Instructions
Get rid of the clutter around you. Put things away, file all those receipts. Get those photos into the album or store them away in a sack. Clean off your desk, clear out your bedroom, throw out all the magazines and newspapers you've got stacked up that you're never going to read.
Turn off commercials. Stop trying to do two (or more) things at once. Reduce your subscriptions and commitments. Pick certain hours to turn of the phone ringers. Don't have the TV on except for certain specific programs that you've chosen, and then turn it back off when they're over.
Remember that your attention is like real estate - everybody wants a spot on it; the first key to good memory is to claim your attentional real estate for yourself.
Clear your internal real estate: quiet down your thoughts and your moods. Meditate, chant mantras, do drumming. Get your body in motion with daily calisthenics, Tai Chi, yoga or just walks in the woods or along the river or ocean. Hike or swim - do something every day that gets your body engaged in a healthy way (as always, check with your doctor, if you have a health condition, before engaging in anexercise program).
Another very useful practice is to sit down before going to bed and remember your day backwards. This can be frustrating to attempt at first, but it's not too difficult. Be patient and thorough with it.
Keep a journal or use your voice recorder for little thoughts and memories that percolate up to the surface whenever you get quiet. We get so used to ignoring these, but you'll find that, once you start respecting these "whispers from the subconscious," your recall will astonish you!
Sometimes it might be a tune or an image - get these down as well. For many people, these thoughts, melodies and images have turned into books sold or albums of songs recorded (I have a dozen dream books and a thousand songs recorded!)
Make it your daily practice to listen to everything: the sound of the wind and the leaves; children laughing in the distance; sirens or trains out across the highway. When someone is talking to you, really notice how they are composing their thoughts, the expressions on their face, their gestures and postures. Don't be in a rush to respond - let their words and images soak into you. Notice the same things when you speak - this will probably make you talk slower, but that's a good thing, isn't it?
Start noticing your mechanical actions: you've arrived somewhere that you always go to, but you have no recollection of driving. Your dinner plate is empty in front of you, but the only clue you have that you've eaten is the tightness of your belt or the taste in your mouth. You've written an E-How article, but can't figure out how you could have written that step.
It turns out that most of what we do becomes mechanical in these ways. We excuse that by saying "it streamlines my attention" or "I'm too busy to pay attention to everything." Well, folks - that is why we don't remember anything, can't take responsibility for what we say or do.
So now, let's pick one of these mechanical operations (a different one every day) and add some senses to it -- how does it sound or smell? What is the texture? What taste does it put in my mouth? What feeling(s) do I get from it? Make sure you write the answers to these questions in your journal, at least some of them.
After you've really made these new modalities an integral part of your life, you can go deeper into your subconscious. Your mind and moods are quiet enough now so that you notice even very subtle shifts of mood or energy, and you follow it down, down the rabbit hole, as it were. At the bottom we find our essential self, who we really are, even at a preverbal level. This may seem quite uncomfortable at first, but after a while it becomes an adventure to find out, for example, what decisions we made about our lives when we were two years old, or how a passing misunderstanding made an indelible impression on us that still patterns what we do today.
Making a thorough inventory of such impressions can give us the ability to change our behaviors, feelings and thoughts - dramatically!
This final step may seem obscure on first reading, but you will probably understand it (or even anticipate it) after doing the other steps for a while: Create a "witness attention" that follows you around, making note of when you've succumbed to unconscious habits or reacted inappropriately to external impulses, etc. This witness is a little piece of your attention that you've trained to stay awake and watch you. Some people say it lives in "the other 90% of the brain" but I can't prove that, one way or the other. The important thing is that it becomes your way to remember back and forth among all your fragmented attentions and personae (the parent, the employee, the budgeter, the dreamer, the avenger, the artist, etc.)
As you cultivate and support your witness part, you may eventually find that you can get to the EXPERIENCE of everything that ever happened to you, everywhere you ever were, every role you've played in your life.
Read more: How to Remember Everything | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4817144_remember-everything.html#ixzz1F7EZ8X00
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm
04.21.08
The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twilight does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.
"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, then turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degree water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the shore. The wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby continue to comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he tells me in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it causes a sensation."
Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this string of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software program called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainly to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a necessity — students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not pay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in China, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex for us to employ with our naked brains.
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.
Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.
The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met.
In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor and tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote mental athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with awe, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the results he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experiments three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic of a new discipline.
Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a strange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next century: the spacing effect.
Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all students have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearly the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been urging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tremendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
How Supermemo Works
SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word, the rate of forgetting levels out. Theprogram tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time.
However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is "one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomium published in American Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrrowful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if people continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by holding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind since before written language: how to remember what's been learned. But instead, the spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he was expected to learn. But that wasn't his most troubling problem. He wasn't just trying to pass his exams; he was trying to learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few months of completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so painfully acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the spacing effect, but he knew that the methods at hand didn't work.
The most important challenge was English. Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with. So he created an analog database, with each entry consisting of a question and answer on a piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact, he meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it. At the end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and forgotten items. By 1984, a century after Ebbinghaus finished his second series of experiments on nonsense syllables, Wozniak's database contained 3,000 English words and phrases and 1,400 facts culled from biology, each with a complete repetition history. He was now prepared to ask himself an important question: How long would it take him to master the things he wanted to know?
The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical.
Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebbinghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by other psychologists in the decades since. If students nonetheless manage to become expert in a few of the things they study, it's not because they retain the material from their lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfield where intense practice keeps their memory fresh. When it comes to language, the received wisdom is that immersion — usually amounting to actual immigration — is necessary to achieve fluency. On one hand, this is helpful advice. On the other hand, it's an awful commentary on the value of countless classroom hours. Learning things is easy. But remembering them — this is where a certain hopelessness sets in.
As Wozniak later wrote in describing the failure of his early learning system: "The process of increasing the size of my databases gradually progressed at the cost of knowledge retention." In other words, as his list grew, so did his forgetting. He was climbing a mountain of loose gravel and making less and less progress at each step.
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