June 20, 2006

Everyone Can Improve His/Her Memory, Champ Says

By Bryan Rourke
The Providence Journal

Imagine everything. Forget nothing.

Memorization's simple, according to Dave Farrow.

At a recent Learning Connection workshop, the former world-record holder for memorization proved it. In a matter of minutes, the dozen people attending his seminar memorized a list of 20 arbitrary nouns, several foreign words and each other's names. "This is a skill," Farrow said. "Anybody can learn it."

Visualize. Fantasize. Compartmentalize.

With the right technique, there's nothing you can't remember, according to Farrow, who once memorized 2,704 randomly shuffled playing cards.

"There are maybe five people in the world who are born with an ability to remember an absolutely tremendous amount of information," Farrow said. "The rest of us, including myself, have to figure out how to learn."

It's easy, Farrow found out. Simply put a picture in your head, the more unusual the image the better.

We remember objects better than abstractions, he said. A noun's easier to recall than a name.

Think of someone named Julie as jewelry, Farrow said, Steve as a sleeve, Audrey as an awning, etc.

"The picture fades, but the information stays," he said. "Once it's in there, you don't have to remember how it got there."

The trick, Farrow said, is to free-associate. Use whatever comes to your mind. Be creative, and unusual.

Consider life as a kind of costume party. You pick people's outfits. "You'll always remember people's costumes before you remember their names," he said.

Someone named Rob could be a bandit. Mike is a microphone. Jay is a bird. Don't just say it, visualize it. Transmogrify people in your mind ... It's hard to forget Colleen the colander.

Names are one issue; lists are another. But the technique that works for names works for other things, according to Farrow.

He asked his class to create a list of 20 nouns. Could anyone, he asked, memorize them in a minute or two?

Those attending said they couldn't. He said they could, then showed them. Here's how. Make every object fantastical and memorable in your mind. Take the first object and have it do something with the second object; and the second object with the third, and so on.

In the workshop, a tree drove a car. A car had doughnuts for wheels. Etc. Each noun linked to another, brought up an image and a memory.

Recall, Farrow said, is a three-step process: visualization, association and rarity.

"The reason you don't remember something is you didn't visualize it," Farrow said. "Or you didn't visualize clearly enough or you didn't use an image that was unique."

Visualization is much more powerful than rote memorization, according to Farrow. To prove this point, he asked members of the class to close their eyes. Then he asked them to imagine being on a tall building, looking all around, taking in the view, then walking to the edge of the rooftop. People swayed.

"On some level, when your mind visualizes something, it actually thinks it's happening," Farrow said.

Something you experience, even if only in your mind, he said, is more memorable than something you don't.

Farrow, 32, grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, just outside Toronto, where he now lives. A stellar student he wasn't. He has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia.

"That was my motivation," he said. "I would overcome these problems."

In 1996, Farrow set a world record for memorizing and recounting 52 shuffled decks of cards. He did this over two days, taking 10 hours to memorize the cards and eight hours to recall them.

His technique isn't so different from the one he uses to remember names: visualization, association and rarity.

Farrow assigned a noun to each of the 52 cards in a deck. Then with each deck, he created a story: You see a diamond ring on the sidewalk. You pick it up. An elephant appears and takes the ring away. The elephant gets on a rocket and flies into space.

"The queen of diamonds is a diamond ring," Farrow said. "The ace of diamonds is a rocket shop. All of a sudden, you can remember more than a few cards because you turned them into pictures. That's the principle of memory. You can make a really long story by using the same pictures."

Some might say that in the computer age, with instant access to information, memorization isn't necessary. Farrow agrees, but only to a point.

"Information is at our fingertips, but knowledge isn't," he said. "No one is going to hire you for what you can look up."

In 2002, Farrow's record for memorizing shuffled decks of cards was broken. The new record is 54 decks. Farrow said he could take back the record anytime he wants, but said he'll wait until his new at-home teaching aid comes out this fall.

"It's a business decision," he said. "I'll get a lot of publicity with that."

Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.