Quantum Memory Power Page 7

  Once you have your journey sorted out, go to the first stage, and as I feed the information, just use all those skills: Use imagination, association. Use colors, humor, sex, anything that makes you visualize. Associate the key image with the location. OK, here we go.

  The first object is a director’s chair. Fix it, anchor it to the location, and move on to the next stage: Dudley Moore. See him there. What’s his action? Playing the piano. Move on, and at the next stage, you see a nice, big pile of money. Loads of dollars, a big bundle of them.

  Move on. This time I want you to picture a big test tube bubbling away, the steam coming out of it.

  OK, next stage. Now picture a long queue of smiling, happy faces. Got that?

  Move on to the next stage. This time, picture a snake charmer in your mind’s eye. Add movement.

  Move on, and wherever you are, I want you to bump into a comedian. You can make it Jay Leno. What’s he doing there? Use logic. Good.

  Move on. At this point, I want you to confront the three wise men from the Bible.

  Move on. Now you meet another character. It’s actor George Clooney. See if you can picture his face. Again, what’s he doing there? What’s he wearing?

  Finally, the very last stage now, here’s the word: fire. Whatever you associate with the word fire. OK, good.

  As always, go back and review the journey. Replay those scenes in your mind. At the first stage, what do you have? A director’s chair. Next one, somebody playing the piano: Dudley Moore. Next one, a big pile of cash, a bundle of dollars. Next one, something bubbling away: a test tube. Next stage, a queue of something—yes, smiling faces. Next stage, a snake charmer. Next, comedian Jay Leno. Next, the three wise men. Next, George Clooney, and finally fire. Good.

  If you weren’t too sure about any of these, then put down the book, go back, and reshoot the scenes. It’s a bit like being a film director, and of course, there’s no budget on your film. You can spend as much as you like.

  When you’re sure you have those 10 key images in your head, we can go through a little speech.

  REMEMBERING A SPEECH

  At this point, I’ve given you the key images required for the speech that I’m about to give you. The images should start to make sense once you start reading the speech. See if you can relate the key images to elements of the speech.

  You’ve decided to call a board meeting, and you have your directors there. You want to be promoted to managing director, and this is what you say. Think about the key images that you’ve memorized.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The reason I have called this meeting today is that I wish to be promoted from T-boy and general dog’s potty to managing director of XYZ Holdings. I have a number of very good reasons why I think I should be promoted. I’ve been with the company for 10 years and have more experience than the lot of you put together.

  “I have produced more profit and developed more products than anyone else. I have a great client base, and I get on well with all our customers. I am charming, witty, wise, and good-looking. Finally, I would just add one very good reason for becoming managing director. My obscenely wealthy uncle has just bought the company outright, and you’re all fired.”

  Let’s go through that little tirade and pick out key images. That first line: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. The reason I’ve called this meeting today is I wish to be promoted to managing director.” That whole line can be reduced to that one image: director’s chair.

  The next image is Dudley Moore. That’s to prompt me to say that I’ve been with the company for 10 years. Remember the Dominic system? Dudley Moore gives you 10, as in the film 10. “I have a number of very good reasons why I think I should be promoted. I’ve been with the company for 10 years.”

  Next one: “I have more experience than the lot of you put together. I have produced more profit,” hence the bundle of dollars. Now the test tube bubbling away—that’s research and development: “I’ve developed more products than anyone else.” See how it’s fitting together?

  Now the queue of smiling, happy faces. “I have a great client base, and I get on well with all our customers.”

  Then comes the series of adjectives: charming, witty, wise, and good-looking. See how they relate to the key images. First one, charming—remember, snake charmer. I’m witty. That’s Jay Leno, the comedian. Wise: the three wise men. Good-looking: George Clooney. Finally, that last sentence: “I have a very good reason for becoming managing director. My obscenely wealthy uncle has just bought the company outright, and you’re all fired.” Hence the last key image: fire.

  The journey ensures that you never forget your way along the speech. It helps you to keep on track with a steady supply of key points. It’s a bit like a guide rope.

  Other advantages of this technique are that you have eye contact. You have closer contact and involvement with the audience. You feel you have control. You can see them, and of course you sound more convincing. It’s more impressive not to use notes, and the audience thinks you’re confident about your information, even if you’re not. They think you’re switched on. The lights are on, and someone’s home.

  Just think of the times you can use this method. You can use it to remember jokes. Maybe you have to give a speech at the House of Representatives. What about being father of the bride or best man at a wedding? They can be harrowing times. Maybe you have an important product announcement or a grievance with your boss. You can walk in cool, calm, and collected: “I’d like to clear the air on a number of points.” The last thing your boss wants to see is a load of cue cards or bits of paper. If you can walk in and deliver your tirade, that’ll impress your boss.

