some tomatoes. Like maybe you are on top of a giant tomato that is rolling down the street, and you are barefoot. And while trying to keep your balance, you feel your feet sinking into the mushy cold wet tomato, and you can feel the tomato juices and little tomato seeds squeezing between your toes.

Next is a bag of flour. New information (flour) to known information (ankles.) So lets imagine that you are being attacked by a ninja death squad, but instead of throwing those ninja stars at you, they are throwing bags of flour. And each time they throw a bag of flour, you do a spinning kick, and burst each flour bag open with your ankles as they come flying at you, covering the ninja’s black ninja clothes with tasty white powder.

Get the idea? It’s really easy to learn, and fun to practice. As an added incentive to make it easy on your brain, when you include images/pictures/elements of pain and sex into your pictures, it will be virtually impossible to forget.

You can really amaze your friends with this after you practice a few times. This is the secret behind those guys on TV that can remember the orders of decks of cards, or the names of everybody in the room. It’s not that they are super smart, or have genetically gifted photographic memories, they’ve just learned this trick, and practiced it enough to get really good. And how you know the secret, you can do the same thing.

How to Easily Improve Your Memory and Always Remember Names

Have you ever been talking to somebody, and halfway through the conversation, you suddenly realize that you’ve completely forgotten their name? Maybe you looked around and hoped you would see somebody that knew them, so you could later ask what their name was. Or maybe you lost track of the conversation completely as you racked your brain trying to remember their name.

Of course, the worse thing that could happen is that a friend joins the conversation, and you are suddenly on the spot of making the socially required introductions. You can either admit you’ve forgotten their name, and look foolish, or you can ignore the introductions and hope they introduce themselves, and look rude. Either way, forgetting somebody’s name is an almost certain way to put you into a bind.

Luckily, because you are reading this you are about to discover how to remember names so that you will never find yourself in an uncomfortable position again. And one cool thing about this trick is that it can be applied to any situating where you need to remember important facts or details, and it wouldn’t be appropriate to write them down.

Before I explain the simple trick, one important, and often misunderstood concept about memory needs to be addressed. Remembering things, names, places, dates, etc, is not a passive process. You have to make a conscious choice, combined with conscious mental action if you want to remember anything, at least at first. Just like riding a bicycle, once you get the hang of it, you can do it without thinking.

Memory is no different. If you are having problems now, you can take simple steps that consciously remember things, just like you had to remember to hold the handle bars and pedal and steer so you wouldn’t crash into things or fall over. But just as you soon were able to ride a bike without thinking, you will soon be able to remember things without thinking.

The idea behind this is called pegging. A peg it simply something you hang something. Physically a peg is something on wall that many people use to hang their keys on, so they won’t forget where they are. You can do the same with names.

The idea is to make a decision that you want to remember their name before you get it from them. It may seem cumbersome at first, but once you get the hang of it will be second nature.

The trick is to give somebody a name before you meet them. And not just any name, something specific about the way they look, or walk or talk. The key here is to be as humorous, demeaning, politically incorrect as possible. This is ok, because you won’t be sharing this name with anybody. Then when you hear their name, you will need to connect their actual name in some way with the politically incorrect name you gave them before.

This requires a bit of mental flexibility, as you will need to take their name and create a mental picture of something associated with that name.

For example. Let’s say you are at a party, and you see somebody you might meet. You look at him, and he has a big nose. So right away you think of him as “Mr. Big Nose.” (Remember, you aren’t going to share this with anybody). Then when you hear his name, you create a picture based on his name, and attach it to “Mr. Big Nose” in your mind.

Let’s say his name is Mike. You can think of a microphone, and imagine a cluster of microphones dangling from his nose. Or lets say his name is Dave. You can think of a wave (rhymes with Dave) and imagine a giant thirty-foot tsunami exploding from is nostrils. Or if his name is George, you can imagine either the monkey, curious George, playing his hose, or George of the Jungle, swinging on vine from his nose, or George Washington, and imagine a cluster of rolled up one dollar bills stuck in his nose.

