A bit of achievement

First published in Column Eight on the 4^th May, 1994

As a family we don’t normally pay much attention to those long-winded advertising programmes on television, but one featuring a certain memory program did grab our attention. I ordered a copy – particularly as there was a 30-day money-back guarantee, and I’d been left a bit of money in my uncle’s will.

Three of us in the family have been working our way through the program and enjoying the effect it is having on improving the use of our memory. For once it is something that I’d recommend; if you’re interested in expanding your brain capacity give it a try.

Why should anyone want to improve their ability to use their memory? Firstly, I want to remember people’s names with greater ease, and not have to say to people I know perfectly well, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember who you are.’

I want to remember things that escape me so easily. I want to finish a book I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading, and be able to recall why I enjoyed it. I want to be introduce to some new ideas, and still be able to explain them within a day or so.

I want to be able to make my way around in the lunch hour without using a list, and I want to stop forgetting things that cause me frustration in the forgetting thereof…

I want to go and see an art exhibition, as I did the other day, and come away not only remembering the pictures, but who painted or drew them.

What’s the point, after all, of having the equivalent of a computer inside my head which is utterly superior to anything human beings are ever likely to able to invent, and only be able to use it at the most basic level? It’s like having the latest DOS on you IBM compatible, and finding that some things won’t work because you have insufficient RAM. Or buying some fancy new program and finding it eats up all available memory, and you can’t print your pretty pictures.

If it is true that we only use round 10% of our brain’s ability, I’d like to tap into a it more!

I don’t want to grow older and find I’m learning less when I could still learn far more. As Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.’

I’ve started trying to teach myself Russian, partly because I’m frustrated at not being able to greet the occasional Russian seamen who come into our shop, or understand when they say they want to buy a newspaper – a gazetta.

Learning Russian is different from learning the Romanised languages I’m more familiar with. There’s a new alphabet to tackle, I have to learn how to repronounce letters that look like some in the English alphabet but sound quite different. There are letters printed rather like various forms of gates or pillars, or like a pot-bellied stove, or someone slipping out of a window, half a dozen of these only differ by a slight tick. One of our English alphabet letters is written backwards. Some letters don’t have any sound at all. Phew.

At the end of the short time I can spare to deal with these matters, however, I come away feeling as though I’ve achieved at least some small thing. It may only be to appreciate that the Russian word for glad is similar in sound to our slang word, Rad!, or that the word for I is pronounced along the lines of Yah!. Yah rad!

And when I took my memory round that art gallery a couple of times, and found I could come away and tell you who all the artists were and give you some indication of what they’d painted, I began to sense I’d started upping the brain box usage to 11%.

Cover of the 1999 edition

The memory course was Kevin Trudeau’s Mega-Memory. It basically took a number of fairly well-known techniques and worked them into a system. It was certainly a good deal better than many things advertised in infomercials, and my wife, my older son and I got plenty from it. Like most things it required ongoing work to make the systems part of your system, and of course we always ran out of time to keep going on such things. But I’d had a lifelong fascination with memory and ways of remembering and I certainly enjoyed my introduction to techniques I hadn’t found on my own previously.

Over a number of years I’ve learned a bunch of poems by heart as well passages of Scripture, including around 30% of the Psalms. The things I learned about memory helped me to memorise these pieces, though it always required work. Which I don’t think Kevin Trudeau emphasised quite enough!

As for the Russian, it became one of those things left in the dust of experiments. I never got into it far enough to make use of it. Though when I was helping a Chilean with his English speaking, I learned that there are similarities between Russian and Spanish. In fact, he has learned Russian - enough to get himself around in that vast country, at least. Since I’m now learning Spanish, and make good progress with it, it might time to compare Russian and Spanish, and see if learning one helps learning the other.

Russian alphabet poster found on E-bay