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| Meet your
amazing brain |
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many of those interconnected subjects like branches on a tree.
But it's much more complex than that. If we asked you
to name the apples you know, you'd start to rattle them off: red delicious, golden
delicious, Granny Smith and so on - from your "apple" memory-tree. If we asked
you to list all the fruits you know, you'd have apples stored with oranges, pears and
grapes on your "fruit" memory tree.
And if we asked you to name round objects, you'd
include oranges from your "round objects" memory-tree. So your brain classifies
information in many different storage-files - like a library, or a book-index,
cross-references books.
It stores this information by making great use of
associations. Every person's brain has an association cortex. It can link up like with
like, from different memory banks.
As a simple experiment, take public speaking. Most
people list it as one of their greatest fears. Ask anyone on the spur of the moment to
make a spontaneous speech in public, and the first reaction will almost certainly be to
clam up. Adrenalin flashes through the brain cells. The brain "downshifts" into
a primitive mode. Fear blots out your memory banks. You're scared! Yet let someone else
start by telling any sort of joke, and almost immediately each person in the group will
start to remember an associated humorous story. Or gather round the piano at a
party. As each person starts a song every one else remembers it almost instantly.
It's as if each of us has a tremendous ability to store
information - and to remember it when we trigger the right association. And in fact
that is exactly correct. Surgeons who have applied electrodes to parts of a brain during
operations15 have been amazed to find their
patients, on awakening, have total recall of specific events, even right back to their
early childhood. And that, of course, is what often happens under hypnosis. A hypnotist
"unlocks our minds" and enables us to recall information that has been stored
away for years.
Learning to store information in patterns and
with strong associations is the first step toward developing your brain's untapped
ability.
It's one of the first keys to improving your ability to
remember any-thing: by associating it with a strong image and using one or
more of your brain's abilities. How else do you easily remember that April has 30 days, if
not by the rhyme that begins Thirty days hath September, April, June and November -
all stored through the section of your right brain that deals with rhymes?
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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