Having an exceptional memory is actually easy

So, you want to have an exceptional memory. Being able to remember everything and anything sounds like a fictional superpower, but there really are people who can memorize an insane amount of information in just a few seconds. I used to think they were simply born with that ability until I looked deeper and realized I was completely wrong.

And surprisingly, it can be pretty simple. On my 17 years learning journey to an Ivy League school, I had to memorize thousands of history facts, poems, formulas, and countless English vocabulary words. And behind all that was just me spending endless hours often in frustration.

My grandma struggles with our hammers and sometimes she doesn't even remember my name. Memory is fascinating to some degree is who we are. Now after years of trials and errors and tons of research, memory is no longer this mystery thing to me anymore.

In this video, we're diving deep into the science of memory and uncovering all the secrets behind it. So, what we usually see on TV are those people doing all sorts of cool memory stuff like memorizing 100 random dates and events or like in 30 seconds they can recall an entire deck of cards. They're called memory athletes and they participate in memory sports just like how Olympians often have genetic advantages.

We naturally wonders if those memory athletes are born gifted. In a 2017 study, scientists scanned the brains of a group of worldclass memory athletes. Their brain structures weren't significantly different.

What was different was their connectivity. And to see if these differences could be trained, researchers split 51 ordinary people into three groups to test their ability to recall a list of words. One trained with memory techniques, specifically the memory palace.

Another used road memorization, which is the memory technique that just repeating something over and over again without thinking. Five 25. And the third one had no training at all.

After just 40 days, the memory technique group more than doubled their recall ability from 26 to 62 words. The road to memorization group improved by only 11 words and the no training group barely improved. And 4 months later, the memory technique group still retained their improvements.

Brain scans even showed their neural connectivities had changed just like the memory athletes. I realized that I can develop this super memory power by just training. With that ability, it would really allow me to learn anything faster, absorb them faster, and then retain them longer.

So, after I did tons of research, something very important that I realized is being able to remember things very fast and being able to retain those information long term and not forget them is actually very two different things. So, first, let's look into how to memorize things very fast. So memory athletes, they don't necessarily need to memorize things they're given long term.

Often they just need to memorize things very quickly and accurately. Usually how they get to that point is through training something called pneummonics. And there are many many different types of pneummonics techniques and they're suited for different type of informations like numbers, text, lists, pictures even.

So here are a couple very important and popular ones. Memory plas also known as the method of loi. You mentally walk through a familiar space like your home, placing items you want to remember in specific locations.

Later, you can walk back through the space to retrieve the information. Like, imagine placing your grocery list into your home. Eggs on the sofa, milk on the counter, bananas hanging from your door.

You can also do this with any familiar items you have like each body parts is information that you want to remember. Acronyms. For example, to remember the great lakes, you take the first letter of each word and turn it into a pronouncable word.

Homes, each letter stands for one lake. A croos text or sentence mononics. It means you can make up sentences or silly ones.

For example, to remember the planets in order, you may say, "My very educated mother just served us nachos. " Each first letter stands for each planet. Rhymes and songs.

Putting information into a rhyme or melody is another technique. For example, A B C D E F G Hopefully you noticed how I was writing and illustrating using my iPad throughout this video. It felt pretty seamless, right?

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Link is in the description. And a huge thank you to Paperlike for sponsoring this video. Chunking.

Breaking down a long list, a paragraph, or numbers into smaller, more manageable parts. For example, we usually remembering a phone number like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 instead of trying to remember the whole thing all at once. Every one of those sounds like a lot of work, right?

And honestly, my first reaction after learned about all those techniques is that I might need to spend more time to came up with the associations and using the technique than just trying to memorize them straight up. So the key idea is really that you need to train yourself with a system or a few systems so you're so familiar with them and your brain already have those association and connectivity built in. At this point you probably wonder like what is this connectivity thing?

So here's a little brain science 101. So before I never really thought about how memory works. I had this vague idea based on my own experience with remembering things.

I kind of thought our brain is like a hard drive. Whenever we learned something new, it was like dragging a new file into storage and forget would mean that the memory file would just disappear somehow. Turns out I was completely wrong.

Our brain is made up of neurons. The basic unit that communicate through chemicals and electrical signals. Every thought, every movement or any new experience involves neuron fires.

So what are memories? A memory is actually a connection between neurons. So when we learn or experience something, specific neuron circuits will be activated.

Even though we're learning new information, we don't usually form brand new connections. We strengthening existing ones. And the more we revisit a memory, the stronger that pathways become.

And that's why if we train our brain to build very strong neural pathways and create a system that new informations can be easily associated with them, we can memorize things really quickly. Like if you've already built memory palaces multiple times. So when you're given new information, your brain can just quickly come up with another memory palace and came up with those associations to make things easier to memorize.

