Enhance Your Memory by Dominic O'Brien (8 Times Memory World Champion)

hello everybody my name is Dominic O'Brien I am the 8 times world memory champion and I'm in the heart of London and Watkins bookshop and I'm produced quite a collection of books with Watkins Halla pass exams how to develop a brilliant memory you've got one here you can have an amazing memory produce so many books now I'm running out of superlatives I've stopped recycling them so obviously I'm going to be talking about my favorite subject memory and I believe memory is the most important of brain functions and if we take care of it if we exercise it regularly it's going to keep us smart late into late age it's a case of use it or lose it and before I forget to say it my memory is a trained memory I didn't get on very well at school I was diagnosed with dyslexia I believe I had attention deficit disorder as well the psychologists hadn't invented a DD in the 1960s but that's what I believe I have I find it very difficult to concentrate and remember what the teachers were saying you would have thought of that little boy would go on to become a memory champion so something happened along the way which I'll tell you about so memory is something that we take for granted it's it's instant if I say the word I've got elephant on my tie here and elephant pops into your head now I use imagery associations and what people think they make mistake of thinking well I can't imagine an elephant in fine detail and that's not important you don't have to come up with a high definition representation in your head it's just the impression of an elephant but what's important is all the associations you make with that elephant whatever the object is it might be a natural history documentary like the artist David Shepherd it reminds you of something else this is the mechanism by which memory works and we take this for granted it's just superb is extraordinary until things start to go wrong we probably will have those senior moments which worries us slightly but if you can imagine there's a guy called Clive wearing years ago who was a brilliant musician and he was struck down with an illness which attacked a part of his brain called the hippocampus which is responsible for storage and retrieval of memories and it started to eat away at his hippocampus so much that he was only able to remember up to the point in which he had the illness so he could no longer store new information which meant he was left with a 30 second memory worse than a goldfish and every time he saw his wife he was said darling I haven't seen you for years he turn away look at something else see her again say darling I haven't seen you for years and there's no cure for this so that is my worst nightmare on the other hand we have people like Steven will show you might have heard of who's a brilliant artist you can fly him in a helicopter over London this landscape were over Rome for 20 minutes and for the next three or four days he will faithfully reproduce the landscape in immaculate detail that's the closest I've ever come across of a photographic memory people get their myths about memory they say do you have a photographic memory I certainly doubt it's all the use of techniques but he's the closest we've come to it and then we have the probably the most famous memory man Kim peek has anybody heard of Kim peek the film Rain Man with Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise where they modeled the film on Rain Man on Kim peek who had an extraordinary brain we all have two hemispheres two brains in effect joined together by a thing called the corpus callosum like a highway with an exchange of information well Kim peek didn't have a corpus callosum or a very small one so it was like one congealed mass and it meant that he could read a book he could look at the left page with his left eye the right page with his right eye and read two pages at the same time and his in his lifetime he read something like 12,000 books and he was able to remember all the information he gained all that knowledge are absolutely extraordinary so he was one of a kind now these days I believe not knowledge is not power it used to be it's what you do with a large we have an abundant supply of it and really we're getting a bit lazy with our memories we don't need to store we store it in the cloud we have social media we have search engines but long ago particularly in preliterate time Neolithic times memory a knowledge therefore memory was power and there's a fascinating revolutionary new theory coming up from a dr. Lynn Kelly in Australia she's producing a book soon that these stone circles in particular places like Stonehenge were places of learning she called the memory spaces so people would go to the elders who had all this knowledge about animal behavior plants making weapons navigation and they would learn from these memory spaces that would be taught this knowledge and the stones because everyone was unique was symbols there were no monix where the information was stored it's a fascinating theory like that I'll actually think it has a lot of truth in it so in those days memory knowledge and memory was crucial to survival now the way technology is going we're in 2016 and there are people working on it right now is that soon you'll be able to have an interface connected to your brain hooked up to the World Wide Web now what is the effect of that well imagine you want to know anything let's say you want to know what is the deepest lake in the world suddenly a voice will pop into your head and say it's like baikal or you want to know the price of gold the spot price of guardians you'll know it's one thousand two hundred fifty six point seven eight dollars now the question I asked audience is if you're the first person to have this and perhaps the only person in the world to have this facility would that make you the smartest possibly the most powerful brain on the planet what do you think who said no why not why no yes you're not actually learning anything and this is the trouble these days we're looking with searching for information and for search engines are making connections for us and we're learning passively and it's making us more and more impulsive we know we don't have to store the information because we can find it again on the Internet so knowledge is not power it's what you do with the knowledge that makes you smart it's taking disparate pieces of information that you've already laid down you've created memory traces in your brain and then you come up with something new that you rika moment that problem-solving formula