We already know since a long time that memory & sleep are related, and that sleep plays an important role in memory formation.
A new scientific study, which has been published in September by the Rutgers University in Paris, has shed light on what is called “short wave ripples” in the brain. They are responsible for moving memories from the short-term memory into the long-term memory, and they occur mostly when we sleep.
Do you want to remember the events of the days better? What you talked about in conversations with others? Be able to recall on what date certain things happened? And just walk with more clarity and confidence through life?
If so, I got a real treat for you – your 10-Minute-Memory Workout.
Oftentimes when people ask me for ways to improve their memory, I know that they want “shortcuts”. If I had a “memory pill” – just pop one down with water and you have a supermemory – I know I could sell them for thousands a piece.
The sad news is: it still takes work to improve your memory.
The good news is: it doesn’t take A LOT of work to improve your memory. In fact, you can get away with being quiet lazy about it…
It’s a simple as: writing a daily journal.
I suggest you get started right away. Just take ten minutes every day to recapitulate your experiences.
You don’t need to be “a writer” to do that. Don’t care about grammar, spelling or style. In fact, if you want to, you can just jot down “keywords”.
(If you absolutely hate writing, you will find some really great ways to make the daily journal routine fun and easy for you to, if you get your hands on your own, free copy of the “Memory Manifesto”)
I really suggest you get going right away, and refine later. There is a certain methodology to making a journal boost your brainpower (and it’s really easy). But I don’t want you to get caught up in details. Instead, I suggest you get going right now and establish a daily habit of writing a daily journal. Can be really short. Just stick to that routine for three weeks. Nothing fancy. You don’t need to have a cetain kind of “journal”. A standard notebook, loose sheets of paper or even just a text-file on your computer will do. Once you crossed the three week-mark, turn to your copy of the Memory Manifesto and learn more about the methodology to enhance your memory power with the help of a journal.
In fact – there are many other benefits to keeping a daily journal. Michael Masterson from Early To Rise has written a great article on the value of writing a journal. With his kind permission, I’ll republish his article here.
It may seem a self-centered pastime, but keeping a journal is actually an excellent goal-setting tool. It can help you figure out a direction for your life, and then guide you where you want to go.
A journal you use for that purpose – recording, revising, and recommitting yourself to your goals – becomes a log of your successes, observations, achievements, problem-solving skills, and best ideas that you can refer back to again and again. But you can also include less serious subjects.
In my earlier years, I kept journals sporadically, usually when traveling or involved in some interesting project. I kept a journal for two years when I lived in Africa teaching English and philosophy at the University of Chad. I kept a journal twice during summer vacations – once in the French countryside and another time in Rome.
But when I started writing ETR, about 10 years ago, I began keeping a journal every day. I have done so pretty much nonstop since then.
Before my thumbs became arthritic, I wrote my journals in a book with a fountain pen. Now I do it on my computer. I liked the feel of writing out my words. And I drew illustrations, indulging my artistic fantasies. I can’t do that anymore, but I can import illustrations from the Internet.
I use my journal to get my day started. As a writer, I face the same blank page/screen every writer faces each morning. Rather than wait for the proverbial flash of inspiration, I begin by opening up yesterday’s journal entry, reading it, and using it as a springboard for the writing I will do that day.
My first effort is a sort of obsessive-compulsive account of the hours that have passed since yesterday’s journal entry: what I’ve eaten, what exercise I’ve done, what work I’ve done, etc. This is not meant for anyone else to read. (I’d be embarrassed if anyone did read it.) It serves to rev up my idling mind and limber up my fingers. I spend five minutes doing this, which is usually enough.
Next, I edit something that I wrote the day before. Often, it’s a poem or short story. But sometimes it’s an essay for ETR. This requires a bit more mental acuity. After a half-hour of that, I can feel the creative engine kicking into third gear.
Then I start my real writing. Fiction or non-fiction, this is the most important part of my writing day.
My journal is also the place where I track my health information – my weight, my blood-sugar levels, my doctors’ appointments and results – as well as the progress I’ve made on other goals in business and my personal life.
I used to keep my goals, objectives, and daily task list separately on a notepad. This past year, I’ve begun to include them in my journal, and that has worked out very well.
