Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using It - to the Full! Pdf

FREE BRILLIANT MEMORY TRAINING: STOP WORRYING ABOUT YOUR MEMORY AND START USING IT - TO THE FULL! PDF

Follow ocdla. Armies hoard weapons to ensure they never run out. Some people hoard various items of little or no real value for fear that they may need them some day, or fear that they may not be disposing of these items correctly and could cause unwanted consequences. Not all people with OCD hoard. In fact, not all hoarders even have OCD. However, many people who suffer from OCD appear to engage in a form of mental compulsion I have come to call memory hoarding. Memory hoarding is a mental compulsion to over-attend to the details of an event, person, or object in an attempt to mentally store it for safekeeping. This is generally done under the belief that the event, person, or object carries a special significance and will be important to recall exactly as-is at a later date. The memory serves the same function for the mental hoarder that the old newspaper serves for the physical hoarder. People with memory hoarding OCD exhibit two major errors in information processing. Second, people with memory hoarding also have the distorted belief that memories can be treated the same way as inanimate objects. The value of a newspaper article can be debated, but the contents of that article will remain constant. But memories do not obey the same properties. Not only is a memory a complex amalgam of all of your senses sight, hearing, smell, and so onbut it is also a function of the emotional state and cognitive processes of the person forming the memory, both at the time the memory is being formed, and when it is being recalled. Therefore the very act of forming or recalling a memory must, by definition, distort it. When you reflect upon an event, you are necessarily filtering the stored data of the initial memory through the present state you are in. So the belief that a memory can be hoarded makes the memory hoarding compulsion a guaranteed disappointment for the individual with OCD. In general, the clients we have seen who engage in memory hoarding compulsions are concerned that moments in time will pass without them fully understanding, remembering, and appreciating them. The uncertainty surrounding whether or not they will be able to adequately reflect upon and evaluate the significance of specific events, people, or objects causes discomfort which they hope to avoid. You stop, you consider that this is the last time you will be this person in this place, and then you move on to the next chapter in life. Someone with OCD who is engaging in memory hoarding symptoms is likely to feel trapped in a state of never fully being able to take in the true value of this moment. The twisted irony of memory hoarding is that the person trying to perfectly remember things frequently misses out on those very things because they are caught up in the mental compulsion trying not to miss anything. This irony is consistent throughout the OCD spectrum. The compulsive hand washer scrubs furiously over and over and yet Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! spends most of their time feeling dirty, no matter how much they wash. The washing actually informs the brain that dirt is on the offensive. The memory hoarder similarly feels a perpetual state of incomplete memory formation, despite all of the time-consuming and emotionally draining work they put into trying to form memories perfectly. As in other manifestations of OCD, the form may change but the function remains the same. Here are some forms of memory hoarding we have noticed in our clients:. Treatment for memory hoarding is obviously not going to look the same as treatment for physical hoarding. Rather, the goal is to be able to accept memories as they are and choose their value willingly, not compulsively. Thus, the practice of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy should be employed in the order of its name. The trick is to draw a distinction between enjoying a moment, and mentally seeking reassurance by asking yourself if you are completely enjoying and remembering a moment for sure. In any case, if the ultimate objective is to value and enjoy experiences in your life, then your best bet is to let those experiences happen without OCD telling you how to enjoy and remember them. In addition to individual therapy, the center offers six weekly therapy groups, as well as online therapy, telephone therapy, and intensive outpatient treatment. I tend to replay it at the back of my head. Memory hoarding occurs when a person purposely and compulsively tries to remember something for fear that must remember it perfectly and forever. That is not what you are doing. You are having involuntary thoughts about past events that were upsetting to you. We all have these types of memories. My problem is that when I hear certain words that were used by a bully when I was being bullied when I was young that I have a flashback to the event where he used those words. Is there any treatment for this? It is driving me insane. I am just inundated with flashbacks. I encourage you to seek treatment with a PTSD specialist. There is no reason to continue suffering. Take care. Obsessing about someone else not remembering things perfectly is pretty much the same obsessing about your own memory. I encourage you to allow your friend to remember whatever he remembers, without viewing the quality of his memories as being important. They are his memories, and it is not catastrophic if he forgets something, or remembers other things with greater clarity than you would like. Forgetting things is a normal part of the human experience. My son memory hoards wwe every move, every wrestler