The Power of Forgetting (14 page)

The good news is that absentmindedness is not a factor of intelligence. Occasionally forgetting critical information isn’t due to lack of inherent brainpower. After all, we all know people with high IQs who lose their keys, forget where they parked their car, or leave the oven on. And there are just as many people who have fantastic memories but whom we wouldn’t call smart. But what does it mean then when we do things unconsciously—without thinking?

Earlier we discussed that one of the hallmarks of mental decline isn’t so much the inability to remember as the inability to create a memory—to take in a new piece of information
and store it somewhere so it’s retrievable at a later date. When people say, “I forgot,” what really happened is that they never stored the memory in the first place. Hence the solution to remembering: Lock it in initially and you can never forget it!

How is this possible? After all, this entire book is about having a better, faster, bigger brain, so is there a single way to do this? A magic bullet? In short, yes. I’ve already been emphasizing the importance of creating associations in your mind, and the longer answer to this question entails a quick tour of how we typically lose our mindfulness in everyday activities. Rather than making conscious connections between two disparate things in our minds, we tend to skip over this essential step, and then later we find ourselves missing an important piece of information, such as where we placed our keys or what time our kids told us to pick them up.

In their seminal work
The Memory Book
, Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas eloquently describe this very process of what they call establishing “original awareness.” It’s a brilliant term, so I am going to use it as well. It explains precisely the issue: Anything of which you are originally aware cannot be forgotten. But awareness isn’t something we routinely maintain. A classic example would be the act of driving. When you operate a car, you’re not really “aware” that you’re driving. You do it quite subconsciously, especially if you’ve been driving for a very long time. You can get from point A to point B while talking with passengers or thinking about other things besides when to press on the gas pedal and when to brake. Or take the experience of “mindless eating” while watching television or a movie. It’s not called mindless eating for nothing! Anyone can find themselves downing an
entire bag of chips or popcorn without thinking about every bite.

So what do Lorayne and Lucas mean by “original awareness”? They use the term simply to refer to the “first time”—as in the first time you see or do something that you want to remember. When you set your keys down on a table, in order to remember that you put them there you need to have an original awareness when you initially set them down. You need to actively observe what you’re doing. In fact, observation is essential to original awareness, and it’s not the same as just “seeing.”

As Lorayne and Lucas compellingly detail in their book, there is a difference between what the eyes “see” and what the mind “observes.” If your mind is “absent” when you perform an action, there can be no observation; more important, there can be no awareness of the action (learning) and subsequent creation of the memory. But how, you ask, do you create original awareness, especially when it comes to random events and abstract or intangible things? Using associations takes care of this, but the key to making memorable associations is to construct associations in your mind that are meaningful to you. Let me repeat that: You must manufacture associations in your mind that have personal significance to you. This is a fundamental fact of trained memory.

It is always easier to remember things that have meaning to you than it is to remember things that do not. And because it’s possible to make any intangible or abstract thing in your mind meaningful to yourself, there’s really no such thing as abstraction! Being able to make an oddity personally relevant transforms the oddity into something real, concrete, and unforgettable. Once you’ve mastered the art of creating
associations everywhere you go, all remembering—and thus all learning—will be easier for you for the rest of your life.

Back when we discussed patterns, I mentioned that we as human beings seek patterns all day long even when we don’t realize it. And we’ve been doing so since birth—for example, as a baby associating a bottle with food and the satisfaction of hunger or as a child hearing the familiar bells of the ice cream truck rolling down the street and beginning to crave a treat. We are instinctively attuned to patterns in our routines, habits, and daily activities. But patterns are themselves associations. When we recognize a certain pattern, we are in fact making an association somewhere in our mind, and usually it’s very relevant to us.

Take, for another example, the repeated pattern of hearing a car pull into the driveway at night. Hearing the same car every evening, the same sound of the car door closing, alerts family members that someone, perhaps Mom or Dad, is finally home. This experience is rich in sensations for those family members who are attuned to it—the feeling that a loved one has arrived home safely and the emotional satisfaction of that arrival. While it’s just the sound of a car parking, it’s not just any car—it’s one that is filled with associations for certain people.

Anyone who has ever heard a certain song and been cast back in time to a specific memory conjured by that song can understand the power of association. Have you ever smelled something that instantly reminded you of someone or a place from the past? For example, a whiff of a certain type of perfume may call your grandmother to mind, or the smell of disinfectant may remind you of your dad, who worked in a hospital. How many times have you heard or seen something
that made you snap your fingers and say, “Oh, that reminds me!” Usually, the thing that reminded you of something had absolutely nothing to do with what it reminded you of. Somewhere in the back of your mind—in your subconscious—a random or absurd association was made, but not as a fluke or a coincidence. Our senses hold big keys to our memories, and they often provide the “glue” that cements an association in our minds. Everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste can factor hugely into our ability to make associations.

So you’ve used associations all your life, but probably without even being aware of it. Anything you clearly associated with something significant to you, even if subconsciously, is sure to be something that is now easily remembered. But since you have no control over your subconscious, associations have been hit-or-miss most of your life. Let’s change that.

Many of us try to remember things by rote memorization—repeatedly saying the information in our heads and hoping that it eventually sticks. Sometimes this method works for short-term recall, but the information fades away over time. Occasionally it disappears quickly once we’ve used the information—the proverbial “in one ear and out the other,” or cramming for an exam and forgetting all the information when you walk out of the exam room!

Unlike associations, which demand a certain level of awareness to create the link and make it relevant to us personally, rote memorization doesn’t include awareness. When we memorize something by rote, we’re not really “aware” of
what it is we’re memorizing, and it often remains an abstract construct. Anything that stays abstract and intangible to us cannot reach the areas of our brains where the information can sink in for future use.

