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  QUANTUM MEMORY POWER

  QUANTUM MEMORY POWER

  LEARN TO IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY WITH THE WORLD MEMORY CHAMPION!

  DOMINIC O’BRIEN

  Published 2020 by Gildan Media LLC

  aka G&D Media

  www.GandDmedia.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Dominic O’Brien

  No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. No liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained within. Although every precaution has been taken, the author and publisher assume no liability for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  First Edition: 2020

  Front cover design by David Rheinhardt of Pyrographx

  Interior design by Meghan Day Healey of Story Horse, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

  eISBN: 978-1-7225-2429-6

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Foreword

  1 It’s Time for Mental Fitness

  2 Three Keys to Quantum Memory Power

  3 The Journey Method

  4 Revision and Review

  5 Combining the Linking and Journey Methods

  6 Never Forget Another Name or Face

  7 Dominic Plays “Trivial Pursuit”

  8 The Dominic System

  9 Conquering Your Greatest Fear

  10 A Journey of 31 Stages

  11 Some Words on Words

  12 The Secret to Remembering Dates

  13 A Frame of Reference

  14 A Look Inside Your Brain

  15 Your First Advanced Test

  16 Time Travel

  17 Card Memorization

  18 Becoming a Mentathlete

  19 Final Thoughts

  Foreword

  Dominic O’Brien was not born with a special gift for memorizing vast amounts of information. Yes, he has won the World Memory Championships a record 8 times and is the current Senior World Champion as well as being in the record books for memorizing 54 decks of playing cards after a single sighting of each card. He can memorize a random sequence of 2,000 numbers in less than an hour and appears regularly on television, memorizing anything from shopping lists to the names and faces of an entire audience.

  Yet Dominic is only able to accomplish these feats because he has trained his brain to do them. What he can do, you can do too. The techniques, systems, and strategies in Quantum Memory Power are unrivaled. They are the most powerful in the world, and the reason is simple: Dominic has devised each and every method from his own trials and errors. The systems that worked, he kept and refined. Those that were unproductive, he discarded. The result is a powerful system, the Dominic System, that will unleash quantum memory powers you never knew you had.

  You’ll learn to remember names, faces, numbers, birthdays, dates, appointments, speeches, or any sequence of numbers you want. Once you have unleashed your memory power, there will be no limits to the type or quantity of information you will be able to store. With each powerful technique in Quantum Memory Power, you’ll be given practical applications and exercises to test and strengthen your abilities in each area.

  You’ll be using your imagination and creative abilities in ways you never imagined to gain speed, accuracy, and poise in the development of your own special quantum memory powers. Not only will you learn how to develop a powerful memory, but you’ll gain competence and self-esteem.

  You’ll learn how your brain operates, how to improve your decision making powers, how to remember directions, how to develop laser-sharp concentration, and everything from acing a tough job interview to developing a mental fact file.

  You’re about to take the journey of a lifetime. You never realized that learning could be such fun. Who knows? You could end up challenging Dominic at the next World Memory Championship.

  1

  It’s Time for Mental Fitness

  Together we’re going to take a quantum leap in unleashing the true potential of your memory. We’re going to unlock a wealth of memory power that you probably didn’t even know that you had.

  How would you like to remember the names and faces of everybody you meet and store that information in your memory, not just for days and weeks, but for months and years ahead?

  I’m going to take you on a journey through the world of mnemonics, and I’m going to teach you a new language—the language of numbers—so that you’ll be able to remember any number—dates, birthdays, appointments, telephone numbers. Now I’m talking big numbers here: 50 digits, 100, maybe even 1,000 or more.

  How would you like to be able to deliver a lengthy speech entirely from memory, with no notes at all? I’m going to teach you how to do that. I’ll also teach you how to remember quotes, anecdotes, jokes, and material that will impress even the coldest of audiences.

  Imagine reading through a newspaper or magazine and being able to remember every single detail in it. You’ll even be able to pinpoint the exact detail on any page. That’ll impress your family and friends.

  How would you like to pinpoint the day of the week for any date in the last century? Not just the last century, but any date in the future or in the past. You’ll be able to do that in seconds.

  I’m going to teach you the secrets of accelerated learning. Maybe you’re a student, or perhaps you have children studying at school. I’m going to teach you how to learn so that you can absorb knowledge the lazy man’s way. You’re going to learn new words. You won’t make spelling mistakes anymore. I’ll even teach you how to learn a vocabulary in a foreign language. That’s just the beginning.

  In the advanced section of this book, I’m going to teach you how to master your own brain waves. I’m going to teach you how to control both sides of your brain. You could be a walking Einstein without evening know it. I’m even going to teach you how to memorize, not one deck of cards, but several. In short, I’m going to groom you to become a memory champion in your own right.

