Ignite the Potential of Memory - The Most Effective Memory Method in the World

Author: Zhang Haiyang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: A chapter that completely challenges human imagination—A colorful key is twisted on a parrot, and the parrot reflexively kicks the ball (a soccer ball) under its feet with force. The ball flies out like an arrow, hitting a huge gong, which falls down and lands in a pile of white coral, crushing it into green bananas. A banana leaf flaps, sending a balloon up into the sky. The balloon is pecked by the sharp beak of a white crane flying in the sky, explodes, and disappears without a trace. The crane flies to a black sofa, crosses its legs, sits down leisurely to rest, and then picks out a large, red pomegranate to eat happily.
After reading this imaginative passage, I believe readers can easily remember the underlined words in order: key, parrot, ball, gong, coral, banana, balloon, crane, sofa, pomegranate. Anyone who thinks they have poor memory can, with a little imagination, easily remember these ten words in just one or two tries, not only reciting them backward but also remembering them for a long time. If you have memorized these ten words, congratulations—you have actually memorized the first 20 decimal digits of pi (3.14159265358979323846)! The clever you will surely notice that by following the phonetic association rules, you can immediately convert each word into the corresponding number: key—14; parrot—15; ball—92; gong—65; coral—35; banana—89; balloon—79; crane—32; sofa—38; pomegranate—46.
Now you should feel that using this method to memorize numbers is not only fast and effective but also full of imaginative fun. You are not completing a dull, frustrating memory task but rather playing a fun imagination game! Through this simple number-memorization game, in fact, everyone has already grasped two basic principles of the world's most effective memory methods: association and encoding.
Association refers to using imagination to connect these ten unrelated words together, making it easy to remember them. Encoding, on the other hand, involves transforming 20 (dry and boring numbers) into vivid, concrete words. By remembering the words through association, you are essentially remembering the numbers.
Building on these two basic principles, and adding what we call the "peg method" as a memory technique to flexibly apply these principles, you can memorize even larger amounts of information more quickly and significantly improve your memory efficiency. The memory method we want to introduce in this book can be called the world's most effective memory method—it is also the simplest and easiest-to-master rapid memory method! It only contains three very simple methods: association, encoding, and the peg method. By mastering this method, we can quickly memorize any information that needs to be remembered. The memory speed of this method is at least ten times faster than our usual "rote memorization" method, and it is also more durable and less likely to be forgotten.