This may seem like a lot of work, but you’ll be surprised how quickly you can master this. You can practice this a couple ways. One way is to look online for baby names, and practice thinking of pictures to associate with common names you might hear. And when you are out in public, like at Starbucks or wherever, you can practice giving people politically incorrect names like “Mr. Big Nose,” or “Mr. Blue Shirt,” or “Miss Big Hair,” or “Miss on sale shoes,” or whatever. You will only need to practice this a couple of times before you get really good at it.

If you need motivation, just imagine what it will be like when people think of you as the person that always remembers people’s names. And when you realize that remembering somebody’s name is the absolute best way to make an impression, you’ll also really increase your popularity.

Tap Your Memories for a Powerful Future

One way to really put yourself on the fast track to success is through the creative use of your imagination. Humans are unique among the animals, as our brains give us the ability to imagine different outcomes for our immediate future. Many evolutionary experts believe this is one of the driving forces behind our incredibly large brains, compared to other species.

This of course can be more of a hindrance than a help. If you’ve ever thought about doing something a little bit risky, you’ll know what I’m talking about. You think about doing something. Like raising your hand in class to ask a question, or speaking up with a perhaps controversial point in a meeting at work. Or you see an attractive member of the opposite sex and you’d like to go and introduce yourself.

What happens next is almost so fast we don’t even realize it. You quickly imagine all the possible outcomes of your prospective course of action, and many times the answer that comes back is a big NO! DANGER!. The brain looks into the future, and imagines what each potential outcome will feel like. Any feelings the brain deems are not desirable, get rejected, and you suddenly feel anxious and nervous about doing what you only thought a minute ago was a no brainer. Now you’re not so sure.

How can you fix this?

Not to worry. Here’s what you do. Before you go to sleep at night, scan through the day for any instances where you wish you could have acted differently. Say you saw a beautiful woman, and failed to take this opportunity to go and introduce yourself. Forget about why, and forget about chastising yourself. Instead, imagine what resource would have been helpful in that situation. For example, what resource would have been helpful when you saw the beautiful woman? Courage? Wit? Charm? Amazing linguistic dexterity? Anything will work. Since this is only in your imagination, you can try different ways until you find something that works really well.

Let’s say you chose courage. Here’s what you do. If it seems kind of weird, don’t worry. It is. But that’s ok. Remember, this is all only happening in your imagination. Scan through your whole life until you find a couple examples of that resource. What was it? Courage. Anytime you felt courage, in any situation, is fine. Now freeze the two memories out in front of your there. See yourself in the memory over there on the left, where you were courageous. And see yourself in the more recent memory over on the right, where you were about to go and talk to the girl of your dreams before you changed your mind.

Exhale all your breath, and breath in all the courage from the picture on the left. Slowly exhale your courage into the picture on the right, giving yourself the courage in your more recent memory. Do this three or four times. Next, float over into yourself on the picture on the right. Now that you’ve infused yourself with the courage that you already experienced, relive your recent memory, only with a different outcome. Walk over and talk to her, throw down some mad game, and get her number, or whatever it is that you wanted to do when you first saw her. Repeat this a couple times.

The key with this exercise is to do it consistently, every night. It might seem difficult, or strange, or even borderline psychotic at first, but when you get the hang of it, you are sending your brain a clear and powerful message. You can not only imagine different futures, but you can reach back into your past and extract resources from anywhere, anytime and from any context and apply them to now, so that in the future you’ll be much more successful than you were before you read this article.

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Three Tricks to Supercharge Your Memory

Everything was perfect. Down to the second. Log off the internet. Jump in the shower. Brush my teeth. Get dressed, get ready to leave, so I show up at work right on time, and…oh crud…where’d I put my keys? Pocket? No. Backpack? No. Freezer? No. Aha! Jacket pocket! No. Wait, over on top of the stereo? Next to my little statue of Buddha? What in the world? Hey Buddha, why’d you steal my keys? The Buddha doesn’t answer. Maybe because they didn’t have keys back in Buddha’s day. But guess what, that reminds me. Here are three tricks to remember the three things you forget the most. Ready?