  At the moment, you’re probably thinking, “Maybe this guy can teach me a thing or two, but I bet he was born with a very special brain. Maybe he has a photographic memory.”

  You’d be absolutely wrong. In fact at school I was described as dyslexic. I left school when I was 16. Here are some actual reports from when I was a child. Age 9½: “Calculation terribly slow, must concentrate, often cannot repeat the question.” I was 19th out of a class of 22.

  Here’s another. Age 10¼: “He tends to dream in the middle of a calculation, which leads him to lose track of the thought.” I was 17th out of a class of 23.

  This is my favorite one. “Geography: has not paid much attention. Appears to know more of the universe than the earth.”

  From those school reports, you wouldn’t think there was a future memory champion in the making, would you? It was only in 1987, when I saw a guy on television memorize a deck of cards, that the way I thought about my own memory was transformed.

  In the World Memory Championships, you have to listen to a 200-digit number spoken at the rate of 1-digit per second. The person that can memorize the most digits before making a mistake is the winner. In other words, it’s sudden death. I was able to memorize the first 128 digits. You can do this too.

  THE WORLD MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIPS

  Let me give you a little bit of the background of the World Memory Championships. They started in 1991, and ever since then their numbers have grown. We have national champions: a Uni
ted States champion, a German, Malaysian, English, Irish, Turkish champion, and so on. The best of each country all gather each year in London for the world championship.

  This is the very first examination; it’s 1 of 10 events on a Thursday morning. We all sit down, all 400 of us, and we’re confronted with a number. We have 1 hour to memorize just 1 number. Not too difficult, you might think, but this particular number is 3,000 digits long, and it’s randomly generated. You have to read through the number like a book and memorize as many of the digits as possible.

  There are penalties. On the first page, you have 25 rows of 40 digits. If you make a mistake on the first line, then you lose 20 digits. If you make 2 or more mistakes, then you lose the whole line. Last year I tried to memorize 1,820. My best, after penalties, is 1,780 digits.

  In the next test, you’re given 100 names and faces that you’ve never seen before, and you have 15 minutes to memorize them. You get a 500-word poem to memorize. You have an hour to memorize as many decks of cards as you can. I usually attempt over twenty decks. Last year, I did 18½ decks. Here’s one of the more quirky ones: you get half an hour to memorize 3,000 binary digits. The person who can memorize the most information altogether wins the championships.

  At this point you’re probably thinking, “What a sad man. This guy should get out more often.” You probably think that all I do all day long is just sit and stare at loads of numbers and playing cards. Well, I don’t, unless I’m in training a couple of months before the championships.

  People often ask me, “What is the point in trying to memorize a 2,385-digit binary number? It doesn’t get you anywhere, does it?”

  Here’s the answer I normally give: why would 22 fully grown men want to kick a ball from one end of a field to get it into a net at the other? Why should a fully grown man or woman want to hit a little white ball from the top of a hill to get it into a little tin cup 300 yards down the other end of the field? There’s no point, is there? It’s hardly crucial to survival. When you go to bed, you don’t tell your wife, “OK, dear. Make sure that the cat’s out, the fire alarm is on, and the ball is at the back of the net.”

  We don’t need to survive that way. The point is not the ball being in the back of the net, but how it gets there. That’s the fascination, the skill, the artistry, and there’s a whole industry behind it.

  The order of a deck of cards in my head is not the point, but rather how it gets there. Not only is it fascinating, it’s an extremely beneficial skill. Just think what you could do with that skill if you had it, and I’m going to teach you.

  There are some side effects, but they’re all positive. You’ll begin to develop a laser-sharp concentration. You’ll find that as your memory develops, your confidence increases. Stress levels will come down. You’ll get a wider range of observation. You’ll become more creative and more imaginative. It only takes a few minutes of practice each day, and you don’t have to be a nuclear scientist to be able to do this stuff.

  A few years ago, when I was writing my first book on memory, I wanted to put a patent out on the techniques and systems that I developed, because I believe they’re the most powerful that you can use to develop your memory. It came as a shock to find that someone had gotten there before I did. In fact, I was 2,000 years out. I discovered that the Greeks had already developed very similar techniques, because they were living in an oral culture. They didn’t have any paper, although they had papyrus and parchment: crude forms of paper. If their culture was to survive, it had to be passed on by word of mouth. This required people of the day to have very good memories. If they didn’t have these naturally, they had to use artificial devices so they would be able to record stories of battles and the details of politics. They would be able to talk for hours and hours on end. They used a technique called mnemonics.

  At that time, the Greeks had some of the greatest minds the world has ever seen. Since then, we’ve had the development of paper. We have the printing press. We now have the world’s biggest library, the Internet, so there’s a lot of knowledge that we don’t need to store in our heads.

  I don’t want to go back to Greek times. I’m very happy with the amount of knowledge that we have in computers, the Internet, and everything else, but maybe what we’ve gained in efficiency has come at the expense of mental agility. We don’t have to work our brains quite so hard.

