One of the most shared posts on this site was was our piece 30 Memory Improvement Hacks — You can do NOW! Not surprising, given our cultural ADHD, often blamed the lack of any real need to memorize things now that you can simply Google the.
But there are times Googling or reading from a smart phone is just plain lame. Most of your favorite live performers wouldn’t be so awesome if we could actually see them reading their lines or next dance moves on their smart phones.
Ditto for times you need to give a speech. It’s no exaggeration that the ability to give a fine speech is a prerequisite to what most people would call leadership. There are clubs like Toastmasters that help you with this. But for those who can’t spare the time to attend these get-togethers, going through the infographic below might be the next best thing.
gisele@neomam.com
Recap:
1) Visualize
2) Blow it up
3) Place your images
4) Put it all together
What it’s really about
The reason we no longer need to memorize stuff as much as we used to is because information literally at our fingertips. Don’t blame the smart phone for the decline of memorization either. The infographic basically advocates a simplified form of the ancient “method of loci” or “mind palace” technique, known to the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and widespread before the introduction of the printing press.
The papyrus roll, the printed page, and most recently the internet have in essence turned into our minds’ external hard drives. Whether or not this is a bad thing remains to be seen, but it can’t be denied that a speech will hold that much more power when you’ve committed it to memory.
Even more if you know it by heart.
What other tips can you share? Comment below!