  A speech mental file is a bit like an autocue. It’s like your own foolproof idiot board. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but politicians these days have their own transparent idiot boards. It allows them to read the information from a script, but they can also keep eye contact with the audience.

  The key images along the journey give you total control. You’re always one step ahead, because you can see the key images coming off in front of you. If you do forget one of those images, it probably indicates that the information wasn’t that important in the first place. Of course, you can always keep a separate sheet. Not that you’ll ever need it, but it’s comforting to know that in the worst case, should you dry up, you can always refer to your notes.

  Once you’ve prepared your speech and you’ve converted it into key images, all you need to do is run through that journey a couple of times back to front, and you have it in your head.

  Sometimes you can get distracted, but you always know from your internal mental geography where you are. This technique allows you to deviate. Sometimes if I’m giving a speech, somebody will ask a question. It might be an interesting one, and we can deviate and go off on a tangent, but I know when to come back.

  It’s a bit like going on the motorway. You see an interesting attraction, so you decide to get off, but you make a note of the exit. It’s exit 10, so you know where to go back on. It’s the same thing with this journey.

  Remember also that a successful speech has a starting place, points along the way, and a concluding destination. If you think about it, a speech is a journey in itself, so use the journey method.

  REMEMBERING QUOTES

  What about quotes? If you want to throw in the odd quote, then simply break down that specific quote into a memorable miniscene or ministory, and have it take place at the relevant stage of the journey.

  Let’s say you’re giving a speech to children about the merits of learning, and you want to throw in the following quote from Aristotle: “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

  You can get a nice key image from that. You might imagine an apple tree with a schoolboy climbing up it to get an apple. You simply slot that into the relevant point along your journey. If you really get keen on quotes, you might want to mentally store them all in one building or in an area like a museum or a library.

  Here are some examples. How would you visualize this? Here’s one from Oscar Wilde: “Art never expresses anything but itself.” Any thoughts? I see a picture within a picture.

  A LIBRARY EXERCISE

  We’re going to do yet another exercise. This time I’m going to give you five quotes to remember, and I want you to store them in one area. Why don’t you pick your local library? Just form a little journey of five stages around your library. You’re going through the entrance, and then passing the desk, and so on. When you’re ready, you can read on.

  I’m going to give you some images now. Go to the first stage. Picture this. A movie, whatever comes to mind. Go to the second stage: computer. Third stage: telephone. Fourth stage: aircraft. Finally, oil well. Got those? Quickly go through them again: movie, computer, telephone, aircraft, and oil well.

  You’re thinking, “What’s he up to now? What is he having me memorize now?”

  Do you ever listen to somebody telling jokes, and you think, “I wish I could remember those. I know the actual content of the jokes, but I wish I could just get a trigger for each one of them.” This journey method gives you a trigger for remembering the quotes or jokes. These are some of my favorite “bad quotes.”

  The first one: movie. Here’s one from H. M. Warner of Warner Brothers in 1927. This was just about when sound was being introduced to moving pictures. He said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

  Next your image was computer. This is a great one. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” This was Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM, in 1943. What a great prediction that was.

  Next one. This is telephone. “This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication
. The device is inherently of no value to us.” This was in a Western Union internal memo from 1876.

  What’s your next key image? Aircraft. All right. This was Lord Kelvin, the president of the Royal Society in 1895, and this was his prediction: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

  The last one is oil well. This was from drillers whom Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist for his project to drill for oil in 1859. This is what they said: “Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”

  You might need to read over the quote a few times, but that single key image will act as a trigger for you to recall the whole thing, and you can use it for jokes as well.

  ACING A TOUGH JOB INTERVIEW

  Here’s some quantum memory power techniques to help you get through a job interview. Before I took up work as a memory man, I applied for a job at Stansted Airport in London.

  During the interview, the guy said, “Look, Mr. O’Brien, if you’re successful at getting this job, you’ll need to know the phonetic alphabet. Are you familiar with that?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really know it.”

  He gave me a piece of paper and said, “Look, you have to read down there. A is alpha, B is bravo, C is Charlie,” and so on. He said, “If you want the job, you’re going to have to learn this for a second interview. I’m going to give you the piece of paper now. You’re going to take it away, come back, and we’ll test you on it. You have to know it for the job.”

  As he was talking to me, I’d already starting memorizing the information. By the time he got to the end of it and handed me the paper, I said, “Right, I think I have that,” and gave it back to him.

  “No, no,” he said. “You don’t understand. I want you to take this away and just learn it at your leisure.”

  “I’ve just learned it.”

  “What? If I say Q, what’s that?”

  “That’s Quebec.”

  “So what’s R?”

  “Romeo.”

  “OK. Can you go through the list?”

  “Yes. Alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta, echo, foxtrot, golf, hotel—”

  “That’s great. How the hell did you do that?”

