How to Build a Memory Palace (with Sample) <img alt="Image titled Build a Memory Palace Step 1" src=" width="728" height="546" class="whcdn">1Edit step1Decide on a blueprint for your palace. While a memory palace can be a purely imagined place, it is easier to base it upon a place that exists in the real world and that you are familiar with or you can use some places of your favorite video game. A basic palace could be your bedroom, for example. Larger memory palaces can be based on your house, a cathedral, a walk to the corner store, or your town. <img alt="Image titled Build a Memory Palace Step 11" src=" width="728" height="546" class="whcdn">11Edit step11Build new palaces.
Ways to Improve Human Intelligence This briefing is intended to pull into one convenient, single frame of reference a body of key information which currently is scattered across a great many different contexts. Until recently, even the possibility of any such information existing was, for essentially political reasons and funding reasons, denied by most of our institutions, together with most of our educators and psychologists, so that such findings as were made in various contexts and circumstances never got discussed across a broader context. Now that it is evident that the brain, and one's intelligence, are highly changeable and that a wide variety of conditions, arrangements and techniques may be employed to improve both brain functioning and intelligence to even a profound degree, we need to make a start on getting a lot of this key information organized to where you and other inquirers can more readily get at it, understand it, and use it. Menu of Methods Quick Interjection 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
5 Steps to Learning How to Speed Read in 20 minutes Imagine how much time you would save if you could double, even triple, your reading speed. The average American reads between 200-300 words per minute (wpm), and has been reading at that same rate since their mid-teenage years. If you fall within this category, a 300 page novel takes you approximately 7-8 hours to read. In an interview, Bill Gates was once asked, “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?” Successful people read a lot. I had always considered myself a slow reader, and use to think there was nothing I could do about it. I learned that anyone can learn how to speed read. It’s not just for geniuses, and it’s not a myth. If you’re up for the challenge, here is a step-by-step guide to increasing your reading speed and becoming a boss: *To perform these exercises, I suggest using a large, hard cover book that lays flat when open (trust me, this will make these exercises much easier). 1. Now, choose a starting point and read at your normal speed for exactly 1 minute.
How I Was Able to Ace Exams Without Studying Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Scott Young of ScottYoung.com. In high school, I rarely studied. Despite that, I graduated second in my class. Recently I had to write a law exam worth 100% of my final grade. Right now, I’m guessing most of you think I’m just an arrogant jerk. Why do Some People Learn Quickly? The fact is most of my feats are relatively mundane. The story isn’t about how great I am (I’m certainly not) or even about the fantastic accomplishments of other learners. It’s this different strategy, not just blind luck and arrogance, that separates rapid learners from those who struggle. Most sources say that the difference in IQ scores across a group is roughly half genes and half environment. However, despite those gifts, if rapid learners had a different strategy for learning than ordinary students, wouldn’t you want to know what it was? Rote memorization is based on the theory that if you look at information enough times it will magically be stored inside your head.
Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes (Photo: Dustin Diaz) How much more could you get done if you completed all of your required reading in 1/3 or 1/5 the time? Increasing reading speed is a process of controlling fine motor movement—period. This post is a condensed overview of principles I taught to undergraduates at Princeton University in 1998 at a seminar called the “PX Project.” The below was written several years ago, so it’s worded like Ivy Leaguer pompous-ass prose, but the results are substantial. In fact, while on an airplane in China two weeks ago, I helped Glenn McElhose increase his reading speed 34% in less than 5 minutes. I have never seen the method fail. The PX Project The PX Project, a single 3-hour cognitive experiment, produced an average increase in reading speed of 386%. It was tested with speakers of five languages, and even dyslexics were conditioned to read technical material at more than 3,000 words-per-minute (wpm), or 10 pages per minute. The Protocol 1) Trackers and Pacers (to address A and B above)
How to never forget anything ever again Two years ago I was having breakfast with a man who was purportedly the most successful Jeopardy contestant ever — behind Ken Jennings (and the Watson supercomputer). As someone who is always interested in learning new things, I wanted to know how he was able to remember so much stuff. “Have you ever heard of spaced repetition?” he asked me. “This is going to blow your mind.” Since that moment, I’ve used spaced repetition nearly every day. I learned that spaced repetition is a learning technique that relies on something called the spacing effect. Think about how memory works for a second. Then you have long-term memory, which is where you store stuff like your name, your phone number, the address of the house you lived in when you were a kid, etc. But short-term memory and long-term memory are actually two ends of a spectrum. One of the most consistent ways that a new fact can move from short-term towards long-term memory is through repetition. There’s an app for that P.S.
Memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software I've been doing this for a year, and it's the most helpful learning technique I've found in 14 years of computer programming. Background: I'm an intermediate programmer. But later, when I worked along side a REAL programmer, I was blown away by their vocabulary! It made me think about how much I've learned then immediately forgotten, over the years. I wanted to deeply memorize the commands and techniques of the language, and not forget them, so that they stay at the forefront of my mind whenever I need them. Spaced Repetition: When you hear a new fact, it's forgotten pretty quickly unless it's brought back to the forefront of your mind repeatedly. You can do this haphazardly by immersing yourself in a language, for example, where the new words you learn will be brought up by chance occasionally. But memory research shows that the most effective and efficient time for a new fact to be remembered is right before you were about to forget it. As for programming, you get where I'm going with this.
