Andi Bell Memory Pack Pdf Download
Vida Hubbert
My sister and I were talking about an event from our childhood, and we ended up arguing over the details of the story. We couldn't agree on what had happened. We were both there, but we both had distinctly different memories of the event. I would swear what I remembered was true, and she likewise.
My sister and I aren't the same person. We each remembered different details that they other may not have even noticed at the time. Our personalities and life experiences caused us to interpret the memory differently; memory can sometimes be less factual and more interpretive.
Not only that, but there are different kinds of memory at work in every given moment. According to writer Ashish Ranpura, we can categorize memory in two ways: how long they last, or what they are for.
It is the short-term and long-term memories that we'll be most interested in for this blog post. My sister and I had long-term memory of the same event, but we used different "chunks" of information to compile it and the end result was a different memory.
Because, as a content marketer, you want your audience to remember your content, and you want them to remember you. You want to be firmly in long-term memory, not short-term (and forgettable) memory. You'll want to understand they might not interpret your content in the same way the longer it sits in their memory.
If you were to ask me about a book I had in my personal library, I'd talk about it by talking around it. "It had an orange spine, with blue lettering," I might say, "and on the third shelf, second from the left."
The way I remember books is not by author or title (at first) but by the color of the book, and where it is on my own bookshelves. Once I head down that path, the title and author will come to me, as well as the relevant information I took away from the book. The book's cover and placement has nothing to do with what I am trying to remember from inside the book, but I have to go to the place it is, and how it looks, before I can get into the book itself.
It's a memory technique that uses our generally strong spatial learning abilities to connect memory to them. A great explanation of it can be found in Andi Bell, the World Memory Champion of 2002, a man who seems to have memory super powers. He is able to memorize the order of several decks of cards and recall them when asked.
Bell explains his location method simply. He picks a route through London, walks it, and repeats the walk (repetition, which we'll talk about shortly) until it is firmly embedded in his mind. He makes note of buildings and points of interest. He also associates each card with a character or picture. The Jack of Clubs, for example, becomes a bear. The Nine of Diamonds is a saw, and the Two of Spades is a pineapple.
In other words, he associates a single character or object with a card. He doesn't have to remember if it was a red or black card, what number it was, or what suit it was (three things to remember); instead, it is merely a simple character. Then, as he's memorizing the order of the decks, he places these characters and objects along the route he walked that morning, e.g. the bear is sawing the pineapple in front of the House of Parliament.
In this way, the order of the deck isn't a complex string of facts he has to memorize, but stories. Each deck is a story of characters and objects whose "plot" occurs on the route in a particular order.
There are no unrelated events. We are associating and connecting them constantly, often to an emotion that occurs at the time. A completely benign song can make you cry because you associate a sad memory with it, or the smell of bread can make you nostalgic because it reminds you of happy memories.
When my nieces and nephews were younger, I used to do scavenger hunts for them when they would come visit for the holidays. I provided them clues and they had to find more clues throughout the house. I absolutely always included a clue behind a drawing of Meleager that hung on the wall in the dining room. To this day, they have a specific memory of Meleager, but it is not a memory of Greek mythology or even art history (the true understanding of Meleager). It is of scavenger hunts. When they are older adults and someone should mention Meleager, they are going to remember family holidays.
You have the ability to associate completely unrelated things together in your audience's memory. Association is a powerful tool. Can you associate your product or service to an emotion? To a feeling? To a place?
It's just a beverage, after all, but that's not the association they are making in their content. That's not the memory they put into people's minds when they cracked open a bottle of Coke. They managed to turn a sugary beverage into a memory of positive feelings.
Unlike a computer, which has random access memory that lets you grab the info you want directly, our memory is a tangled mass of connections, all of them linked to each other as if on interconnected chains.
Let's say you want to use your grandma's bread recipe. On a computer, if you want to find your grandma's bread recipe, you find it directly. In your brain, you don't get the recipe directly. You're going to think of your grandma, holidays at her house, how her kitchen smelled when she baked her bread, what she looked like-eventually you'll get to the bread recipe.