My sister A, who is an art director for theater and film, e-mails her family copies of her daily journal when she is on set. These are filled with photos and comments about her unusual life. I’ve never used my journal as a communication tool, but I can see from her example how it could be done.
To me, a journal should be like your house. It should be filled with interesting things that reflect the person you are. I hate houses that are designed by professional decorators. You walk through them and they all look the same. You know the people who own them, but you can find no evidence of their personalities where they live.
Keeping a journal can help you change your life. As I said, it can help you do better work, achieve your goals, communicate with friends and family, and get your working day moving. And it’s a terrific way to leave behind a record of who you were and what you were doing during your voyage through life.
If you are keeping a journal or thinking about starting one, here are three ways to make that journal work for you.
3 Powerful Ways to Benefit From Your Journal
1. Keep track of your goals.
Every month, I consult my list of yearly goals and create a list of monthly objectives. I keep both my yearly goals and monthly objectives on notepaper – a throwback to my handwritten days. But then, based on my monthly objectives, I put together my weekly and daily task lists – and those are input directly into my journal.
I highlight my priorities on my daily task list in yellow, and try to accomplish them all early in the day. And as I complete each task, I change its color from red to black on screen (the equivalent of scratching it out). This is a technique I’d recommend to you. The point is to give yourself a little psychological reward for completing your work.
At the end of each day, I note which tasks I’ve completed and which I’ve failed to complete. I also note how long it took me to complete each task. This helps me get better at estimating time commitments in the future.
The goal-setting aspect of my journal has become the most productive part. It may not always be the most fun, but it’s critical to the success of my long-term plans.
2. Stay creative and keep your writing fresh.
Writing in your journal every morning gets and keeps your creative juices flowing. You can record ideas for new products or services… draft memos to your team or letters to colleagues… jot down outlines for books you want to write… even practice your copywriting.
Copywriter John Forde recommends writing three pages of sales copy a day. He says it will keep your imagination in top form. I believe he’s right.
3. Remember things you’ve learned, books you’ve read, and observations you’ve made.
We all have great thoughts now and then. And what do we do with those thoughts? Scribble them on scraps of paper and then lose them, right? Nowadays, whenever I get a good idea, I make note of it by entering it in my journal and putting NTS (note to self) in front of it, highlighted in yellow. It is easy to spot these highlighted entries, so I can be sure they will be put on my goal list and not forgotten about (like so many of my good ideas were before I kept a journal).
I also record interesting facts and figures from my reading. (I make it a point to locate at least one useful fact or idea in every newspaper or magazine or business book that I read.) And I use my journal to list recommendations that I read or hear about: a new wine to try, a new book, a new CD from a favorite singer, a new restaurant, an exotic destination that I want to travel to.
It’s amazing how much good stuff you can accumulate once you get into the habit of putting things that interest you into your journal and highlighting them for future use.
So those are three important benefits of keeping a journal – but there are many more. A journal can also be a place to:
• record snippets of conversations that you can use later when writing your next (or first) novel or screenplay
• list reasons why you deserve a big salary increase (or reasons why you shouldn’t be let go during your company’s upcoming layoffs)
• identify all your assets and their locations, so your spouse or children can get to them in an emergency
• index your favorite recipes, quotations, images, etc.
• record the good deeds you’ve done and the blessings you’ve received
Keeping a journal takes about 5 to 30 minutes a day – well worth it when you consider the payoff: It will help you make better plans and accomplish more with your time.
And when you get much older, a journal can give you an unexpected bonus: hours and hours of fun, reminiscing about your rich, rewarding, productive life.
This article appears courtesy of Early To Rise, a free newsletter dedicated to making money, improving health and secrets to success. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com.
For a very long time I was not so happy with my ability to memorize certain things.
Specially when it came to giving speeches. I didn’t want to read from a script, or have to look at my notes all of the time.
But then every time I stood in front of an audience and little nervousness kicked in and just wiped out my mind. It was like all the contents of my memory had been deleted, just like files on a computer that had been moved to a virtual trash bin.
So I was totally dependent on notes, outlines and scripts. But I wasn’t satisfied with that. I tried rehearsing my speeches at home, talking in front of the mirror.
But even that was difficult. I was almost trying to remember a sentence by sentence. It was like memorizing a poem back in school. This was not the way to go.
Now I knew that there are some people who can easily remember speeches and deliver them onstage. And I wanted to find out how they do it.