Car Keys

Where’d they go? Well, this trick, as with the other two, require that you decide before you put your keys down that you want to remember where you put them. This trick won’t work if you throw them down while talking to your friend on your cell phone while checking through the mail for that big check that is supposed to come. The trick? Simple. Imagine the keys are made of some highly toxic alien blood metal, or some kind of advanced explosive, and whatever you set them down on gets completely and absolutely destroyed. I know a person that imagines her keys to be a little tasmanian devil, and spins around and eats through whatever surface she puts them on. Make sure the destruction is really fantastic. So when you think of your keys, you can easily remember what you destroyed with them. (Only in your mind, of course.)

Remote Control

Use the same method, but involve the buttons and some kind of a death ray coming out the front of the remote. Choose something you’d like to destroy before you set it down. Something that doesn’t move, so the cat won’t work. Like a big plant, or your stereo, or your homework. Anything. So when you come looking for the remote, you’ll automatically remember what it is you wanted to destroy with your Death Star remote control.

Car

This one requires a little imagination, but it’s the most fun. Say you park in section A4. Usually when you leave, you look up at A4 and think, ok, no problem. But when you come back, problem. A-what? In this case, A4, think of a noun that starts with the letter A.  Acrobat. Astronaut. Aerobics teacher (choose your favorite.) Then think of something related to the number four. Four leaf clover. Four legged elephant. Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Four members of the Beatles. Choose one for each, and make a crazy story connecting the two. Like your Aerobics teacher riding an elephant who is crushing your car. Or an astronaut with his space suit filled with killer carniverous alien four leaf clovers. It sounds complicated, but it only takes a couple of seconds, and your friends will be amazed. Just be careful not to mumble your secret memory picture too loudly while you’re walking back to your car. Your friends might suddenly want to call a cab.

These are just three simple techniques that can easily help you increase your skills when you use the amazing power of your mind. To find out many more ways to use your brain in new and fascinating directions, have a look through my other articles, or check back for more, as I update this site daily. And be sure to tell your friends, too.

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Quickly and Easily Learn a New Language

Klaatu Barada Nikto! The meaning of this phrase, repeated in the recent rendition of “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” has been widely discussed and the generally agreed upon meaning is that it is a kind of “safe word” used to keep the giant Gort from destroying the Earth.  While no translation has ever been given by the writers of the original screenplay, you can understand the meaning by the context in which it was used.

When we are babies, that is exactly how we learn English, or whatever other language you happened learn when you grew up. We pay attention to the sounds, and expressions, and figure out what they mean by the context in which they are used. When we practice copying the sounds and phrases of the adults around us, we learn what words get us what things. Over the course of three or four years, we unconsciously soak up all the grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary that will form the basis for our entire communication that we use for our entire lives. We do all this without thought, worry, or stress. It just happens.

So what makes it seemingly so hard to learn a foreign language when we get older? Do our brains change somehow, as many believe, making it harder for us to learn as we get older? I don’t think so. I suspect that wherever you are in your stage of life, if you put yourself in an environment exactly the same as when you learned your native language, you’d learn a new one just as quickly. The rub is making sure the environment is EXACTLY the same. Surrounded by loving adults who give you all kinds of happy feelings when you speak, correctly or incorrectly. An environment where the ONLY thing you were expected to do was learn things. And environment where you didn’t have to worry about food, TV, or anything else that you take for granted today.

Unfortunately, unless you have a lot of money to throw around, re-creating the environment where you learned your first language is not likely. So if you want to learn another language, you need another strategy. Luckily, if you’ve read my other articles on memory, you already have a fantastic strategy for learning new words in a foreign language. It’s called pegging. If you haven’t read the other articles on memory, I suggest yo do that.

Imagine you want to learn the Japanese word for apple. Ready? I’ll teach it to you. Imagine you are in Tokyo at a Beatles concert. You can see John and Paul in the front, and George off to the side. But you can’t see the drummer, what’s his name. You walk over to the side, to get a better look. And to your shock, instead of the Beatles drummer, you see a giant apple, with arms and legs, banging away on the drums. How do you say “apple” in Japanese? You guessed it: Ringo.