every logo totally obsessed with it, but why is memory so bad at homework? Maybe he just likes wrestling stuff. It would only be Memory Hoarding if he felt compelled to remember everything about wrestling with perfect detail, and if this was causing him distress. Sometimes the memories are not even mine. Some important detail? This is really frustrating and has affected my grades in college as well. My answer to that is quite simple — if your memory of a conversation is imperfect, and you mess up telling about it later, absolutely nothing bad will happen. There is no great catastrophe in not re-telling a story perfectly. It is simply not important. The bottom line is that nobody needs to remember conversations or events perfectly. And if anyone tries to force themselves to do so, they will make themselves miserable. Hi Melissa, good question! Despite it seeming to be irrational, this is definitely something people do when they memory hoard. All hoarding behaviors come down to a belief that the thing being hoarded has some unique value that cannot or should not be let go of. It is not uncommon to see someone put great effort into capturing the essence of an event they see as negative so that they may be able to recall exactly how painful the event was later. There is often a kind of compulsive justification that takes place. In other words, something causes someone a great deal of pain and they tie this to a mental ritual such as memory hoarding in attempt to make the extreme pain seem legitimate or Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! it. Always mostly about my loved ones please help me understand as I sit here with Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! trying to live like I used to without ocd which I believe is pure o…the last sentence in the second paragraph about trying to recall how painful an event is in an attempt to make the pain Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! or worth it is actually opposite I relive my thoughts and memories good or bad to RULE out and reassure myself the bad thoughts do not mean anything of importance. I know it is not in the DSM, even though hoarding is. But, then I get extremely uncomfortable if I start to forget details of an event, person, place, emotion. When I have any down time like driving or trying to sleep for example its like its all I think about… there are some days that I dont do this but I find more often than not this is what I do. Its more prominant with bad memories but if a memory is profoundly good I do a simmilar thing… I try to catch it and scolled myself from doing it but I find it just goes to a different memory. I also reherse conversatons that never happened or never will happen in conection to perticular moments. Im woundering if this is an OCD that Im doing and if there is anything I can do on my own to help it, I dont have money to go to a dr. I also see some of the signs in my 12 child and I want to help him before it get as bad as mine. Sinserely, Hilda. Marie, sorry for the delayed response, this one slipped under my radar. Everything you described sounds like a mental compulsion to me. Replaying conversations is sometimes called mental review or retracing. The other things you describe definitely sound like ocd. You mentioned not having funds for Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full!. I would start by reading some books on ocd and joining an online discussion board like OCD-Support. I almost fell out of my chair reading this article. Since childhood, and for fifty years, I have been afraid of forthcoming fun events because I knew I would be forever trapped reliving them. As a fun event draws near I have nauseating anxiety about how devastating it will be when the event ends—thus am unable to enjoy the event. My husband grew tired of this constant state of anxiety and actually left because of it. Now I spend every waking moment reliving our married life together: it is a room whose four walls are grief, pity, regret, and anguish, and it has no exit. Perhaps I can find someone locally who subscribes to your findings and would be willing to treat me. I feel hope for the first time in my life. When i am studying i try to go 5 mins in a row without writing. Add to it all I am jewish and for 24 hrs a week there is no writing, which Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! me out of equilibrium for 24 hrs, and then again when i can start writing again. Total mental torture. I have always wondered if during those 24 hrs i have a different brain mechanism, as I can go sometimes for 1 hr, witrhout having anything i want to write. HelloI suffer exactly from this type of ocd. Is there a book outhere or any other site talking about this type of ocd?? Thank you for your comments. That said, it is important to remember that all OCD symptoms are essentially variants of the same process of over- attending to our thoughts and feelings, over-valuing them, and over-responding to them with unnecessary behavioral compulsions. In other words, you have the option of not paying attention to that thought, not taking it seriously, and just letting it sit there in your head without responding to it in any way. Sounds like Memory Hoarding. Memory Hoarding in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder ( OCD )

