Sun Shoe Tree

Long Term Memory

2007-10-01T17:08:44+01:00

“ I know of no tricks to improve the process of transferring information from short-term to

memory"

”http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070930/LIFESTYLE/709300337

This is response from a doctor to the query “is there any mental exercise that will work like physical exercise to sharpen my mind? ” How sharp one’s mind is – is tricky to evaluate and certainly not something I am qualified to comment on.

I definitely do not have a sharp mind. As a kid at school, mental arithmetic was such a trial that I often felt the need to take my socks off so that I could use the toes as well as the fingers. Telegraph poles, baths filling with water, trains traveling at speed were all a challenge and nowadays – Countdown and Sudoku are equally mysterious.

But I do know about ‘improving the process of transferring information from short-term to long-term memory’ and it is not a trick, just a simple process of systematic review. The process is covered in full in my Ebook 'How to Remember' and I assure you it works – even for duffers like me.

So there is no such thing as a bad memory. To some of us, accurate recall comes more easily than to others, just as some of us can run faster than others – but we can all run.

The Magnet Effect

2007-09-18T19:02:19+01:00

One of the most exciting and satisfying benefits of memorising is the ‘Magnetic Effect’. For an example: if you decide that you will buy a red car, or a red coat: suddenly you see nothing but red cars or red coats wherever you go – they were always there - you just didn’t notice them.

So, if you put one fact into long term memory – your brain receives the message ‘I am now interested in this’ and information around that fact (which was previously filtered out) is now brought to your notice.

You notice, you embrace the information, you strengthen the path that you have created, you enhance and deepen your knowledge.

Learning Something New

2007-09-09T15:31:03+01:00

I am 60 years old. Six months ago I tried an experiment - using simple memory techniques - to see if it were possible to learn about a wide raft of subjects about which I had no prior knowledge and no real interest: these included sport, pop, celebrities, soaps and other forms of popular culture.

I am appalled at how little I knew – it was as if I’d had my head buried in the sand since the middle sixties, filled only with raising children and working.

Now, however, I know a bit about punk, glam rock, boy bands and girl bands. I know a bit about golf, darts, football, cricket, baseball, American football, athletics and the Olympics. I know a bit about films and celebrities and who they married and what they called their children. I even know a bit about soaps although I have yet to watch one.

I am thrilled with the results. They are better than I deserve considering the vast quantities of wine that I’ve imbibed over the last 40+ years. My synapses are polishing up nicely and with each new snippet of information, the connections become shinier, brighter and stronger.

If only I’d been taught these techniques in school: I was, at best, a mediocre student. If I had known that learning could be so easy I might have had more confidence in my own abilities. I might have reached out for the impossible and found out much earlier, what I now know very well - that all things are possible.

Cartoons

2007-08-20T16:17:52+01:00

Someone has asked me to put my cartoons on the web and so I thought I’d better say a bit about them.

I’ve been drawing cartoons for as long as I can remember – to amuse my friends or design an invitation to a party – but I only did it seriously after I read an excellent book by Seth Godin called ‘Permission Marketing’.

I was running a very, very small recruitment agency on a shoestring budget. I have done ‘cold calling’ on a number of occasions during my working life, including ‘door to door’, but I have never found it easy The idea that people might give you ‘permission’ to market to them was instantly appealing - in fact, it is the book I am reading so avidly in the photograph that accompanies this site.

On page 175 of Permission Marketing, Seth gives an example of Joe Girard who was listed in Guiness as the world’s greatest car salesman and his success was based on sending cards to his clients once a month.

I felt this was within my budget and so every month I sent a cartoon based on the building industry, to all my project managers.

I will never know how many were thrown in the bin but I got the occasional message back, such as, ‘like the cards’ and ‘keep them coming’, to encourage me to continue and – let’s be honest – I had fun doing it.

I am now back to only drawing occasional cartoons on request or when a funny idea strikes me - such as the ‘Butterfly Effect’ above - but if you want to look at the ‘Site from Hell’ cards either click on Cartoons in the side bar or to see all my work, check it out at Kathleen D'Ore

Coaching Actors

2007-08-13T14:35:01+01:00

How did I get in to coaching actors?