  Have you noticed that over the past two or three decades there’s been a surge of body fitness videos? Actors and athletes keep bringing them out. We’ve learned that to stay young, healthy, and happy, it’s a good idea to look after our bodies. Great advice—I could do with losing a couple of pounds myself. We don’t necessarily heed that advice, but at least we know about it. We have government promotions that say, “Why don’t you take half an hour of physical exercise every day, whether it’s walking the dog or cycling to work instead of driving—something that leaves you a little out of breath?”

  I think there should be a government health campaign encouraging us to take half an hour or even 10 minutes of mental exercise every day—something that leaves our brains slightly out of breath.

  I’m going to be giving you plenty of these exercises in this book. You can regard it as a training manual for the brain. I want you to regard me as your personal memory fitness trainer.

  2

  Three Keys to Quantum Memory Power

  The techniques, systems, and strategies that I’m going to reveal to you are, in my opinion, unrivaled. After all, I needed something that was going to make me win the World Memory Championships.

  I devised each and every method from my own trials and errors. I kept and refined the systems that worked and threw out those that didn’t, so a kind of natural selection took place. I’m only reluctant to reveal these techniques because you might be the one person that uses them to beat me at the World Memory Championships. If you do, I hope that you’ll at least acknowledge it at the awards ceremony.

  I want to know exactly what your memory span is at the moment, so that we can compare it with results later on. I’m going to give you a couple of very simple tests.

  I’m going to give you a series of 10 words. The idea is to remember as many words as you can in order before you make a mistake. Maybe you won’t make a mistake.

  Get a pencil and paper. First, read this list carefully:

  Sand

  Rope

  Flashlight

  Card

  Bathtub

  Lion

  Football

  River

  Gnome

  Target

  Now close the book and write down as many as you can. Once you’re finished, open the book up again, read the list, and see how many you have right.

  How did you do? Just make a note. It doesn’t matter if you made mistakes. Maybe you only got one right, but by the end of this course, I’m willing to bet you’ll get all 10 in order, backwards or forwards.

  We have one more test, a number test. Here are 14 digits: 6, 8, 0, 2, 8, 6, 0, 8, 9, 1, 7, 4, 3, 5

  Again, take a pencil and paper. Read this list of numbers carefully and remember as many as you can. Then close the book and write down the numbers you remember, in the correct sequence.

  How many numbers did you remember? How many did you get right? Maybe you made a mistake on the second digit, in which case, your score is 1 (because you only got 1 right in order).

  We’re not looking for perfection here. I don’t expect you to memorize all 10 objects. This is the first exercise you’ve done, so like any underused muscle, your brain is bound to feel a bit stiff to begin with, but I’m giving you this to ease you into the course.

  About a quarter of the way through, you’ll find that all these exercises will come as second nature to you, so don’t be disappointed if you’ve made a mess of it right now.

  ALI

  I’m going to give you three key ingredients for developing awesome powers of memory. You’re going to be using these right throughout the course. They
are association, location, and imagination.

  Here’s your first memory test. How are you going to memorize these three principles? If you take the first letter of each word, you come up with ALI. Think of Muhammad Ali, who said, “I am the greatest,” because these are the greatest techniques.

  Let’s start off with association, which is the first golden key of memory. If I say key, you think of door. If I say skiing, you think of snowman. If I say snowman, you think of Christmas, and so on. What if I say Tiger Woods? You think of golf. Monica Lewinsky—OK, you get the picture.

  Association works because in our minds, everything is connected to everything else. We identify something not by its dictionary definition, but by what we associate it with. If I say bicycle, you don’t suddenly think, “Oh, yeah, that’s a vehicle with two wheels, one directly in front of the other, driven by pedals.” No, you think of 1,001 other things. You think about the first time you rode a bicycle, a birthday present, an accident. You think about the first time you tried to ride a bike yourself. I can remember being age 7 and getting a nice red bicycle for my birthday. It’s everything but the dictionary definition.

  Association is the mechanism, the cogs and wheels, the nuts and bolts by which memory works, and we’re going to be using plenty of it.

  Here’s the first exercise. I’m going to give you 3 pairs of words or objects, and I want you to forge a link between each of them. There’s not necessarily a ready-made link, so you’re going to have to find one. For instance, if I say kangaroo and master-piece, how are you going to connect those 2 words together? Think about it.

  Introduce a bit of creativity. Maybe you were thinking of a masterpiece: a painting of a kangaroo. That’s what most people would think, but I want you to get more creative. I want you to think outside the norm.

  Let me give you 3 pairs of words now. See if you can make a connection on your own between them. Here we go. Here’s the first pair: bicycle, hamster. The next pair: balloon, submarine. Finally: palm tree, chocolate.