Most of the time, this is simply a sign that a person is a bit too busy or is preoccupied. On the other hand, having a consistently poor memory can be problematic for someone. Many factors play a role in memory loss, including genetics, age, and medical conditions that affect the brain. There are also some manageable risk factors for memory loss, such as diet and lifestyle. While not all memory loss is preventable, people may be able to take measures to protect the brain against cognitive decline as they age. In a similar way to muscles, the brain needs regular use to stay healthy. Mental workouts are just as essential to gray matter as other factors, Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! challenging the mind can help it grow and expand, which may improve memory. A large trial from the journal PLoS One found that people who did just 15 minutes of brain training activities at least 5 days a week had improvements in brain function. The researchers used brain training activities from the website Lumosity. Physical exercise has a direct impact on brain health. As the author of research in the Journal of Exercise Rehabilitation notes, regular exercise reduces the risk of cognitive decline with age and protects the brain against degeneration. The control group did nonaerobic stretching and toning. Mindfulness meditation may help improve memory. The authors of a research paper note that many studies show meditation improves brain function, reduces markers of brain degeneration, and improves both working memory and long term memory. The researchers observed the brains of people who regularly practiced meditation and those who did not. Their results indicated that making a habit of meditating may cause long term changes in the brain, including increasing brain plasticity, which helps keep it healthy. Learn about a variety of different meditation types and how to do them in this article. Sleep is vital for overall brain health. Sugary foods can taste delicious and feel rewarding at first, but they may play a role in memory loss. Avoiding extra sugar may help combat this risk. While naturally sweet foods, such as fruits, are a good addition to a healthful diet, people can avoid drinks sweetened with sugar and foods with added, processed sugars. Along with cutting out sources of excess sugar, reducing overall caloric intake may also help protect the brain. Researchers note that high calorie diets can impair memory and lead to obesity. The effects on memory may be due to how high calorie diets lead to inflammation in particular parts of the brain. While most research in this area has been with animals, a study from looked at whether restricting calories in humans could improve memory. Female participants with an average age of The researchers found that they had a significant improvement in verbal memory scores and that the Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! was most significant in those who stuck to the diet best. Caffeine from sources such as coffee or green tea may be helpful for the memory. People who took milligrams of caffeine scored better on recall tests after 24 hours than people who did not take caffeine. Caffeine may also boost memory in the short term. A study in Frontiers in Psychology found that young adults who took caffeine in the morning had improved short term memory. This insight might be useful for individuals who have to take tests or recall information during a time of day when they may otherwise be tired. The results of a study suggest that cocoa flavonoids, which are the active compounds in chocolate, help boost brain function. People who ate dark chocolate performed better on spatial memory tests than those who did not. The researchers noted that cocoa flavonoids improved the blood flow to the brain. There are risk factors a person has no control over, such as genetics. In other cases, a person may be able to reduce the risk of memory impairment. Eating a diet high in refined sugar and fats and leading a sedentary lifestyle may increase the risk of memory loss. Eating a rounded, healthful diet and exercising regularly may contribute to keeping the mind sharp and reduce memory loss. For example, practicing mindfulness meditation may not only make a person less forgetful but can also reduce stress. A look at different types of meditation and the benefits of each. Included are tips for better meditation and information on how long it takes to work. Dementia is not a single condition, but a term that describes symptoms of impairment in memory, communication, and thinking. It is a feature of…. Dark chocolate generally contains less sugar and more cacao solids than milk chocolate. It is also rich in antioxidants and some minerals. Exercise involves physical activity, exerting the body with movement, and increasing the heart rate. Exercise is vital for looking after and improving…. However, making some simple changes to sleep habits can…. How to improve your memory: 8 techniques to try. Medically reviewed by Timothy J. Legg, Ph. Do brain training. Share on Pinterest Research suggests that meditation may cause long term changes in the brain that improve memory. Get enough sleep. Reduce sugar intake. Avoid high calorie diets. Increase caffeine intake. Eat dark chocolate. Risk factors for memory impairment. Share on Pinterest Exercising regularly may help keep the mind sharp. Diabetes: Coffee and green tea might reduce death risk. Virtual reality nature boosts positive mood. Spiraling healthcare costs of wildfire smoke in California. Related Coverage. What is the best type of meditation? Medically reviewed by Daniel Bubnis, M. Dementia: Symptoms, stages, and types. What are the health benefits of dark chocolate? What to know about exercise Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! how to start. Tips for sleeping better. Medically reviewed by Deborah Weatherspoon, Ph. Full E-book Brilliant Memory Training For Kindle - video dailymotion