and the analogy really is it's reliving fortunately in the Western world where food is easily available we just go into a supermarket we don't have to hunt for it we just take it off the shelves and we've learnt if we're not careful we eat too much it's not good for our health and if we wrong types of food we get things like type-2 diabetes so we have to work it off we have to be careful you either diet or we physically exercise and we're getting the stage now with information with knowledge we no longer have to work at it it's there but we need to offset it and I believe the best way of doing it is to exercise our brains and the best way to do that is to exercise working memory now there are so many benefits to this i co-founded years ago the school's memory championship so we give we go around to schools we teach them techniques to students and they use them to help them study more efficiently and pass exams hopefully I was talking to a colleague of mine the other day and he said you know the most amazing thing about these techniques is it takes away the stress of learning stressor learning can be terribly stressful when you look at a whole topic or subject you've got to study it's a mountain but these are techniques enable you to look at information just once and the majority of the information if you organize it properly will go into your long-term memory but there are techniques to help you keep it there it's called spaced repetition also you can use these techniques in business if you want to upskill learn new trade remember names and faces of clients sales figures delivering a presentation but also later on in age to keep the lid on senility to put the brakes on the aging process it really is a case of users or losers playing games with your brain now back in 1987 I saw a guy on television memorize a deck of cards which he did in just under three minutes just by looking at each card once and that was the most fascinating thing I ever saw and it literally changed it sounds a bit of a cliche but it changed my life I've got to know how this guy did it and in those days there were no books on how to train your memory I didn't nerve any so I had to sit down and try and work it out for myself and it took several days if not weeks before I perfected a strategy which I thought was unique it was in fact used centuries ago used by the Romans and the Greeks you've probably had a memory palaces how many people have heard of memory palaces Sherlock Holmes was talking about memory palaces well I coined the term the journey method which is using familiar locations a sequence a journey of stuffs where I can plant information that I see just once so I code information like playing cards numbers even names whatever it is and I plant them it's a bit like a train journey at different stations and because I'm able to imagine this and make associates strong associations it's very easy for me to pick up the information at the world memory championships these days the competitors spend six to ten hours a day training for it I'll just give you an idea what's involved this is a page a thousand numbers 25 rows of 40 digits this is just one page of about three you have to memorize in and out and the ideas you read through the numbers like a book and commit it to memory you have 15 minutes to memorise hundreds of words about 6,000 binary digits ones and zeros to memorize in half an hour 200 names and faces 30 decks of playing cards to memorize in an hour at this point you're probably thinking I should get out more back in the 1990s journalists will say well really what is the point in doing what you're doing computers can store information and the answer I normally give is well what is the point in running round a track 400 meters going round in circles not getting anywhere what is the point in twenty two fully grown men trying to get a ball from one end of a field into a net at the other and I heard some screams earlier cheers of seeing them are just one in the Euro 2016 it's not the ball being in the back of the net that's the point it's how it gets there that is the art and science of football of ice hockey of whatever it is and it's not the order of a deck of cards in my head that's informed but that is the art and science of memory and more importantly I believe it reveals the very essence of the learning process now the way I do it as I use my working memory which is slightly different from short-term memory working memory is your mental working space now I think at this point I'd like to give you just a short demonstration so every time I click my finger I want you to give me a number between 0 & 9 so if I go like that you say 0 or whatever you want okay we're going to start off slowly and then we'll speed up a little bit I'm going to try and do what maybe 30 or 40 okay six after seven cichlid wait till I click 76 to throw that number backwards you want me to do that well forwards if I can yeah so it starts with a nine whoa ends with a nine here yup just say yes three two four five three six seven seven five nine eight seven two three four eight six six seven eight three two nine four five five seven eight five six nine four one four five nine to six seven yeah that great what is interesting about that is that I got to carry on talking but last that number is still in my head it's gone into my long-term memory it'll be there for a good 24 hours if I want it to be it'll be there for the rest of my life and the way I can do that techniques are in the book it's knowing when to review it but I'm using my working memory my short-term memory is actually been scaled down now we think we can hold about four pieces of information it used to be seven plus or minus two it's now four that's our short-term memory so I was using my short-term memory as I was because you were giving me the numbers I was telling those numbers in two pictures and I was fusing these pictures with older memories I was using journeys and I was creating new connections in my brain it's almost as if I'm sent me I'm tricking in my brain to semi believe an experience don't worry doesn't make you mad it's an exercise you can all do this the reason I'm fast is that I've trained my memory over years we could have done 50 100 200 500 the result would still be the same like you go through the number forwards and backwards dr. Tracy Holloway who worked at Sterling University has been doing research using these techniques on working memory and she's trained 30,000 students a lot of them with dyslexia attention deficit disorder the problems I had she now claims that she can predict the students grades