And depending on the type of information that you need to memorize, you can use a combinations of a few of those techniques. For example, you can first use chunking to break the things down and turn each chunk into acronyms to make them even more memorable. Now, let's look at how we can make information stick longterm and never forget about them.

For that, we need to understand how forgetting works and why we forget in the first place. For a long time, we all thought forgetting is this passive process that it kind of just fades away over time. It's like a failure for our memorization.

But now scientists have discovered that forgetting is actually its own very active process. We already know that memories are connections between neurons in our brain. And thanks to the transparent of zebra fish's brain, scientists will be able to see forgetting happens in real time.

In this image, yellow dots shows new connections, which are new memories being formed. But at the same time, blue dots showed old connections disappearing. It's like the brain is clearing out old information to make room for the new.

So, how do we make sure the stuff that we actually want to remember doesn't get cleared out. And it all comes down to strengthening your memory connections. We all know the feeling that something is just on the right tip of our tongue.

This happened to me most often when I was like in an exam. I look at a question and I was like, "Haha, I know this. " However, when I'm actually trying to answer it, I just couldn't think about what it really is.

When we're in a conversation and we're trying to say someone's name and you know you know it, you're like, "Ah, that guy with the hair, what is his name? What is his name? Start with a J or whatever.

" And the moment you hear the answer, you're like, "Ha, yes, that's it. I definitely knew it. " And when those things happened, that's because of the information is actually in your brain.

It's not forgotten. You just failed to retrieve it because it's a weak memory pathway for you to retrieve it. And the key is every time you retrieve that information, it actually streng memory pathway or just like carving a road in the forest.

The more you walk on the path, the clearer and easier it becomes. So, we really just need to do two things. Retrieve and repeat.

And that leads us to two of the most powerful techniques for memorizing things long term. Active recall and spaced repetition. I definitely talked about them a lot on my channel, but I still want to quickly give them an introduction, share a little bit background of them from a science perspective because I think they're so powerful and understanding why they works is going to be so helpful.

Active recall basically just means instead of passively reading notes, test yourself. Use flashcards, quizzes, or just grab a blank sheet of paper and write on everything you remembered. Then check what you got right.

And remember, struggle is good. The harder it feels to remember something, the more it strengthen that memory. Just repeating something over and over again isn't enough.

That's still short-term memory. The real memorization happens when you recall it after some time has passed. And number two, spaced repetition.

After we just learned some new information, we will roughly likely forget about 50% of it by the end of the day. And within a week we almost forget 90% of that information. So this is known as the forgetting curve.

Our brain naturally drop information over time. Please note we're saying forgetting here but it doesn't mean that information is not in our brain as we mentioned. It's just we failed to retrieve that information.

It probably still somewhere in there. We just have a hard time to recall it. And every time we reveal that information the memory got strengthened.

So next time when we are trying to remember that information the forgetting curves actually slows down. Review materials at the right intervals if we keep doing this our brain will just lock that information longterm and we barely need to do any review and we can never forget about it. It's worth noting that different from the memory athletes, a handful of people have been diagnosed with a brain disease called HSAM which caused them to memorize unusual level of details in their lives and they almost can't forget anything and it's not as amazing at it sound.

For example, when encountering a date, these people can often forced reexperiencing part of that memory in great details, which you can imagine can be very disruptive, make it very hard for them to focus on the present. So now, after I took a moment to appreciate that I have the ability to forget, okay, after we learned all those different techniques, it can be a little bit overwhelming, I would admit, cuz that's how I originally felt when I first did all the research for this video. But it becomes pretty easy for me to understand approach them after I learned how memory is being formed.

There are three steps of memory formation. Encoding, storage and retrieval. The first step is encoding.

Whenever we experience something, we take in sensoring information like taste, smell, what we see, what we hear and our brain gathers all that information and then make a little package of memory and form that in our hippocampus. Encoding is the process by which the details of our experience converted into a format that our brain can store it aka the connections of neurons. And this is where most of the pneummonics techniques come in.

Familiar stuff that know like pictures, sounds or patterns used to make the encoding process stronger and faster. And once the information is encoded, it's stored all over our brain. Our brain organizes and returns this information ready to be retrieved later.

And the final step is retrieval, which is the brain caused information, whether consciously or unconsciously. Usually, we need a trigger to recall a memory. It's like when you smell something and takes you back to an event.

Just to summarize quickly, if we want to memorize a large amount of information quickly and remember them long term, first we should use different pneummonic techniques like chunking or memory palace to encode those information quickly, accurately and also make them easier to retrieve later. Then if we want to remember the information long term, then we want to use active recall or space repetition to strengthen our ability to uh retrieve those information. So we can access the information whenever we want.

So now I actually know that I can train myself to have a good memory with those powerful techniques. However, there are just still so much work that we need to do. No matter how good my memory is, I will still just forget things sometimes.

