Is there something new you just read or heard that you want to remember, or know?
Make an ABC list.
Here is an example. About six months ago I started doing a form of yoga that just happens to involve a series of 26 postures, and two breathing exercises. How perfect! The English words for each pose were fairly easy to remember but I wanted to be able to identify the Sanskrit name for each pose, not easy to remember because for one, I’ve never done any other kinds of yoga, and two, Sanskrit is totally unfamiliar to me, so I didn’t have anything to tie the names into.
Before the Memory Optimizer course, I’d have written each word out and by repetition, gone over each name until I knew them. I think it would have taken me weeks to learn them. For one thing some of the names of postures are so similar it’s difficult not to get them mixed up.
Using the ideas in the Memory Optimizer, I wrote down the numbers one through 26. Number one was the first posture because it’s the first pose. That’s easy. The second was the next pose in the series, which has two parts to it. For the Sanskrit name I broke down the words into smaller units to make a sentence or story that I would remember. This took some time but it worked! If I came to a letter/number and nothing came to me, I’d go on to another and then come back to it.
I did the first 8 one day, then a few times that day and the next day I mentally went over my list. When I experienced a gap, I’d look back at my written list. This reinforced my learning. Later I’d mentally go over the list again. I just treated it like a game.
In short, I learned the Sanskrit and English names in a few days. Now I know them. I don’t even need to use the list I created, but it was in the process of making the list that I memorized the names.
This is just one example. As Vera says if you just do the work, your memory will improve.
[This message has been edited by Sandy Millies (edited November 24, 2003).]