And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. Imagine for a moment what it would mean to have all that lost knowledge easily accessible in your brain. For the final cherry on top, you can start doing this within a couple of hours, perhaps even within minutes. How much would your life radically change? Would you be more productive? How about smarter? Perhaps you would want to shift your priorities in life and dive into intellectual pursuits. Maybe those self-defeating beliefs we all pick up from school would start melting away. With all the knowledge that has gone in one hemisphere and out the other, imagine what fascinating works you could write. This is the picture of memory most often sold by memory books in the popular psychology Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! self-help section. I mean academic articles and books, true original works that push the demarcations of our knowledge further. The kind of writing that is based on a large amount of foundational knowledge and combining what seems like two disparate ideas into something that breaks new ground, or at least pushes the conversation into unknown territory. The idea for this article was sparked by a very simple observation, namely that memory techniques seem to be scarcely used within academia, even in fields like history, sociology, and biology ix. If memorizing is central to learning and writing you would think techniques like the memory palace would be ubiquitous, but it seems to be the opposite. We can see the difference by looking at the work of the super memorizers. In the case of Piotr Wozniak, inventor of the spaced repetition program SuperMemo, even with his PhD he has still only published two articles that I could find in the scientific literature xiii and does not attend scientific conferences or meetings. Though, this could be attributed to his goals with SuperMemo and the optimization of human behavior with computers xiv xv in other words, SuperMemo is his research. World memory champion Ben Pridmore was working on a publication titled How To be Clevera book that includes memory tricks, and even how to scam IQ tests. Grand master of memory Ed Cooke seems to be an outlier in that he has a graduate degree that will inevitably Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! into research of some sort xvii. Before we dive in deep I will have to point out something about my argument. I am going to be talking about a niche that seemingly has no research into it that I could find. The cornerstone proof of my hypothesis, therefore, will have to come from my own experience and observations. And while I may have a few examples from famous people and super memorizers, they only tally up to a single-digit number of data points. Focusing on the lack of evidence ignores, what I think is, a deeper meaning and message from my research that goes beyond the title of the article, and instead touches on the question that just about every autodidact and lover Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! learning has asked themselves at one point or another — how do I manage my knowledge? In other words, how do I manage forgetting? I will mainly be referring to both the memory palace as well as spaced repetition systems. Plus, it is the best technique when it comes to long-term storage of information, as well as volume of information that can be stored in it. Specifically, the following topics:. Memory is an incredibly complex topic, with many different systems working in tandem. There are many different competing theories and models that work to explain how all these individual systems operate from the micro-level of the neuron, up to the macro-level of brain regions like the cortex. I will not be discussing such complicated topics here. Thankfully, for our discussion we only need knowledge of one memory system, you may know it as short-term memory. However, it is now known that the working memory instead holds about four bits of information xx. This is a fundamental limitation on the human brain that we are all subject to. It is only through chunking information that we are able to move past this limitation, which is outside the scope of this article. The discovery of the forgetting curve goes back to the 19 th century, to a man named Hermann Ebbinghaus, who ran the first science-based inquiry into human memory by trying to quantify the process of forgetting. He devised a series of experiments wherein he would memorize three- letter nonsense syllables, of which he created 2, of them, and he would then test himself to see how many he had forgotten and how many he had retained. Every time he graphed the results he got something that looked like an inverse exponential xxi. This was the famous forgetting curve:. There are several things you can take away from this information and graph. The more fatalistic conclusion is the realization that most of what you learn you forget within hours after you learn it xxii. The other is that by reviewing what we learn at certain times we can beat this forgetting curve. This fact inspired a young man named Piotr Wozniak and drove him to create a program and algorithm that would change the landscape of learning. The problem with this approach is that every single discrete bit has a different time that it needs to be reviewed. Wozniak realized some twenty years ago that computers would be perfect for the job of calculating this exact time, and set out to create an algorithm that would do this for the user. The spaced repetition algorithm used in his program SuperMemo is the result of his work and research xxiii. By using the program the user creates a database of discrete bits of information, much like flash cards, that they want to remember. The program then tracks the forgetting curve for each bit and reminds you to review once your chance to recall a bit of information has dropped below a certain percentage. After the first review it takes you longer to drop to that percentage again corresponding with