The problem with the memory techniques that are covered in all the books, is that they leave you with the question ‘How do I apply this to my particular learning needs?’ As my actors say: ‘Yes, that’s great, I can now remember a number of objects, the planets, my credit card number and a shopping list, but how will that help me learn a speech?’

I had the same problem. I had successfully learned historical facts, foreign words, the dates of my favourite artists – but how could I learn ‘To be or not to be?’ using this system?

With a lot of thought and practice I began to work out a method and applied it to my favourite poems and pieces of literature - this was just for pleasure.

By a cosmic coincidence I shared the exhibition of my art with an actor, Lorraine Molins who was also a painter. She moaned about her difficulty with learning lines and I said I could help.

I met her at the Actors Centre, which is a brilliant organisation where actors meet, have auditions, produce plays and have the opportunity to attend a vast range of workshops, given by illustrious actors, producers, directors and teachers.

Through that meeting I met a wonderful man called Barber Ali who mentioned me to the programme planner.

I was invited to meet the artistic director, convinced him to give me my first workshop the following autumn and I have been doing that for the past two years.

I am happy to say that my workshops always have a waiting list and I love the work and I love the actors!

So much so, that I felt I needed to better understand their problems, on stage, film and television – so I joined an extras company to experience it all first hand – but that’s another story.

Your Brain

2007-08-06T17:00:47+01:00

In addition to workshops and a combined phone and Internet course, I do individual, face to face coaching. On one occasion, a client was referred to me because he had “burnt out his brain”. He had been a brilliant astrophysicist with a first class degree and then had gone on to be a very successful business man, but, although he was not yet 30, he said that his memory had become so bad that he had difficulty recalling a conversation once he put the phone down. He need not have worried. A period of concentrated work may mean that a beach holiday may be deserved and advisable for your general well being, but your brain will never suffer from exercise - whatever you do.

Most of what we know about the brain has been discovered in the last 30 years and that is less than 1% of what there is to know. It is thought that most of us use about 10% of our brain, and even more interesting, what is not being actively used is not asleep but "idling" like a waiting taxi. So everyone of us has this incredibly powerful organ in our body. Our brains contain billions of neurons - more than there are stars in the sky. These connect with each other at a signal from the brain.

According to Ornstein "Right Mind" and Tony Buzan, "Use Both Sides of Your Brain" who cites the Russian Pyotr Anokhin, there are more potential connections in our brain, than there are atoms in the universe and that's a lot of connections because to quote Douglas Adams: " Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

So to return to my physicist friend: with all those possible connections and all that untapped brain, - all he needed was a little gentle exercise in memory techniques. The other cheering fact - particularly for those of us who quaff the vino, cheerfully killing off our neurons on a regular basis - although unlike most cells, neurons cannot regrow after damage, those from the hippocampus, which is where the memory resides, are an exception. Just practice making connections and you will not only have a better memory but your brain will become altogether brighter and more creative too.

How I Began

2007-08-01T10:33:59+01:00

I am often asked by my students how I came to be involved in coaching memory techniques.

I came to London in the early 90’s, with the newly found "freedom" of a redundancy cheque. I was offered a ‘job’ which turned out to be multilevel marketing. However, I thought the product was good so I decided to give it my best shot. I quickly discovered that although I had all the necessary management skills, I was at a complete loss at any form of public speaking. Dipping into the redundancy again, I joined a Dale Carnegie course and was delighted over a period of 12 weeks to win 2 plastic pens, to learn that you did not die if you got up to speak in public and lastly - the magic of Sun, Shoe, Tree.

I was so interested in memory techniques that I read up all I could from such authors as Tony Buzan (link) and Harry Lorayne and practiced my new skill on subjects that interested me - Art, History and. Italian.