It's just so much easier to put a reminder on my phone's calendar. Growing up, I was asked to memorize so much information for all the tasks throughout my learning journey. and most of it it's already gone by at this point.

However, what I remembered is all the allnighters I pulled for preparing those exams trying to cram and stuff all the information into my head. The pain I still remember very clearly. So, I couldn't help but wonder in a world with technology does it still matter if we have a good memory and is testing someone memorizing things still a good way to assess students?

The answer is yes. study consistently shows that if someone have a better working memory, which is the ability to hold information in mind and manipulate them, they're likely smarter. Especially in fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason and solve novel problems.

I was very surprised I found out this because I always thought memorization, this general concept, is more related to like literature or histories cuz we were asked to memorize a lot of things. And I think that's because I always had kind of a wrong idea for memory and more specifically for working memory. So what exactly is working memory?

So for the longest time, scientists thought we have two type of memories. Short-term memory and long-term memory. Shortterm memories allows us to perform tasks like you tell me a phone number and I can dial it.

It lasts for seconds to minutes and has limited capacity typically holding around four to seven items. And long-term memory stores information that last a long period of time. That's how we get to access over past experience, skills, and knowledges.

Long-term memory can be retained for like weeks, months, or even a lifetime. But memories aren't that simple. It's actually very, very complicated.

So, here we have working memory, which is a system that allows you to briefly hold information in your mind and manipulate it. It's essential for tasks like learning and reasoning. Working memory builds on short-term memory by processing information and it can potentially be transferred to long-term memory.

And the good news is that we can improve our working memory and by guess what? Practicing all the memory techniques that we just discussed earlier in the video. Isn't it so awesome?

Not only they can help us memorize things better, but also can boost our intelligence and make us smarter. Just to clarify, I don't have any like professional training on the pneumatics or memorization techniques. I realized what I've been doing for years, like lots of time when I'm trying to memorize a large amount of information, I've been using those techniques without even realize what I was doing.

I definitely do a lot of chunking and I try to came up with fun like songs or like fun ways to memorize them so makes them easier. However, most of the stuff we were asked to memorize in the classroom setting were definitely not designed to train our working memories using memory techniques. A lots of students end up just trying to memorize those things by force and often get very frustrated by the amount of volume and the time that needs to be invested in wrote learning which is basically means that you repeat something over and over again without even thinking about it until you memorize it.

It's been the traditional teaching method for centuries. However, over the past couple decades, road learning has been criticized a lot for exactly the reasons I mentioned and experienced. It really takes the fun out of learning.

There's no bridge between old concepts or new concepts. It does not promote critical thinking. It does not even promote thinking sometimes.

As an active learner, we definitely should avoid doing a lot of road learning because it's definitely not as effective and it makes things boring. Of course, interesting from a brain health perspective, it's actually good for us. for old people, scientists discovered that road memorization is good for their brain health and their memory functions.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that for brain health, doing some sort of memorization is way better than doing nothing. It's exactly like for our physical health like taking a 10 minutes walk. It's significantly beneficial for your health compared to you just do no exercise at all.

Of course, it would be better if you do other form of exercise like strength training, cardio, etc. In our case, for our memory functions is of course the techniques we discussed in this video. My grandma is suffering from Alzheimer's, a disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and it actually affects millions of people.

So, it really makes me think about what can we do to prevent it and maintain and improve our brain health. So lifestyle is a huge part include eating healthy, regular exercises, getting enough sleep, managing stress and protecting your head from trauma. And these are the things that we should always always prioritize in our lives.

And besides that, as I mentioned earlier, it's important to challenge your brain like doing some sort of cognitive exercise for your brain like reading, learning new skills, memorizing, and even puzzles and games. My grandma unfortunately she barely remember any recent events. She will ask me the same question over and over again.

Sometimes she forget to eat and even not remembering my name. It's very sad and I miss her so much. However, she still remembers some of the meaningful moments when she was younger when I was a kid and that just makes me feel memory is such an fascinating thing and interestingly that makes me feel like I still get to spend time with her and actually speak to a younger version of her.

It's a very strange feeling. Memory is such a fascinating thing and if you really think about it, it's who we are. It's how we know how to walk, what our favorite foods are, and who our loved ones.

The ability to use memory to generate new ideas, to create, and to problem solve. That's what drives creativity and meaning in life. Memory is not just about recalling facts.

It's also about the present and using what we learn to shape the future. Well, thank you so much for watching this video. Um, if you like this format where I kind of deep dive into a topic about learning science or learning technology, please let me know because I'm trying to experiment with different video ideas and formats.

I had a lot of fun making this. Share any thoughts and ask any questions in the comment section. Consider subscribe.

Have a wonderful day. I will see you next time. Bye-bye.