the green lines in the previous picture. The next time takes even longer, and so on. But if you fail to recall the flash card, it starts back at the beginning xxiv. With the exception of a few notable brains throughout history, we are all subject to the forgetting curve the debate as to whether memories fade or simply interfere is outside the scope of this article. Even if you have the information stored inside a memory palace you still have to review it. This is why spaced repetition programs go along with memory techniques so well. If you believe the story, the most versatile and popular of the memory techniques was first discovered in ancient Greece in the 5 th century B. When he was asked to help identify the bodies, he had a realization. He remembered where each guest had been sitting even though he made no conscious effort to do so. Chief of these, and the core of all memory techniques, is elaborative encoding xxvi. The other two techniques it is based on are the link method and peg systems. The link method, which is typically applied to a list of arbitrary words, works by creating a story between the items you want to memorize. Imagine putting your hand into some butter. From inside the butter you pull out a sticky magnet. The magnet pulls itself and you towards a book, which happens to be an atlas. Like a coat rack, or hangers in our closet, the items that we hang our memories on never change, but we can swap out the things that are hanging on them any time we wish. Once we have our list of items, we simply use the link method to form a connection between the visual image we have created, and whatever peg we would like to hang it on. The way the mind palace combines these two systems, is that we use locations that we know well as our pegs, and we form links between each location and our mental image. Most books start by having you use your own home as your first palace. What you would do is imagine a linear journey through your home with a fixed number of stops at certain items or rooms within your home; you begin at your mailbox, then move to the front door or garage, then into the kitchen, and so on. Now that we have a basic grasp on the three main concepts needed to understand memory techniques, we can now turn to looking at their application to academic writing and studying, beginning with mnemonics like the memory palace. They are incredibly powerful for learning certain topics, and especially learning a new language. Instead, I want to point out the problems that I ran into when trying to use these techniques for anything beyond superficial memorizing, as well as the bombastic claims that are often applied to them. It is here in the realm of memory techniques that having a well-developed baloney detector can help immensely. There is little proof that memory training in regards to visualizing and the memory palace increases your fluid intelligence. In fact, it has been known that fluid intelligence actually decreases over the years as we age xxx. As for general improvements in brain power we can look to the experience of Joshua Foer. At the end of Moonwalking With Einstein, he returns to the laboratory of K. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who studies experts and expert performance, in order to undergo testing. It was here that a true difference could have been discovered when compared to the baseline they took nearly a year ago, especially considering he had trained to such a level that he won the US memory championship. My digit span, the gold standard by which working memory is measured, had doubled from nine to Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full!. I wish I could say it was. My working memory was still limited by the same magical number seven that constrains everyone else. What about the other side of this argument? It is here that they fail in two regards. The first being how long they take to use. The second is their clumsiness when it comes to information that is actually useful! In other words, when memorizing what you would want for writing — excerpts, facts, and arguments — the techniques slow to a crawl and become incredibly clunky. Memorizing sections from a book we have two options, and neither are particularly pleasant. Option one requires that you memorize verbatim — what is called memoria verborum. This causes you to Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! up with a ton of images spread all throughout your journeys that at any point could slip your memory or interfere, ignoring the fact that memorizing in this way can hardly be called learning. The second option, and what I believe is a better one, is memorizing the gist of the information — memoria rerum xxxiii. At the absolute least memorizing in this way forces us to summarize, or put the information into our own words. Memorizing in either of these ways requires the generation of tons of mental images, which is both exhausting and time Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full!, and also requires the review time in order to maintain them. You can see how having hundreds of these images spread over many different journeys, all requiring review and flash cards for spaced repetition, turns into a very clunky system. And one that requires so much maintenance it will be hard to find time to write. Turning to spaced repetition systems now, they suffer from some slightly different problems. Piotr Wozniak has a phenomenal article Brilliant Memory Training: Stop Worrying About Your Memory and Start Using it - To the Full! the proper way to make flash cards xxxivbut the problem is that following these rules are both time consuming and present several problems. The first being that flash cards are good for some things and very poor for others.