So I actually called an NLP trainer. I explained my situation and what I was trying to achieve. We scheduled an appointment and he gave me some coaching.
Now you don’t really need to pay a lot of money for that. Because I’m giving away what he told me about totally free to you.
Actually, the techniques that he used to memorize speeches, and even whole seminars was long that he stole from the ancient Greeks.
Back in those days great orators would hold long speeches and captivated the audience. The art of giving a speech was one that was very highly valued at in these times.
And the way these orators memorized their speeches was by visualizing. They visualized walking through a temple that they knew. They actually walked so many times through the temple in real life that they could remember every single detail of the temple. They knew how many columns that where, how many doors, how many steps and so on. All the details of the temple.
They remembered the temple so vividly that they could walk through the temple in their imagination.
Note if they want to remember the speech all they did was to put certain visual clues into the speech.
For example, if they were talking about bringing some public figure to court, they want in their mind patch that person’s face to the entrance of the temple.
If for example this person stole some money, they will bend in their mind at the first thing behind the temples gate picture and stealing money from another pocket.
And they could memorize hour-long speeches that way very easily. When you are reading this right now, this might seem a little difficult and confusing at first. Maybe you say: all that’s not practical for me. I can’t remember some temple with that much detail.
But you don’t really have to remember some temple. You just take what’s already there and use that.
For example, do you remember what your apartment or house looks like? If so make that your memory temple. Take different corners of each room. All the windows. The lamps. You can hang in your mind something at door knob.
Now there is a simple system that shows you how exactly to do that. And you can find out more about that in your free memory improvement course – click here to claim it now.
PS: Even if you don’t have to give a lot of speeches, these techniques can make life easier for you in many situations, and you’d be surprised how impressed people are by a good memory.
Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
- Leonardo da Vinci
I started to get interested in how I can improve my memory as a young child already.
On the schoolyard Paul, a friend of mine, would be talking about yesterday’s MacGuyver episode. And he remembered so many things – he would repeat certain quotes almost verbatim, and he remembered the whole episode easily.
I saw that episode too, but I was just amazed about how good he remembered it. I couldn’t remember HALF of what he remembered.
But that was not what sparked my curiosity.
What really made me wonder was the fact that I memorized vocabularies A LOT easier and faster than he did. In the back of our schoolbooks, we had these lists of vocabularies for each chapter. And he teacher often gave us the homework to memorize these. It were mostly short lists of 10 to 30 new words.
Paul and me often did our homework together. Most of the time he studied vocabulary TWICE as long as I did, yet he wouldn’t remember them as good as I did. And with vocabulary tests, while I always had A’s and B+’s, he mostly got B’s and C’s, and sometimes even worse.
He often told me: “Yes, of course you got an A again, I would too if I had your superbrain!” And I replied: “But you remember all the McGuyver episodes much better than I do.” His reply then was: “So what? What is that good for?” He was a bit jealous about my ability to memorize so easily. We were good friends, but even with good friends you know that sometimes we are jealous of each other.
But this question never really left me.
Another thing I noticed about Paul and me was that, when we read cartoons, he read them A LOT faster. He had all those “The Adventures of Tintin” cartoons. I actually read all the words in the cartoon, but he could just look at the picture and go to the next, look at the picture and go to the next. I always had to ask him to turn the page back, until he finally resolved to waiting till I told him: “ok, next page”.
Obviously there was something different in the way we thought.
It was only years later when I grew up that I started to make some sense out of it… that I learned about different models of the brain, and how our minds work in different ways.
I’m gonna share more of on brain research and memory here soon, but for now, if you are interested in enhancing your memory, I suggest you go over to my homepage and get your free memory course.
I share some great tips that helped me improve my memory – and now, I could easily remember MacGuyver episodes as well as Paul could. (But quiet frankly, there are more important things than MacGuyver for me these days).
But Paul could have profited just as well from these little “memory tricks”. I call them “tricks”, because I think they are almost unfair – because it will be a lot easier for you to remember names, places, dates and faces, or speeches or vocabulary, than for 99% of the population. (I made that 99% number up, I don’t have the real statistical data, but I know that very few people have as good a memory as I do… and that is NOT because “my brain is different”, but because I learned how to use it – and so can you).
All the best,
Joe Paz