Never Forget Again: Develop a Legendary Memory (Become Better at Everything Book 1)

During the Renaissance it got wrapped up with a whole bunch of Kabbalistic and hermetic ideas that were in the air at the time. In the case of Cicero, that information was a speech. In the case of mental athletes, it might be the order of a shuffled deck of cards. The memory palace is a device that was invented, at least according to legend, in the fifth century BC. Simonides, the famous Greek poet, had an old-fashioned epiphany after a traumatic event.

Moments after he exited a banquet the roof collapsed, killing all inside and mangling the bodies beyond recognition. What Simonides realised, after the event, was that our visual and spatial memories are powerful. We seem to be innately good at remembering things visually. Figuring out how to remember things is what many of these ancient memory techniques are about. If you can engage the visual part of your brain in remembering, it makes stuff stickier.

Never Forget Again by Matthew Canning

By placing the memories within this edifice you are tying them together and keeping them in order. Mnemonists say their skills are as much about creativity as memory. Creating really weird imagery really quickly was the most fun part of my training to compete in the US Memory Competition. Yates writes that the earliest known book with memory tips dates to 90BC. As one of the earliest skills of essence, is mnemonics one of the first sources of self-help literature? There clearly were many others.

The Book of Memory

His assumption was that everybody knew this stuff. This is the best study of the role that memory plays in medieval culture. We reserve the term genius for people who are creative, who are innovators, who think in ways that are entirely new. In the middle ages, the term genius was reserved for people with the best memories.

How did medieval mnemonics both borrow from and add to ancient systems of memory? Mnemonic techniques got weirder and weirder and weirder. Once you get to Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno, a leading figure in the story of the development of the art of memory, these mnemonic techniques become incredibly esoteric and almost impenetrable.

Tell us about the illustrations in this book and what we can learn about memory from medieval illuminations. During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text.

This is such a good book. He applies learning from cognitive science to help us understand oral traditions, stories passed down by word of mouth including The Iliad and The Odyssey. He takes a cross-disciplinary approach. One of the things he writes about is that the ancients understood things about cognition that have only been rediscovered recently. The use of visual imagery to imprint memories is not the only mnemonic device.

Rhyme and rhythm are also mnemonic. One of the best ways to make something memorable is by using rhyme and meter and rhythm and song. That seems to be how The Odyssey and The Iliad were transmitted.

1. Create a memory palace.

Scientists have tested mnemonic techniques, and proved that they work. Studies show that you can easily teach elderly people to use memory techniques, but that once they leave laboratory conditions they forget to apply the techniques. Cognitive science has taught us that learning to retain information is easy, but that remembering to remember is hard. Onto another book rooted in mind science. Tell us about Metaphors of Memory by Douwe Draaisma? This is a book that should be more widely known. Draaisma is a Dutch historian of psychology and ideas who has written a couple of books about the mind that are filled with wonderfully weird anecdotes and terrific insights.

Today we talk about photographic memory or digital memory; we analogise our memories to the technologies of our era. The Greeks talked of memory as though it were a wax tablet.

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In the middle of the last century thinkers saw memory as a hologram. Draaisma writes about how these metaphors shape what we think about memory.

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Draaisma points out that to Socrates, memory was an aviary. For St Augustine it was a treasure house. Freud called memory a mystic writing pad. Memory is a playground. The act of making something memorable involves finding what is meaningful, significant and colourful in a piece of information or experience. The more fun you have with this, the stickier your memories will be.

Never Forget Again (Become Better at Everything)

I mention this again to make the point that comprehension and retention are made easier through association with stories or mere metaphors. So yes, the analogised imagery in metaphors makes ideas and information easier to recollect. This book created the entire genre of humanistic clinical histories. The memory palace is based on the idea that our spatial memories are much stronger than our memories for specific words or objects.

20 Best Memory Improvement Books (Memorize ANYTHING!)

Next you approach your bedroom, where you picture a giant laying on your bed while snacking on loaves of bread. In the bathroom, you see the sink and bathtub overflowing with milk. This process is called encoding.

The reason we misplace things like our keys, wallet, phone, or car so often is because we store so many similar versions of those memories. Think of how many times you've parked your car or tossed your keys somewhere. Your brain has encoded thousands of those memories. To improve your memory, you have to be able to keep those recollections apart. Take note of the surface on which you're resting it. Is it wood, steel, or concrete?