with 95% accuracy by measuring their working memory really working memory is the key to success in learning not just in learning but later on in life as well the way I describe another analogy is that you've got to know you're forgetting threshold when you start training your memory in this way it's a bit like the old circus act with the girl with sticks and plates spinning them so you'd spend about 10 the first one would start a wobble so you go back spin those and then work on the next 10 so this is a bit like your memory when you start doing this how much information can you store just by listening or reading through it once before the first few bits of information start to wobble well as you train your memory you start to memorize more and more information obviously you don't want to train your memory to memorize numbers or playing cards very useful in casinos by the way I did a documentary 1997 where I went to Las Vegas and turn $20,000 into $30,000 I'm actually barred from all the casinos in the UK because I use this to memorize blackjack odds so that the applications are absolutely endless alright I think with the point now where this dyslexic Dunson school school can become a mobile role memory champion so you can - you all have this potential memory as again when we go into schools we get children to play the game of memory and then eventually the penny drops and they realize but actually I can use this to help me learn languages or mathematical equations and then they develop their own systems once they start playing it and we give them the schools that enter the school's memory championships everybody is a winner as they get a certificate for passing but we also have gold silver bronze last year we did a pilot with Rachel Riley from countdown where we have a knockout we have the eight best students in the country and they enjoyed playing the game of memory and of course now they use these techniques so I would encourage your son just to try what I call the journey method just learning a simple shopping list of information by imagining it's one of my books yeah list of words in a split second photographic mentally you can reproduce it since 1991 were the very first world memory championships we've had thousands of competitors and no one has been able to do that I don't believe it really exists but the closest was this guy Steven will share thought of having to learn something or memorize something is is highly stressful but once you start using these techniques it's a bit like meditation because you notice when I was memorizing that number I had my eyes closed and I'm very interested in brainwave frequencies I have my own EEG testing equipment so I know that when I start imagining in information which I turn into pictures a code two pictures my brainwave activity actually slows and is very relaxing so I start producing things like alpha and theta waves that's what I meant memorizing it's very relaxing it's a form meditation but when I come to recall information my brain speeds up I go into high beta and I rattle the numbers out all the information whatever it is so it's really mobility of brainwave frequencies that this sounds terribly it sounds like mumbo-jumbo but but it is it's quite therapeutic in a way it's very relaxing very enjoyable as you start using the techniques there's number shape so three could look like handcuffs for example or a number four could look like a sailboat well the number one could be a pencil or something like this and so to remember three for one I could imagine some handcuffs or being handcuffed for this pillar I could imagine Eitan holding a little sailboat for the number four and then you're writing something down with a large pencil over there so it's three for one so that gives you a clue the journey preserves the order of information but you want to remember eyes and actually as well as real journeys you can use virtual journeys a lot of kids like playing shoot-'em-up games and virtual worlds are getting very real so you can actually use those landscapes as a basis to store information people say to me well I haven't got enough spaces places to put this information is it an infinite number of places you can have journey could be a series of places around your house it could be your front door going into the kitchen your hallway library whatever your house is up the stairs and in each of these rooms you can have four places you could go around in in the clockwise fashion so in one house you might be able to store a shopping list of 50 items if you like just by imagining each item at each place along the journey another term for that is memory palace lines of Shakespeare um I mean I work quite a lot with comedians and Lenny Henry is one of my client I've been working with him for years and he uses these techniques when he doesn't goes on a shows we go through the script together and he'll learn a line but then the way he connects it to the next one is by by linking it somehow the last part of the the gag to the first part so we come up with an image for that but sometimes we'll go around his house and we'll post all his jokes around the house it's quite pleasurable to do that but he's a very funny man and won't even go into the garden so then he'll pick up the images as we walk around his house and that's the whole of his show in his own memory palace I developed a system called gender zones where you have different areas let's say you're learning French or Spanish so you have agenda zone you have a male area which could be everything in a city and the female area could be out in the countryside so you create images from words you know cow is vaca so you might imagine a cow vacuuming in the field doesn't matter how silly the images are but because it's out in the country you know it's female feminine again if they're all in the books the way you use you you will be amazed I mean one of the tests I give students is to give them 20 objects they've got about three minutes to memorize them and the average is about nine to ten that they get right in sequence but after they've had the instruction they're able to memorize 20 30 40 objects I used to be consultant for I still am for the BBC in programs like friends like these Saturday night shows where I'd be given contestants challenges on the show and I'd have half an hour to work with them and after half an hour they would have the ability to remember 30 or 40 objects and seasons so very quickly you'll see results because we will have an imagination that that's what it's all about when I saw this guy on television that that's what really started off