How to Remember Like a Pro Most people don't want to be memory athletes, but they would like to remember things more easily and reliably. These techniques can accomplish that. Besides, they're fun. Ancient Greek orators were noted for their ability to give hours-long speeches from memory. One common imaging technique is known as a "method of location" (MoL). Here is a simple example: Consider the living room of your apartment or house. You can use other locations or maps, such as your body, specific places in your car, or highly familiar routes in your backyard or at work. These techniques work, even for older people with no formal memory training. Modernizing the Mnemonic In 2012, a team of Canadian researchers gave the ancient MoL mnemonic a 21st-century facelift. [3] The team constructed several detailed virtual-reality environments to serve as loci, rather than asking MoL learners to generate their own. Both MoL groups outperformed the controls. Thickening of the Brain Rewiring the Brain [1] Maguire E.
How to Learn (Almost) Anything This is a guest post by Glen Allsopp of PluginID. Have you ever read an informative book, only to later remember just a few main points — if anything at all? The problem might be that you’re using one of the least efficient ways of learning available. The Cone of Learning I remember back about 7 years ago when I was taking music lessons at school, there was a poster on the wall that really grabbed my attention. Image Credit After doing some research, I found that the contents of that poster were based upon the work of Edgar Dale back in 1969. Today, many of you may know this as the Cone of Learning, but beware: although the cone is in fact based upon the results of Dale’s research, the percentage figures were never actually cited by Dale, and added by others after the initial investigation. Based on the research we can see that: The Cone of Learning suggests why you are more likely to remember parts of a movie than you are from a book on the same topic. Learning Almost Anything
Incremental reading Introduction Traditional linear reading is highly inefficient. This comes from the fact that various pieces of the text are of various importance. Some should be skipped. What is incremental reading? Incremental reading is a learning technique that makes it possible to read thousands of articles at the same time without getting lost. Incremental reading converts electronic articles into durable knowledge in your memory. Input: electronic articles (e.g. collected from the net) Output: well-remembered knowledge (quizzed regularly in the form of questions and answers) In incremental reading, you read articles in small portions. Warning! Five basic skills of incremental reading Incremental reading requires skills that you will perfect only over months and years of use. Skill 1: Importing articles Five article import methods Initially, you may limit your imports to a simple copy&paste of individual articles. Here are the 5 main article import methods in SuperMemo: Import by Copy&Paste
5 Brain Hacks That Give You Mind-Blowing Powers #2. Control Anger by Using Your Less-Dominant Hand Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com Everyone knows at least one guy who hulks out over the stupidest things -- a messed up coffee order, a red light, global warming. Usually these people are just harmless joke fodder until they road rage on an elderly person over a politically charged bumper sticker. If you don't know one of these people, consider that it might be you. Of course, there are all these tricks that your mom taught you that are supposed to calm you down ("Stop and count to 10!") Hemera Technologies/AbleStock.com"Somebody stop me before I rob a sperm bank and make this town disgusting." The Hack: This one comes from the University of New South Wales, who found the perfect anger-management trick, and it wasn't cool jazz music or playful kittens wearing sunglasses. Why would this possibly work? Digital Vision/Digital Vision/Getty Images"Fudge you, mother lover!" BananaStock/BananaStock/Getty Images"Oh, hey, you are totally correct.
The lesson you never got taught in school: How to learn! | Neurobonkers A paper published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions. The report is quite a heavy document so I’ve summarised the techniques below based on the conclusions of the report regarding effectiveness of each technique. Be aware that everyone thinks they have their own style of learning (they don't, according to the latest research), and the evidence suggests that just because a technique works or does not work for other people does not necessarily mean it will or won’t work well for you. Elaborative Interrogation (Rating = moderate) A method involving creating explanations for why stated facts are true. An example of elaborative interrogation for the above paragraph could be: Elaborative learning is useful for proficient learners because it allows them to apply their prior knowledge effectively to process new information. Summarisation (Rating = low)
Creating False Memories Elizabeth F. Loftus In 1986 Nadean Cool, a nurse's aide in Wisconsin, sought therapy from a psychiatrist to help her cope with her reaction to a traumatic event experienced by her daughter. During therapy, the psychiatrist used hypnosis and other suggestive techniques to dig out buried memories of abuse that Cool herself had allegedly experienced. In the process, Cool became convinced that she had repressed memories of having been in a satanic cult, of eating babies, of being raped, of having sex with animals and of being forced to watch the murder of her eight-year-old friend. She came to believe that she had more than 120 personalities-children, adults, angels and even a duck-all because, Cool was told, she had experienced severe childhood sexual and physical abuse. When Cool finally realized that false memories had been planted, she sued the psychiatrist for malpractice. False Childhood Memories My research associate, Jacqueline E. Imagination Inflation Impossible Memories The Author