Would you Like To Have A Photographic Memory?

Well, to answer your question: it is not possible to develop a photographic memory. Those who are close to having one are extremely rare and unique people who were born that way. The good news is however, that it is possible to develop a very strong memory that, while it isn’t up to the quality standards of Peek or Neumann, is indeed impressive.

99% of the people in the world don’t have photographic memory.

Or do they?

Perhaps that does not sound like a promising statistic… but here’s something that most people don’t understand. You DO NOT have to be BORN with a photographic memory in order to have incredible memory skills!

As a matter of fact, some of the most real-life “memory masters” in the world are actually SELF TAUGHT.

Some of them were people who used to forget where they put their keys every day and decided to do something about it and can now memorize the order of 32 decks of randomly shuffled cards in as little as one hour!

Imagine having taught yourself THAT kind of skill. Could you think of any areas in your life where an incredible memory skill could be useful? You’d become the one person in the office who remembered anything and everything important… you’d be the go-to guy! Or you’d be the mom that never forgets to pick up her kids from football or who never forgot dentist or doctor’s appointments.

As far as I can tell, EVERYONE could enjoy a better memory.

Believe it or not, I will teach you the skill you need to have the mind of an elephant.

Just read the following script. Then close your eyes and imagine you are pulling up to the front of your own house. Visualize your front yard, the porch, the stairs leading up to the door…

Suddenly you hear a loud explosion. The ground shakes. Then something bursts out of your front lawn in a cloud of dirt and grass… it’s Santa Claus and Rudolph, covered in dirt!

You jump out of your car and run past them into your house. You open the front door and go inside only to find that there is a large rhino standing right in front of you! He is so big that he’s made a hole in your wall just so he can fit in.

You crawl underneath the rhino and walk into your living room. Sitting there on top of your coffee table is a sight you cannot believe… it’s a huge Buddha… meditating right there on your coffee table! His eyes are closed, his legs are crossed and his hands are on his knees.

You shake your head in amazement and continue into your kitchen. All seems quiet there… until you open the fridge. It surprises you to find that an entire army of garden gnomes have overtaken your fridge! They are eating through all your food, throwing Jiffy bags on the floor, spilling orange juice all over the floor… you slam the fridge door shut.

Okay, now come back to reality.

I bet I know what you’re thinking. “What the heck, Andre, have you gone nuts?”

 it surprises you to know that this kind of visualization I just put you through is a set of ancient techniques which worked nearly 2500 years ago in Greece and still helps with a photographic memory.

This method is called mnemonics, or memory development systems, and is ascribed to any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval in the human memory.

Mnemonics uses elaborate encoding, retrieval cues, and imagery as specific tools to encode any given information in a way that allows for effective storage and retrieval.

You see… most of us are MUCH better at remembering things through PICTURES and ASSOCIATIONS and NOT by repetition.

Yet, normally when we try to remember things like names, speeches or lines in a poem we say them over and over and over again. This takes not only a lot of time, but using mnemonics in stead, has proven to be far more effective.

Mnemonics is a memory tool that helps you recall large pieces of information like characteristics, lists, names, parts, phases, stages and steps, etc.

In a 1967 study by Gerald R. Miller, he found that students who regularly used mnemonics increased their test scores by up to 77%!

Surely, that is a great enough reason to try it!

Below, is another example of how mnemonics work.

If you should tell one person to remember that there was a certain man named “Mr. Baker” and you tell another person to remember the village “Baker” like a cook who do you think will remember the best?

The person who you told to remember the village baker. Because when you think of a baker, you think of someone in a kitchen with a tall white hat and flour on their hands. But telling someone to just remember someone named Baker leaves them without an image to associate with the name and they are much more inclined to forget it.

Since discovering mnemonics, I’m using these practical applications below daily.

When you’re trying to remember someone’s name, you need to come up with an image of this person along with something that reminds you of their name. For example… to remember my friend Bill Shepherd’s name, I Imagined our utility bill being waved around by a shepherd surrounded by sheep. Or even a shepherd trying to stop a sheep from eating our utility bill. It’s slow going at first, but your mind is a lot more resilient than you can imagine and almost immediately when you try it on other names your mind rushes along with several associations, (mnemonics) to choose from.

How to remember word order–To remember things in a specific order, use phrases. For example, the order of the nine closest planets, I am working on something like this to remember: “My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies.” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto).

How my mentor remembers symptoms of a heart attack. Remembering the symptoms, he takes one word and uses the first letter of each symptom. For example: PULSE.

* Persistent chest pain

* Upset stomach

* Lightheadedness

* Shortness of breath

* Excessive sweating.

PROOF THAT THIS WORKS

You probably don’t remember the names of the two men who set up quality standards for memory, without checking back, but you remember exactly who burst out of your front lawn in the visualization exercise? Of course you do!

Remember, we’re all in this together, I am one of the 99% learning this method. here’s looking forward to awesome future memory abilities for all of us!