SIDNEY to mind. Make it graphic (you don’t have to tell him what you came up with).
Professor Jackson can have a ball and jacks on his head (in your mind). Again, the more graphic it is, the better. Later on, chances are you’ll remember their names.
Memory experts connect people’s names to some aspect of their faces—their noses, their eyes, their ears, or whatever. For example, meeting a man named Robert, you notice that he has a rather long nose. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it is the first thing you saw. That’s where you’ll hook your mentalpicture. So, to suggest “Robert,” you could make an image of a robber and link it to his nose.
The key is to make the images really striking. That means colorful, illogical, sexy, aggressive, or anything else that brings emotion into the mix. So picture a long chain of robbers in striped prison suits running in one nostril and out the other. Bring it into sharp focus. Picture the robbers leaving muddy footprints on his face as they run. Pump up the imagery. When you next see Robert, this image will pop into your mind and will suggest the name.
Mundane images do not work; they trigger the brain’s delete button. If that surprises you, think about what your brain conjures up in dreams. Did you ever dream that you did your grocery shopping? Or that you went to work and had a good couple of meetings? Or that you had a successful golf game, that you had a nice dinner with friends, or that you read the newspaper? The answer likely is no, because your brain’s scriptwriter thought that all these ideas were too dull and dumped them in favor of images that are poignant, funny, sexy, or loaded with emotion in some other way. Positive emotions are best, because you will want to retain them. If you want to remember something, color it in some way that makes it striking.
There are many books on these techniques. One of the best is Benjamin Levy’s
Remember Every Name Every Time
(Fireside, New York, 2002). You’ll also find a concise guide to many memory methods in Tony Buzan’s
Use Your Perfect Memory
(Plume, New York, 1991).
A Touch of Humility
As exciting as the concept of cognitive reserve is and as useful as memory exercises can be, they do not take the placeof physically taking care of yourself. That means eating healthfully and exercising to the extent you can. If you are not eating well—if you are dosing your brain with “bad” fats and toxic metals—the cognitive reserve you have built can be easily and quickly destroyed. Ditto if you are sitting idly instead of getting your heart pumping on a regular basis.
My father went to medical school, finished an internal medicine residency, plowed through every issue of
JAMA
and the
New England Journal of Medicine
, and read the local newspaper every night. Yes, it was the Fargo paper, but it still counts. He built up an enormous cognitive reserve.
But he also grew up on a cattle ranch and never left the taste for beef behind him, except for a few years when my mother managed to convince them both to eat better, before a move into a retirement home made them abandon healthy eating in favor of whatever was on the enjoy-your-golden-years menu for the day. His diet overdosed him with saturated fat and cholesterol, along with iron, copper, and zinc, and after dinner his stomach pains led to his habitual dose of aluminum-containing antacids. His cognitive reserve was like a house on stilts hit by a tsunami. As his memory and emotional control began to leave him, you could almost see the neurons losing their grip on each other.
You want to prevent all of that. That means eating for excellent health, as we’ve seen in the preceding chapters. It also means using every opportunity to give your brain the stimulation it craves, whether that means a newspaper, a crossword puzzle, a class, or a news program. And why not go another step and jump into a challenging and fun online program, or see if a foreign language
Professor Jackson can have a ball and jacks on his head (in your mind). Again, the more graphic it is, the better. Later on, chances are you’ll remember their names.
Memory experts connect people’s names to some aspect of their faces—their noses, their eyes, their ears, or whatever. For example, meeting a man named Robert, you notice that he has a rather long nose. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, but it is the first thing you saw. That’s where you’ll hook your mentalpicture. So, to suggest “Robert,” you could make an image of a robber and link it to his nose.
The key is to make the images really striking. That means colorful, illogical, sexy, aggressive, or anything else that brings emotion into the mix. So picture a long chain of robbers in striped prison suits running in one nostril and out the other. Bring it into sharp focus. Picture the robbers leaving muddy footprints on his face as they run. Pump up the imagery. When you next see Robert, this image will pop into your mind and will suggest the name.
Mundane images do not work; they trigger the brain’s delete button. If that surprises you, think about what your brain conjures up in dreams. Did you ever dream that you did your grocery shopping? Or that you went to work and had a good couple of meetings? Or that you had a successful golf game, that you had a nice dinner with friends, or that you read the newspaper? The answer likely is no, because your brain’s scriptwriter thought that all these ideas were too dull and dumped them in favor of images that are poignant, funny, sexy, or loaded with emotion in some other way. Positive emotions are best, because you will want to retain them. If you want to remember something, color it in some way that makes it striking.
There are many books on these techniques. One of the best is Benjamin Levy’s
Remember Every Name Every Time
(Fireside, New York, 2002). You’ll also find a concise guide to many memory methods in Tony Buzan’s
Use Your Perfect Memory
(Plume, New York, 1991).
A Touch of Humility
As exciting as the concept of cognitive reserve is and as useful as memory exercises can be, they do not take the placeof physically taking care of yourself. That means eating healthfully and exercising to the extent you can. If you are not eating well—if you are dosing your brain with “bad” fats and toxic metals—the cognitive reserve you have built can be easily and quickly destroyed. Ditto if you are sitting idly instead of getting your heart pumping on a regular basis.
My father went to medical school, finished an internal medicine residency, plowed through every issue of
JAMA
and the
New England Journal of Medicine
, and read the local newspaper every night. Yes, it was the Fargo paper, but it still counts. He built up an enormous cognitive reserve.
But he also grew up on a cattle ranch and never left the taste for beef behind him, except for a few years when my mother managed to convince them both to eat better, before a move into a retirement home made them abandon healthy eating in favor of whatever was on the enjoy-your-golden-years menu for the day. His diet overdosed him with saturated fat and cholesterol, along with iron, copper, and zinc, and after dinner his stomach pains led to his habitual dose of aluminum-containing antacids. His cognitive reserve was like a house on stilts hit by a tsunami. As his memory and emotional control began to leave him, you could almost see the neurons losing their grip on each other.
You want to prevent all of that. That means eating for excellent health, as we’ve seen in the preceding chapters. It also means using every opportunity to give your brain the stimulation it craves, whether that means a newspaper, a crossword puzzle, a class, or a news program. And why not go another step and jump into a challenging and fun online program, or see if a foreign language
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