Now if you need to, you can add more stuff to that picture to make it more memorable, but keep the elements the same. An apple playing drums for the Beatles at a concert in Tokyo. Try this with other words. Take the target word (in this case, “Ringo”) and say it until it reminds you of anything in English. Then just connect them up using a crazy, emotional, nonsensical picture/story. The more you do this, the easier it will get.

Now how long did it take to learn that? One minute? Two minutes? Do you know how many words are the base for everyday fluency in any given language? About 3000. And that’s really stretching it. Most linguists figure there’s really only about 500 that people use in basic non-technical conversation every day.

If you only spend 5 to 10 minutes a day, you could easily become conversationally fluent in a new language every year. And simply because you can imagine this, you can make it happen. How much would that impress your friends?

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Easily Remember Names and Impress Your Friends

“Oh Hi!”
“What’s up?”
“Nothing much, same old. Ya know.”
“Who’s your friend?”
“Oh, this is, uh, um, jeez,” blush, “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”

Don’t you hate when this happens? How would you like to learn a technique that once practiced, would ensure that you always remember peoples names? Do you think you could find this new skill you’re about to learn useful? Don’t worry, it’s easy, however, it does take a bit of mental practice once you easily remember the simple technique.

It’s similar to the pegging technique from that other article. If you haven’t, you might consider to read it, as it has useful background on memory in general.

This way is specific to remembering peoples names. The first step in remembering somebody’s name is to make the conscious choice to remember it before you hear it. Most people hear a name, and then later wonder why they can’t remember it. Memory is an active process, not an automatic one, unless there is one or both of those magic ingredients I mentioned earlier involved. Then it’s easy to remember.

So here’s what you need to do. When you see somebody that you are likely to meet, grab the first thing that jumps out about that person. Anything. Hair, shirt, tie, shoes, belt, nose, ears, eyes.  Since you are keeping this completely to yourself, it is ok to be a little bit mean, but remember to keep it to yourself. Say you see a guy, and he has a really really really big nose. We’re talking Pinocchio big. So immediately, you think of him as Mr. Big Nose. The more you add to it, the better. Like if he has really overgrown nose hair or something, fantastic.

So you meet the guy, and he introduces himself as Mike. Quick, what do you think of IMMEDIATELY when you hear Mike?  For me it was microphone. (As this example is based on a true story.) So now you have to connect Mr. Big Nose to Mike, or Microphone. In my particular example, I imagined the guy with three or microphones swing out of his nose as he walked around. And every time he turned his head, they would swing and crash into the people around him. After that, it was automatic to remember the name ‘Mike’ when I saw him. If you are worried about thinking unkind thoughts about somebody you’ve never met, keep in mind that remembering a persons name is the biggest compliment you can give them.

Another example. I was at a resort, sitting at the bar. I was going to be there for a week, so I thought it would be a good idea to get friendly with the bartender. The first thing I noticed was his unique hairstyle. While I don’t remember exactly how he had it, just that it was the first thing I remembered. He introduced himself as ‘Fred.” Hmm. Fred. Fred. Fred. I immediately thought of the scene in ‘Pulp Fiction.” Now because in the scene ‘Butch’ says “Zed’s dead,” instead of Fred, I had to include a picture of Fred Mertz from “I Love Lucy” just to make sure. So in my picture, I had this guys unique hair, dragging a bunch of dead people (including Mr. Mertz.) So the next time I saw him, I saw the hair, and the dead people (just like that little kid) and immediately say “Hey Fred!” Of course because I called him by name everytime, I never had any problems getting served right away, and my bill at the end of the week was at least half of what it should have been.

Now if you are worried about coming up with pictures for names on the spot, you can practice by finding a list of baby names and practice with those until you get the hang it. It’s that simple. When you get this technique down it will start to happen automatically, and not only with your old friends be amazed, but you will be collecting wonderful new friends as well.

Be sure to check back often, and read more articles on how you can improve yourself, and get a different perspective on reality. And after you master this simple memory technique and impress your friends, you’ll be sure to tell them about this site, won’t you?

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