So here’s a basic rule to all memory training that all memory trainers, such as Lorayne and Lucas and countless others (myself included!), teach: You can remember any new piece of information if you can associate it with something you already know or remember.

One of the most abstract things we’re trained to memorize very early on is the alphabet. And how do we recall it? By associating it with a song. Right now, you can probably hear the alphabet song playing in your head. The alphabet comes naturally to anyone who has the alphabet song down, but when you think about it, the order of letters is fairly arbitrary.

If you ever took music lessons, then surely someone told you that the ideal way to remember the notes that ascend the lines of the treble clef—E, G, B, D, and F—is to think of the sentence “Every good boy deserves fudge.” The first letters of the words correspond to the notes. The ascending notes for the spaces between the lines are F, A, C, and E, which can easily be remembered, since they spell the word “face.” The notes that fall on the lines of the bass clef in ascending order are G, B, D, F, and A, which can easily be remembered by the sentence “Good boys deserve fudge always.” The ascending notes in the spaces are A, C, E, and G, which correspond to the sentence “All cows eat grass.” Your music teacher wasn’t making this stuff up. These sentences have been used for a long time to teach abstract information, and they follow the basic memory rule: Associate the information
with something you already know or at least understand—in this case, a simple sentence—and the information will stick.

A mnemonic (“mindful”) device uses advanced patterns to remember things. “Spring forward, fall back” helps us remember which way the clocks move at the beginning and end of Daylight Savings Time. “Every good boy deserves fudge” is another example of a mnemonic device.

Associations come in all shapes and sizes. In other words, there’s an infinite number of ways you can create associations. All of us can instantly picture Italy in our heads because we were told it’s the shape of a boot. But what about Germany? That’s not so easy, is it? You probably haven’t created an association for that one. (As an aside, anytime you need to memorize something about Germany, try thinking about the actress Meg Ryan. Her name shares the exact same letters as “Germany”; maybe that association will help you.) To remember how to spell “Ohio,” many of us were told to break it into
O
(as in “Oh!”), then
hi
(picturing someone from Ohio waving hello), and finally
o
(“Oh”) again. Or to spell a word like “piece,” some of us were told to think of a “piece of pie.” “Pie” is pretty easy to spell, so the hard part of spelling “piece” (knowing the
i
comes before the
e
) is already taken care of just by associating the word with the phrase “a piece of pie.” And anyone who has had to memorize the Great Lakes might have used the word “homes,” as in “homes on a great lake.” The letters correspond to the first letter of each of the Great Lakes’ names: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. Similarly, the four voices in a quartet can be recalled by picturing a quartet being stabbed, because “stab” gives us soprano, tenor, alto, and bass.

Despite the value in these specific examples, they will
only work if you can make them relevant to you. “Homes” might not be the word you want to use to remember the Great Lakes. You might have to come up with another word or sentence that has more meaning to you personally. If there’s one great thing about memory systems, it’s that if you’re willing to employ them there really are no limits. If you know how to consciously associate anything you want to remember with something you already know (ahem: create that original awareness), you’ll have a trained memory. Associations needn’t be logical or commonsensical, either. In fact, later on we’re going to see that bringing a level of absurdity and silliness to your associations can be an incredibly powerful tool. Anytime you use your imagination in establishing original awareness you maximize your memory building because you’re forcing yourself to concentrate and form associations.

Let’s take a quick example. Say you’re told to remember the following items in this order: T-shirt, milk, sand, boat, and clock.

How will you commit this list to memory and not fumble the sequence? Start by making an association between the first two words, T-shirt and milk. There are a number of ways to do this, one of which is to first picture a T-shirt stained with milk. Then find a way to tell a story through the rest of the words, or at least picture something that encompasses all of the words. Maybe you see a kid in a T-shirt drinking milk while he sits in the sand on the beach. He looks out to the boats on the water and then turns to his mother and asks, “What time is it?” This last part is a tad absurd, but it’s exactly the kind of storytelling that helps commit things to memory. The crazier it gets, the stickier it will be.

But isn’t logic important? Why am I confusing you with
talk about making things as illogical and weird as possible? There’s definitely a role for logic in all things mind related, particularly with regard to using your brain, thinking through problems, and not letting external influences hijack your sensibility. But when it comes to memorizing per se, it helps to recruit your quirky side—that part of you that yearns to be funny, strange, different, and sometimes even ridiculous. When you bring your creativity to the table, you’re in fact making things more logical for you. So it’s not as contradictory as you think. Anytime you fuse your imagination, artistry, and originality with facts, data, and information in a way that retains the integrity of the data, you essentially enhance your personal logic.

Centuries ago, Aristotle began one of his books with this sentence: “It is impossible even to think without a mental picture.” How true that is. Einstein himself confirmed this when he stated, “If I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it.” Our minds tell stories all the time. We mentally see pictures and images all day long, as if we’re running a movie in our heads. Try it right now: If you read the words “baby,” “truck,” and “rhinoceros,” you cannot think of any of those things without “seeing” a picture of them, if only for a split second. The same is true of actions, or things in motion.

When you read the words “skiing,” “mountain climbing,” and “surfing,” what does your mind do? It briefly pictures those actions. It is the image-making part of the brain that facilitates higher thought processes. We never think without making a mental picture, for the thinking faculty thinks of its forms in pictures.

Even blind people think, and in turn “see,” in their own world of imaginary pictures. In fact, we’d never learn or understand anything if we didn’t have the ability to perceive
pictures. When we’re forced to think about abstract or speculative ideas, our minds try hard to create some mental pictures with which to think about the ideas. Those who invent trained-memory techniques teach us to construct images in much the same way Aristotle had in mind when he said that it’s possible to put things before our eyes.