Natural Ways to Boost Your Memory

Tony Buzan is an author of more than 80 books on the brain and learning and is also founder of the World Memory Championship. According to him, most people remember less than 10% of the names of the people they meet and 1% of the phone numbers given to them.

According to Buzan, the first step towards developing a better memory is to stop castigating yourself and concentrate on the phenomenal things that our brain is capable of. His method of naturally developing a better memory is to use the brain's associative and imaginative abilities, and with that, anyone can boost their memory.

Brain consists of 2 parts (hemisphere) and the left part is called the left hemisphere, or just the left brain, and the right part is called the right hemisphere or just the right brain. The left brain deals with logic, words, lists, numbers, sequences, linearity and analysis. The right brain deals processes information and information through rhythm, imagination, daydreaming, color, dimension and spatial information. For better memory, the left brain and the right brain must engage.

Memory experts are of the opinion that the human brain is better stimulated by visual images supplemented by our sense of taste, smell, rhythm, color and form. This is because our brain evolved at a time before reading and writing was developed. During those period, human survived by remembering the way along lonely tracks, noticing differences and associations between landmarks. Games such as chess, crossword puzzles and Scrabble develop the mind's ability to progress through association.

Mnemonics uses associations to apply to all sorts of different situations. For example, you want to remember a shopping list of a silver serving spoon, six drinking glasses, bananas, soap, eggs, washing powder, dental floss, bread, tomatoes and roses. You can imagine yourself walking out of our front door with an enormous silver serving spoon in our mouth, the handle part of which is in your mouth, tasting and feeling the metal. Carefully balanced in the ladle-end of the spoon are six exaggeratedly beautiful crystal glasses, through which sunlight reflects brilliantly into your bedazzled eyes. As you walk, you imagine yourself slipping with one foot on a banana and the other on a soap, and then falling backward to land on some eggs, which then necessitate the use of washing powder. Tired from all these activities, you then pull yourself pull yourself along the street with thick dental floss and then smelling some freshly-baked bread filled with bright red tomatoes. You than see a beautiful woman to whom you want to give some roses. Note that the list of items are in the sequences of events that you imagine in you head, and this make it fun and easy for you to remember the list of items to buy.

Practicing these technique of visualizing comical events will eventually make it second nature for you to remember sequences and thus long list of items.

Books by Tony Buzan