this journey to find out how he did it and then I realized I could do it myself by using journeys using my imagination so the three things really the use of association that's really the mechanism by which memory works locations places to put all to store the information so you can know where to find it and then the fuel of memory is really your powerful creative imagination and the more you your imagination the that is the fuel of your memory is your imagination so I'm going all poetic now there is stress and it could be a trauma and the inner light could be a physical trauma or mental trauma it doesn't matter there's a disruption there in the frequencies but that as I was explaining earlier when you start using these techniques it forces you to imagine scenarios and then you you're able to access these frequencies very calming frequency so it slows your brain down and if you do it on a regular basis I mean I tried to memorize two three four packs of cars that they all couple hundred numbers or names or whatever it is and it just keeps my memory sharp so you're never too young you're never too old to start training your memory and measure yourself as well keep a tally of your how much you're able to memorize at the islands JD would be Johnny Depp teller dimes could be David Cameron lives at number 10 Downing Street in charge of the wealth coos the queen of nightclubs Paris Hilton Ace of Spades that could be Alan Titchmarsh a gardener famous gardener three wise men etc now you've learned your language you do this for all 52 cards you'll imagine seeing these people along a journey but also they can interact with each other so ten of diamonds ace of spades that'd be David Cameron using Alan Titchmarsh is action which is digging with a spade if it's the other way around it's um Alan Tish ma Titchmarsh holding the door of number 10 Downing Street so these are complex images interchangeable my wire image is so much easier to remember because we most of us are visual people but it's not just the images it's like a story as well using logic why is Alan Titchmarsh holding the door of number 10 Downing Street sometimes the stranger in the pattern sometimes the stranger the better but logic is very important you information unintelligible information it could be law if you're studying law or it could be a complicated mathematical equation with the different shapes you can assign characters to those they're training six to ten hours a day the record is 18 seconds to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards but I also hold the world record for memorizing 54 decks of cards shuffled together on a single deal so he imagined 2808 numbers spoken once that's what I do with the cards you still got that piece of eight the memory of those numbers I think have been strengthened they're still there I'll go over it this time very quickly from beginning to the end so it's seven six two nine five four one four nine six five eight seven five five four nine two three eight seven six six eight four three two seven eight nine five seven seven six three five four two three nine is that correct so it's actually it's actually getting stronger my memory because my brain cell gets networks of neurons been talking to each other say isn't this fun all these images the difficulties trying to get rid of that number now because I can see the number laid out on a dollar trail so all I have to do is walk backwards through my memory trail my journey and pick up the images the yeah I've coded it into images I'm just reversing the process if yeah if it was Teledyne ins ace of spades if it came out in that order it would be David Cameron digging if you ask me to go through the cards backwards I'd think of Alan Titchmarsh first ace of spades ten times going backwards going back and reversing the story not changing the story it's walking backwards through keep this yes some useful information useful knowledge in your brain for long-term storage and retrieval and you'd be surprised as there's not many reviews you need to do but you need to know when to do it and every time you review the gap gets longer before you need to do the next review yeah I think I'm sure I'm certainly sharper than I was when I was at school I managed to fail most of my exams there's a bit of a cheat that I've written a book called how to pass exams also I've said the importance of measuring so I measure myself how long it takes to memorize I'd like a 200 digit number or deck of cards so I know what shaped my memories in and when I retired from competition back in 2002 I entered a couple years ago and actually found that my records had improved I'm coming up 60 next year want to start training again to enter the senior category you have to be 60 or more 60 plus to enter so I'm still keen on competition did you do in that way involves the function of memory doesn't it it's a matter of organizing information so memory is one part of it training your working memory organizing the information you need to know how to make notes as well efficiently and I highly recommend mind mapping by Tony Buzan are you familiar with that were you again you're putting information into salient images Tony Buzan mind mapping so you're lifting information in the written form into a form that you can understand and then comes the process of actually committing that to memory using memory palaces also knowing how to read efficiently as well speed reading missing out although yeah the words you don't need to know just getting to the salient points so it's efficient reading note-taking memorization and reviewing that stress is one of the worst causes a memory failure and people to come to my courses sometimes I do one-to-one let's spend a couple of days with me the first day I get into relax so without any memory techniques at all we can get onto eg testing and I give them audio visual stimulation which is flashing lights and sound it's a huge subject to get on ting but the first thing to do is to get them and get the hardware right get them to relax so they're receptive to taking these techniques so then I give them the software on the second day the techniques the brain is incredibly resilient I mean obviously if you've got some physical damage through trauma then then it's quite difficult but the stress that you can relieve stress you can get over it I know as I have the stress of school I'm being told I was jus

Channel: watkinsbooks

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Keywords: Dominic O’Brien, memory, world champion, watkins

Id: KD4TKQNvGs8

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 25 2016