Magic of memory

Poor memory has been blamed on all kinds of suspects (“I just wasn't born smart”, “Age is catching up with me…”), but the fact is that the most common culprits are the least suspected ones.

Unhappiness, for instance. It can usher in the dark, heavy clouds of fear, anger and resentment that overturn your mental equilibrium and blotch out memory.

Most memory experts fail to give due importance to mental tranquility. Yet, in it’s absence, you might be able to train your brain to remember better temporarily, but you won’t be able to make remembering a lifelong habit. It’s when you possess inner calm that you’re able to retain your sense of reason, your sense of balance, your sense of humour. In this state of rational tranquility, you operate from a basis of fact, not sentiment. And facts are what memory is all about.

A robust memory requires fertile ground on which to thrive. Not only a clear mind, but other pre-requisites go into its making. So, before we get down to the actual techniques for improving memory, let’s make sure that we prepare well the soil in which it is to be nurtured. Start with these important preliminary strategies before you get started; without them you won't derive the full worth of this book.

Throw out the mental clutter

Let’s suppose that a month or so ago, you read the word, ‘screever’, looked up its meaning in the dictionary and filed away the information for future retrieval. Today you’re trying to recall that word, but for some unfathomable reason, it eludes you. Why? One reason could be the mental blocks that are jamming the highway of your mind.

Negative emotions are one of the impediments that can impede clear traffic. As the Bhagvad Gita says, '… From anger results delusion, from delusion results confusion of memory ...' Not only anger, but a scroll of other unhappy emotions can fog your mind: fear, depression, selfpity, envy, grief, hatred, restlessness, anxiety. With this mist overhanging your mind, your senses can get dulled to the point where you are not registering even your immediate environment or experiences. Thus, you may:

n Pass a friend on the street, look at him, but do not see him.

n Listen to someone who’s talking to you, but do not hear her or later recall a single word she said.

n Touch a snake in the wild undergrowth, but don’t feel it.

n Eat a delicious meal served to you, but do not taste it, or later even remember what it was you ate!

n Inhale the gas leaking from your cylinder, but do not register its smell - with potentially disastrous consequences.

Make a conscious effort to weed out negative thoughts from your mind, to send it positive, harmonious messages.

The great sage, Paramahansa Yogananda, asks us to remind ourselves every day: “I am a prince(ss) of peace, sitting on the throne of poise, directing my kingdom of activity.” Memorize this sentence. Say it to yourself when you awaken each morning. Repeat it to yourself whenever you find yourself in a situation that threatens to upturn your mental equilibrium. Until, gradually, you find that equilibrium is more and more easily acquired and that finally it gets embedded as a natural feature of your thought-scape.

Once this happens, you won’t find yourself turning into a mass of quivering jelly with a bad case of exam nerves or interview fright. The mental equilibrium you've instilled in yourself will still those butterflies in your stomach: All you’ll need to do is take a deep breath and tell yourself with confidence, 'It will all come back to me in a minute.' And it will!

Keep an Open Mind Let me illustrate the importance of this with a riddle which I would like you to try and solve. It was set by the mind wizard, Harry Lorayne: ‘Here is the Roman numeral IX. Can you add just one mark or symbol to this Roman numeral, and change it into the number 6?’

If you have a closed mind, you’ll rack your brain and never come up with the answer. Or you will give up immediately from disinterest. In case you haven't been able to solve Lorayne's riddle, here is the answer: 'Simply add an "S" in front of the letters IX and you've formed the word "SIX"!'

See what I mean? Your memory knows IX and S and SIX. But it’s only if you're open-minded that you can bridge these separate memory strands, link them together and come up with a new concept.

When you allow yourself to get stuck in a mental groove, you put the brakes on your imagination and interest, limiting your ability to build bridges to memories, to link a present problem to past information and to arrive at a solution or a new idea.

Open-mindedness was precisely the route by which Newton, watching an apple fall to the ground, arrived at the laws of gravity. And Archimedes, looking at the water overflow from his bath-tub when he was immersed in it, gave the world Archimedes' principle. If these two men of science had not had that memory-link ticking in their brilliant brains, they might never have given the world those Eureka findings.

Which is why I say: keep an open mind! To do that, you'll need to force your brain out of its old, well-worn grooves by keeping yourself creatively challenged. Try things like designing a new wardrobe for yourself (even if you never actually go out and buy up all those clothes and accessories), reading a book on an unfamiliar subject or dreaming up 10 innovative uses for a paper clip. You've got to exercise your mind to make it more flexible.

To be continued...

Excerpted from Super Memory: It Can be Yours by Shakuntala Devi with permission from Orient Paperbacks