Limitless - Jim Kwik Page 0,80

when it comes to the man’s profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in.

Even if you don’t at first remember that the man is a baker, perhaps you get some vague sense of breadiness about him or see some association between his face and a big white hat, or maybe you conjure up a memory of your own neighborhood bakery. There are any number of knots in that tangle of associations that can be traced back to his profession.3

What the Baker/baker Paradox illustrates for us is that creating associations for ourselves is likely to boost our memories dramatically. The exercises on the following pages are tools along these lines that I have found particularly effective.

RECALLING A GREAT DEAL OF INFORMATION

One of the things I do regularly when I’m speaking to large groups is ask audience members to throw out a group of random words—somewhere between thirty and a hundred—that I will then repeat, backward and forward. It never fails to get an awed reaction from the crowd, but that isn’t what I’m looking for. Instead, I do this to get across a key point: that everyone has the capacity to do the same thing.

We’ve already talked about the importance of memory in performing nearly all brain functions. If you’re going to unlimit your brain and therefore unlimit yourself, you need to unlimit your memory. This means training your memory to the point where it can retain a great deal of information and allow you easy access to that information. What I do on stage with the list of a hundred words might have the immediate impact of a parlor trick, but how I trained myself to do this is through a technique that anyone can use to remember and access lots of information. Maybe in your case it’s the specifications for your entire line of products. Or maybe it’s a long string of mathematical formulas. Maybe it’s the directions to all the stops on your swim-practice carpool. Whatever it is, this tool can help.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s talk about how to memorize a list of words. The technique will be the same regardless, but it’ll be easier to explain it to you if we can focus on a particular thing.

Below we have provided you with a list of simple words. Your assignment is to memorize them in the order they are given. Spend no more than 30 seconds looking at the list, then flip the page over. Good luck!

Fire Hydrant Diamond

Balloon Knight

Battery Ox

Barrel Toothpaste

Board Sign

What was the method you used to remember this list? Did you repeat the words in your head over and over? For instance, were you saying to yourself “fire hydrant, balloon, battery, fire hydrant, balloon, battery, fire hydrant, balloon, battery, barrel, etc.” Did you find that you needed to repeatedly say the words over and over again, until they stayed in your head? Did you try to see the words as pictures in your mind? Most people use one or a combination of the first two methods described. The process of repeatedly saying or writing information down to remember it is called repetition learning, otherwise known as rote learning.

You may have used rote learning in the second grade to remember your multiplication tables. You would say to yourself “seven times seven is forty-nine, seven times seven is forty-nine, seven times seven . . . .” Or you may have written it out “7 × 7 = 49, 7 × 7 = 49, 7 × 7 = 49,” and would continue to fill up your sheet of paper. This is also most likely the method you used in elementary school to learn how to spell. Your teacher may have asked you to spell a word like chair 50 times on a piece of paper. What was happening was your natural learning ability was being stifled. You bored your mind continually with this method until it finally gave up and said You win! For the 100th time, Columbus landed in 1492, just no more of this chanting!

Most people find rote learning to be a very tedious and boring process. It taxes your mind and is extremely ineffective for remembering most things. We know that as much as 85 percent of the information you take the time to remember in this fashion is lost in only 48 hours. That is why some students find the need to cram, because they know that the material will be lost in a very short period of