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Improve Your Memory
No pills. Ancient techniques. Still work today!
You memorized his theorem in Elementary School.
Now use his wisdom to keep your memory.
Can you spare 10 minutes a day to
Improve your memory
Fight memory loss
Defend and empower your mind
The techniques
of Pythagorean school from 500 BC.
No pills. No
side effects. Just a simple exercise.
Have I
mentioned, it’s free?
Are you happy with your memory?
Whether you
cannot recall where you put the keys of your car
or
you cannot
recall a matching word from one of the several languages that you read and
speak,
in either case it is really frustrating. And in both cases, it can be helped.
Surprisingly, you don’t need pills to improve your memory. Most people can dramatically improve their memory with the techniques of the Ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras from Samos.
Most people think of Pythagoras as a mathematician because of his theorem. It’s true that his school made a serious contribution to mathematics. But he was more, much more. For starters, he is the one who invented the word Philosophy. Before him, wise men of Greece were known as Sages, or “those who know”. He changed it to “those who love wisdom”. Pythagoras was revered as far as India as Pitar Guru, Father and Teacher, and as Yavanacharya, the Ionian philosopher.
Young Pythagoras learned mathematical ideas from the Greek mathematician and philosopher Thales – the Chief Engineer of King Cresus – and his student Anaximander from Miletus. Then he spent more than 10 years in Egypt. There, he served as an Egyptian priest in the city of Hiw of the Upper Egypt that Greeks called Diospolis. He was consecrated into esoteric Egyptian mysteries that he used later when he founded his society. It’s not easy to even explain what it meant in the Ancient World. Greeks looked at Egyptian priests like CIA agents would look at a secret Soviet nuclear physicist who fled to the West in the middle of the Cold War. In some areas Egyptians hold knowledge and mysteries that we are still striving to learn today.
It seems that Pythagoras was quite satisfied with his life as an Egyptian priest so he did not plan to leave, but the Persian invasion in 525 BC changed his life. He was taken to Babylon as a prisoner of war. The time had come for him to learn Chaldean and Assyrian mysteries. Syrian philosopher Iamblichus writes that “Whilst he was there he gladly associated with the Magi ... and was instructed in their sacred rites.” He spent 5 more years after the Egypt learning from them.
Once he returned to Samos, he founded a school called “semicircle”. Long after he left, that society still ruled the political life of the city. Soon he moved to the city of Croton in the Magna Graecia (Southern Italy) and founded his famous philosophical and religious Pythagorean school. According to Iamblichus, “he tried to use his symbolic method of teaching which was similar in all respects to the lessons he had learnt in Egypt.”
The members of the society devoted themselves to moral life and search of wisdom and knowledge. One of the key premises of the society was that most of the knowledge does not come from outside, but rather from inside of the mind and spirit as a recollection of past events. Not a big surprise that members of the school paid serious attention to improving their memory. It was literally a matter of salvation in their eyes. And they had the tool – the techniques their teacher learnt in Egypt.
You can have it too. And, yes, it’s free. Read on...
The Actual Ancient Technique
Many sources tell that Pythagoras made his students recite poetry before and after sleep to aid the memory. While this is true, and it really can help your memory, he and his students also employed a much more efficient technique. Here it is:
Step 1. Every evening, before going to bed or in the bed before going to sleep, write down key events of the day including the emotional component. Are you happy about the event and its outcome? Disappointed? Encouraged? Scared? Proud? Ashamed?
Step 2. Every morning, review the last day’s records, recall the details and feel the associated emotion.
Step 3. Once it starts to come to you easily, start to record once in two days, covering the whole period in one session, three days, and so forth. Ideally, you will end up recording the key events weekly. Continue to recall the events and associated emotions every morning.
Simple, isn’t it? Actually, it’s not that simple. Can you remember, what you did four days ago? Five? Not just “went to work” or “ate dinner,” but specifically? The key events? Like had a lunch with a specific business partner and was annoyed by delays.
You see, it’s not that easy. However, this skill can be acquired. What’s more important, is that if you follow these instructions precisely and avoid the pitfalls described below, you will find your memory improved in other aspects as well. And even the ability to easily recall the whole past week is impressive by itself, isn’t it? The positive effect usually shows up in about two to four months, although this is highly individual, depending on the current condition of your mind and memory and small details of how you perform the exercise.
Typical Mistakes
Now, well, that’s the ancient technique. However, it’s very easy to make mistakes and skip important parts of this exercise leaving it much less efficient. We’ll talk about how it works later, and it all will make sense, but let’s start from typical errors and mistakes:
- DO NOT go into details when recording the event. Just put a few keywords, names, and – at most – sentences. The whole idea is that you recall the details the next morning. It helps to have limited space to record.