  “I just have a pretty good memory. I’ll go backwards if you like. Zulu, Yankee, X-ray—”

  “No, no,” he said. “That won’t be necessary. You got the job.”

  Being able to do that was the icing on the cake, and you can do that with a trained memory and a mental fact file. Before the interview, as I was swotting, I was converting facts and figures and putting them into key images along a mental journey.

  Put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer. Wouldn’t you be impressed that someone had bothered to do a little research about the background of your company? He comes across as intelligent and enthusiastic, and he’s asking all the right questions.

  What about your CV, your curriculum vitae or résumé? It’s worth taking the time to memorize your own history. You can put it in order by using key images again and using a journey. This prevents ums and uhs and “I can’t really remember what I was doing then.” Interviewers don’t like gaps in people’s history.

  The mental fact file helps to order your thoughts efficiently. The worst thing that can happen is having your mind go blank just when you need to give a good impression. You may find that you need one or two journeys: one for your CV, another one for the details of the company. There really is no limit to the amount of information you can store. You have financial figures, balance sheet, customers, key employees, even share prices.

  A word of warning here: don’t reel off figures for the entire interview. The guy might think you’re a nut, or you may unnerve him into thinking that you’re after his job.

  Another piece of advice, which my father gave me once: when promulgating your esoteric cogitations, beware of platitudinous ponderosities. Let your conversation possess clarified conciseness with concatenated cogency. Eschew all battlement, but above all, don’t use big words.

  Keep the language simple. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to land the job or confuse the interviewer with words you don’t understand yourself?

  In any event, you could use a journey around the job location. Use all the tools available to you—mnemonics, number shapes, number rhymes for numbers, or even the Dominic system. You could use the methods on the names and faces. That alone could land you the job.

  It really is a competitive market out there, so why don’t you give yourself an unfair advantage over the rest of the pack and land the one job that everyone else is after? It’s easy. See if you can memorize your own curriculum vitae or résumé by turning aspects of your life into colorful, meaningful images.

  Just to recap: to memorize your speech, first condense the contents into key points. Then create symbols for each key point by using imaginative, colorful, meaningful, key images. Place each key image at various stages along a familiar mental journey. The journey will act as a guide, ensuring that you don’t confuse the order of your speech or lose your place. It’s your very own mental speech file, an invisible autocue.

  Don’t try to memorize your speech word for word. The audience wants to hear you, with your spontaneity, mistakes and all. Use a mental fact file for storing data in preparation for a job interview, facts and figures about the company, your own curriculum vitae or résumé, and so on. These can all be stored using key images and a mental journey.

  10

  A Journey of 31 Stages

  Have you noticed that these days we seem to be under more and more time pressure? We seem to rely more on our smartphones, electronic organizers—you name it. I think this has contributed to a steady decline in our ability to memorize things. We just don’t need to exercise our minds so much.

  The Japanese, in contrast, although they’re keen on electronics, are very well organized. They seem to rely more on their memories than we do. They seem to do away with appointment books. Appointment books are great, but what happens if you lose them, or maybe the battery goes on the blink on your smartphone?

  Anyway, wouldn’t it be nice to have full control over your appointments, to know exactly in an instant what you’re supposed to be doing on a certain day? Well, you can, with a mental diary.

  By using a journey of 31 stages, you can tell at a glance what treats lie in store. Each stage of the journey represents a day of the month, and appointments are placed at the corresponding stages. For example, let’s say you have an appointment with your dentist on January 5. At the fifth stage of the journey, you see your dentist standing in anticipation with a drill.

  I have a journey. It’s 31 stages, and it starts at the top of a hill, and it looks over an old village I used to live in. In fact, I was born there. It’s the village of Bramley, in southern England. This is how it goes.

  I’m at the top of the hill, and there’s an old ruin—an old tower. Then it goes on, there’s a little tree stump, which I use as a stage. Then it goes on to a well, a secret tunnel, a garden fence that leads into a garden.

  Then there’s the driveway of an old mansion. There’s a stile, and then there’s another tree, where I used to take picnics as a child. There’s an old shed, and so the journey goes.

  Eventually you get to the 27th stage, and there’s a gas station. A restaurant is the 30th stage, and finally, the last stage, the 31st, is a church.

  How can we use this to keep an appointment book? Suppose you have to return a library book on the 27th. In my case, the 27th stage is a gas station, so I’d visualize a big book leaning up against the gas pumps at the gas station.

  Another example: let’s say I have a ticket to see an ABBA tribute band. (Yes, I’m a bit of an ABBA freak, I’m afraid.) To remember that, I imagine the group, the original group, walking into the restaurant, because the 30th stage of my route is a restaurant. Also, if you want to add details of times or quantity, what do you do? You use number shapes, or the Dominic system.