As Winston explains in the video, we have trouble digging up a memory if there is only one neural pathway to it. Neural pathways are easily broken (forgotten). When we interlink and create many pathways (grandma's face, the smell of the kitchen, her house, the bread plate), a broken pathway won't slow us down. We'll just hop on another route to get to the memory we need.
As a content marketer, you need to make it easy for your readers to form multiple pathways to what you want them to remember. Illustrate the most important fact through story and example in several ways so that one of them sticks.
There is no avoiding the re- methods of learning, which are reinforcement and repetition. These are not popular methods of learning today, but they are vital to turning a short-term memory into a long-term memory.
We call memorization by repetition "rote" learning and for some, and that has negative connotations. Why do we no longer like the idea of rote learning? It's not fun, it's work, it takes practice, and it doesn't seem very creative.
The problem is that we learn through reinforcement and repetition, whether we like it or not, and rote learning works on your audience. Remember, one of the key aspects of Bell's location method was to repeat the route through London until that was in place in his memory. That had to be locked down and unmovable so that the card characters could "move around" according to location and associative techniques.
Repetition smooths over the bumps, wearing down the rough edges. According to a study about repetitive learning by neurobiologists Zachariah M. Reagh and Michael A. Yassa in the Journal of Learning & Memory, repetitive learning "shakes loose" the details of memories. Those details are sometimes what differentiate similar memories from another.
Once the details are gone, memories become almost ambiguous. They are not anchored in the details that made them stand out. The more you recall a memory, the more subjective it becomes, the more you're not sure.
My sister and I had recalled that childhood story over and over in our minds many times through the years. The details became lost, and the story morphed into a childhood game of "telephone" where each time we dialed up the memory, something was slightly changed from the last time we'd thought of it. Yet we were both certain we had the story right.
As any pianist knows, practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect. In other words, if you practice sloppily, you learn the song sloppily and it is almost impossible to unlearn what poor practice ingrained in you. Every detail you lose is one more wrongly ingrained memory.
The Energizer Bunny didn't show up one time and immediately sink into the national psyche. He kept coming back, over and over, in different scenarios in commercial after commercial. We finally got it: he keeps on going. It is why you can (and should) write about the same topic more than once: chances are very good they didn't really get it the first time, or the second. They need to hear it over and over before it sinks in.
Something unusual that isn't so similar that it falls into the "I've seen this before" rote memory which can't differentiate well. Good designers sometimes make the mistake of making everything look "similar" for visual branding purposes, not realizing they hurt the ability of some to differentiate among their content. Copycats also do themselves no favors for this same reason.
Something that doesn't require long-term memory to grasp, i.e. isn't so complex or long that they forget what they've read at the beginning. When we're reading, we're functioning on short-term memory. It's easy to forget things. Blogger A.J. Kohn even suggests our infographics are getting too complex.
You might use the information in this post to simply help you remember things better; great! But, once you begin understanding how people remember things, you can add this to your content marketing tool chest. You can create content that is memorable, or primed to be remembered, even in the midst of a deluge of content that is screaming to be forgotten.
"Potential candidates achieving a score of at least 2500 points in carefully adjudicated 'marathon' memory events
were awarded the title of Grandmaster of Memory." Source: 'Synapsia' Autumn/Winter 1995
A new title of International Grandmaster of Memory (IGM) will be awarded to competitors who have achieved more than 6,000 points according to current millennium standards (as of January 2013) at a World Memory Championship and to all former World Champions of Memory.
To encourage new entrants globally to take up the sport of memory, the World Memory Sports Council has decided to introduce a new title recognising significant achievement. Commencing at WMC2013, the WMSC will introduce a new title of International Master of Memory (IMM) and redefine qualification criteria for the title of Grandmaster of Memory (GMM). 2013 will be a transition year where both IMM and GMM will be awarded for the same achievement.
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