Joe Paz

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