- DO NOT miss the emotional aspect. We’ll speak about it later, but it is very important to record, recall, and feel emotions during this exercise.
- DO NOT record minor mundane events like getting a cup of coffee from the kitchen at work or shopping at a grocery store. Never record anything you don’t really care or feel about.
- DO NOT skip morning recall. Consider it a part of a morning workout – in fact, it is a part of your morning workout. DO NOT skip it.
- DO NOT just read your records, recall the associated details and emotions. DO NOT recall in the morning without the records either, see below why.
- DO write it down in the evening. Don’t just think about it before going to sleep. Typing on a computer may work, but likely to decrease the efficiency significantly – we’ll explain why later.
- DO write down and recall emotions. Yes, I repeat myself, but this is critical.
The Modern Version
The modern version described here is pretty much the same, except that it is designed to prevent the typical mistakes. According to some sources, it is used in this form by secret services like MI-6, CIA, MOSSAD, or former Soviet KGB and GRU to train their agents. Here are the key elements of this version:
- Have a physical diary to record the event, and pre-allocate the space for each day. Pythagoras students wrote it on small flat pieces of wood, waxed to enable a stylus to leave marks on them. They were restricted in space, and that helped. Restrict yourself too, make the diary pages relatively small. It’s a recall exercise, not a writing exercise.
- Specify sections for main emotions, and separate events where you grade yourself (pride/shame) from the events that you grade for yourself (good, bad, happy, sad.) This way you will forget to mention less events and will not forget the emotional component.
- Don’t worry if some sections are left blank every day. It’s your mind and memory that you are trying to fill, not the diary.
Here is a suggested list of sections/questions on every page:
- Date
- My actions, I am proud of:
- My actions, I am ashamed of:
- Events that make me happy, joyful, encouraged, hopeful:
- Events that make me sad, distressed, scared, disappointed:
- New people, I liked:
- New people, I disliked:
- Other bright events and strong emotions:
Some sources also recommend to include weather and other events. It only makes sense that as long as you log entries, you may record anything you need to track as well, but for the purpose of the training your memory, it’s not critical. In fact, question 8 is a placeholder for such tracking information, as any really bright events and emotions should fall into one of the previous questions.
Now, how do you proceed? First option is to print these questions on paper in ninety or more copies, bind individual pieces of paper into a diary, and use this diary as described above. Don’t forget to restrict the size; make the pages about a half of letter size, or put two days on a side of a letter-size sheet of paper.
Or you can order a ready to use three-month diary here. Why three months? Because, it’s the time you need to start feeling the results. It’s also a quarter of a year, which is a convenient interval to track.
How Does it Work?
Let’s start from a short Q&A:
Why short? Why just keywords? Because the actual exercise is the recall. If you write details, you “train” the paper, not your brain.
Why emotions? Did you read my book “Disinfect Your mind?” Emotions are natural anchors. By associating events with emotions, you train your brain to build emotional links, which help to keep events in memory and recall them. It’s like building a highway system to make memories more available.
Why just reading is not enough? Why recall details and emotions? See the answers above. You train your memory, not reading skills, and you need to anchor events you recall.
Why writing? Brain involves extended neural circuitry to make your hand write down words. By writing, and not simply recalling briefly events in the evening, you make the event spread much wider over your neural circuits, involving areas of the brain and neurons that would never be involved if you merely recall it. For the same reason, typing on a computer is not that efficient – pressing a button is a much more primitive action than writing a letter, hence less brain circuitry is getting involved.
Now, how does it work overall?
The essential part is that by writing in the evening you involve wider brain circuitry into memorizing the event, not to mention the usual recall-store cycle we normally use to memorize something. By recalling it in the morning, you refresh this widely spread memory. Reading also helps to involve larger areas of your brain. In the end, you start to memorize your life with more neurons. And by linking the events to your emotions, you improve the paths to the areas where these memories are stored. Simply put, you make the memories more accessible.
By the way, the modern science is not 100% sure how exactly this “more neurons” is achieved. Original hypothesis was that new areas get involved into the process of storing the information – memory. However, the latest experiments show that it’s possible that you can actually grow new neurons and new connections on the existing neurons. In particular, the researchers were able to see an actual newly born neuron in a rat brain that became fully integrated into the brain and functional in a mere month.
Ready to try? Here is the link to order the diary:
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Historical references:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras
[2]http://www.wisdomworld.org/additional/ancientlandmarks/FirstGreekPhilosophers.html
[3] http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Pythagoras.html
[4] http://theosophy.org/tlodocs/PythagorasandHisSchool.htm
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Ely Asher, 2005.
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