I now had a new partner who brought to the relationship 3 guitars, a sofa-bed and a celebration box of Trivial Pursuits. For the first year, the guitar and the sofa-bed were all we needed for amusement, but in the second year, he dusted off the Trivial Pursuits, proudly proclaiming that it had been a gift from his family as he was an acknowledged champion. We settled down to play and he won.It was himself crowing about his victory that irritated me. I swear if there had been a dunghill in the room, he would have climbed on top and flapped his wings! So I took action.

My kids said I was cheating but I didn’t see it that way. How do you get information? Either you see it, or hear it or read it. All I did was read it - straight from the cards. I literally learned all the answers from all the Trivial Pursuit cards – well I'm competitive!

A few months later we sat down to play again. It was all rather sad – I threw the dice and won the first turn – and that was it: the poor champion never got to throw the dice much less flap his wings. Needless to say, the game was returned to the shelf, never to be opened again – but – our relationship survived!

So at first my memory skills were used for recreation and in the war of the sexes.

The coaching workshop skills came from a venture with the above partner. I had spent 3 years developing an art process that was – to quote a review - 'a revolution in painting’ and 'breathtakingly beautiful' - did I mention I was an artist? The good news was that in those 3 years, I finally cracked the technical difficulties, the bad news was that I’d run out of money. We were searching for something I could do to fill the coffers when my partner remembered an idea that he’d once had. He was in the building trade and knew first hand the frustration on site that a poor secretary could cause. The idea of working on a building site with all the dirt and cold and no proper loos, was appalling for most secretaries but for some girls, the camaraderie, casual dress and sense of achievement from running an office efficiently, was worth the inconvenience. All I had to do was find the right girls. It was a niche market and although I knew nothing about the construction industry and nothing about recruitment, I knew I could do it.

I also wanted an opportunity to introduce people to their own possibilities. When I came down to London I was uptight with a rigid set of principles and beliefs, but then I was introduced to a seminar called The Landmark Forum . I will admit that I disagreed with much of stuff around it, but the essential Forum changed my life for the better and forever. I can still recall the forum leader marching across the stage and throwing off his jacket and letting go of a chair – “if it doesn’t fit you, drop it” and I’ve lived by that ever since – trusting in what I feel about things rather than what other people tell me I should feel. However, I noticed that most of the people at these seminars were teachers, consultants, social workers. Where were the secretaries, the receptionists, the shop girls? Were they at seminars being taught how to answer the phone rather than how to change their lives? I decided that if I ever had the opportunity I would pass this knowledge on, and here at last was my opportunity. We held our first workshop above a pub in Southwark just a few months after starting the business and we had only 6 delegates, which was our entire workforce, plus my loyal daughter. But it was there that I held my first seminar on Goal Setting and so I continued almost every month until 2003.

In 2003 I needed to find new work. I searched around for what I could do. I would like to refer you to a blog post by Scott Adams here . You don’t need to be brilliant, just become very good at two or more things. I was good at art but it could not be done without a very large workshop and a show place which needed money. I had managerial skills, but I was too old to be of interest to employers. What else did I have? Aha! I had memory skills, seminar and coaching skills – and that is how I started.

Sun, Shoe, Tree - What Does It Mean?

2007-07-29T20:07:04+01:00

Want to improve your memory?

Want to pass exams?

Want to increase your brain power?

Sun, Shoe, Tree is as easy as One, Two, Three.

It is the simplest of all memory techniques and yet it demonstrates a major principle of mnemonics - take something you know and peg it to something you want to know.

Anyone - even children - can learn it in moments.Why don't you try it?

Here is a list of numbered common objects.

1. PLANT
2. TABLE
3. PHONE
4. FLOWERS
5. LAMP
6. FRUIT
7. SPOON
8. PEN
9. WATCH
10. BED

Look at this list for just a few moments then turn away from the screen and see if you can remember all the objects on the list in the correct order.

Failed miserably? Never mind! Most of us only remember things at the beginning of a list and at the end, or what is unique or of special interest to us. But you can learn how to remember this list in less that ten minutes - just click on Pegging in the side bar.