zengrifter
Banned
Is a dirty mind a sharper mind?
Sexy images can help you memorize anything from your
pin number to a stack of cards. An expert explains how
BY TRACY CLARK-FLORY / SALON
The next time someone admonishes you for having a dirty mind, consider the case of Ed Cooke. He became a Grand Master of Memory at the age of 23 in part by harnessing his sexual imagination. It isn't just him, either: Cooke used this technique to coach Joshua Foer, author of the buzzy new book, "Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," to become the U.S. Memory Champion in under a year.
Cooke, the co-founder of the online learning site Memrise, argues that our brains are wired to remember bizarre and debauched mental images like nothing else. The concept is simple: You create a Memory Palace, a building that you can easily conjure in your mind's eye, and then fill it with shocking images that stand in for the information that needs to be remembered. If you're memorizing the order of a deck of cards, for example, you place the representative images in a path throughout the house.
While effective, the directive to get dirty can lead memory athletes to some uncomfortable places. Eventually, Cooke had to evict his mother from his Memory Palace. Similarly, Foer writes, "The indecent acts my own grandmother had to commit in the service of my remembering the eight of hearts are truly unspeakable." (He also writes that he conjured "a handful of titillating acts that are still illegal in a few Southern states, and a handful of others that probably ought to be.")
MORE- http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/21/dirty_mind
Sexy images can help you memorize anything from your
pin number to a stack of cards. An expert explains how
BY TRACY CLARK-FLORY / SALON
The next time someone admonishes you for having a dirty mind, consider the case of Ed Cooke. He became a Grand Master of Memory at the age of 23 in part by harnessing his sexual imagination. It isn't just him, either: Cooke used this technique to coach Joshua Foer, author of the buzzy new book, "Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," to become the U.S. Memory Champion in under a year.
Cooke, the co-founder of the online learning site Memrise, argues that our brains are wired to remember bizarre and debauched mental images like nothing else. The concept is simple: You create a Memory Palace, a building that you can easily conjure in your mind's eye, and then fill it with shocking images that stand in for the information that needs to be remembered. If you're memorizing the order of a deck of cards, for example, you place the representative images in a path throughout the house.
While effective, the directive to get dirty can lead memory athletes to some uncomfortable places. Eventually, Cooke had to evict his mother from his Memory Palace. Similarly, Foer writes, "The indecent acts my own grandmother had to commit in the service of my remembering the eight of hearts are truly unspeakable." (He also writes that he conjured "a handful of titillating acts that are still illegal in a few Southern states, and a handful of others that probably ought to be.")
MORE- http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/21/dirty_mind
