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An engaging instructor devoted to exploring the scientific secrets
of human memory.
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Peter M Vision is Associate Professor of Psychology
at the College of William and Mary.
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He received his B.A.
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in Psychology and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D.
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in psychology and Cognitive Science from Cornell University.
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Professor Visteon has served as program director for Developmental
and Learning Sciences at the National Science Foundation.
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His research interests
include perception and motor systems of the brain.
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He has been published in the top journals in the field of psychology,
including science, Psychological Science,
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the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
and Experimental Brain Research.
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Imagine this You're an early hunter gatherer.
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Starting your day, searching some bushes for berries,
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getting these berries is critical to your survival.
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So you're going to check the bushes, even though you know
an important fact there are lions hiding in some of the bushes.
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If you stick your head into a bush
that has a lion in it, that's it for you. End of the line.
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Okay.
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So here is the critical information.
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This knowledge will save your life when you're searching those bushes.
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You should avoid Bush numbers 9 to 19 six, 24, 17,
seven, ten, 24, 16 and 22.
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Got it.
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It's important.
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So let's try again.
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9 to 19.
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Six. 24. 17. Seven. Ten.
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24. 16 and 22.
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Okay. Go ahead.
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Find enough berries to feed your family
and survive the winter and don't get eaten.
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How confident do you feel?
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Did you remember all of those numbers?
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If you're like most people,
then you probably remembered a few. But not all of them.
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No matter how much you wanted to remember them,
your brain is just not built for it.
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What it is built for is spatial information.
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Okay. Here are all the lions.
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Here's the same information,
the same thing conveyed by reading you that list of numbers.
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You may note that there are lions in each of the numbered spots.
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9 to 19.
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624. 17, seven, ten, 24, 16 and 22.
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Just like I said,
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if you look at this image for a few seconds,
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however, you will be able to remember
where all of the lions are located.
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It really is the same information,
but it's converted into a different format.
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The number labels are replaced by locations in space.
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Your brain also probably notices a spatial pattern here.
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All of the lion bushes are right next
to one of the four corners of the space.
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By converting this information into a location based format,
our memory is suddenly able to perform much, much better.
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Part of that remembering locations is based on an excellent ability
that humans possess to remember natural images.
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You should be able to look at the world around you, taking in some image
through your eyes and recognize if you've seen it before or not.
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It's also important that this recognition process function very quickly.
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More than a few seconds and a lion might be chasing after you.
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I'm Peter Vista and I've been fascinated with human cognition
and the brain for more than two decades now.
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I've done many experiments on perception and action control, and much of
my research focuses on cognitive development in infants and children.
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Since the beginning of my time studying psychology,
however, I've also been interested in memory, for one thing.
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Memory is present in almost everything that we do.
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Without it, we would exist in a sort of vacuum.
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Without memory, we could perceive things and do things, but we wouldn't
have a sense of how our lives exist in a continuous, ongoing fashion.
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Memory is the thing that links us to our past.
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Our understanding of our memory
also links us to the future innate allows us to plan and reason
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with an understanding
that we'll have access to those plans and conclusions in the future.
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While I'm talking about myself,
I should also mention that I don't have an especially good memory.
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I forget birthdays where I left my car keys
sometimes, where I parked my car.
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Perhaps my fascination with memory
originally arose from some concern about this.
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That said,
when I do choose to encode something in my mind, I'm very good at it.
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Even with my relatively limited memory capacity,
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I'll be showing off some tricks that I think are rather impressive,
at least until I show you how they're done.
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Human memory is a truly amazing thing.
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Just think about this.
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You experience these sounds that I'm making, these ideas
that I'm explaining, and they somehow stick in your head.
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Your brain, with its millions of neurons
and trillions of synaptic connections between those neurons,
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is always changing itself, always changing itself to store
the things you remember, the things you experience.
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You can't feel it, but it's changing right
now, as amazing as human memory is.
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There are times when it seems to fail us.
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Why is that?
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Why can we remember some things with perfect clarity and fidelity
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and yet forget other things like where we left our keys
or the date of a good, good friend's birthday.
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We often forget these things
and not because we don't really want to remember them.
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They just don't stick.
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Why? In this course, I'll argue that with rare exceptions,
all humans have an amazing memory capacity.
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Scientific research on memory has established us.
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The real problem is that our brains were not really built
for the types of memory challenges that we give them in our classrooms,
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offices, and throughout our everyday lives.
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The central trick to enhancing the power of your memory is to transform
things that are hard to remember
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into things that are easy for your brain to encode and later recall.
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There's a field of science called evolutionary psychology
that makes a strong and not uncontroversial assertion.
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Modern humans, they claim, go through their lives
with the brains of primitive cave people.
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You, they claim, have the brain of a primitive early human
who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago.
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Evolutionary psychologists start, of course, with the notion
that humans evolved from ancestral species
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through a process of selective adaptation, random mutation combined
with a survival of the fittest, according to the standard theory.
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This is how our species and all species developed.
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Another thing that's central to the evolutionary psychologist's
position is the notion that evolution is very, very slow.
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Our species first walked the earth, according to most theories,
about 200,000 years ago, somewhere in East Africa.
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For the vast majority of those 200,000 years.
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Humans survived by hunting and gathering food.
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Until relatively recently,
humans didn't work in offices with computers or even with books.
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We didn't have to remember phone numbers, social Security numbers,
pin codes.
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Our brains didn't evolve to process that type of information,
and so they aren't especially good at it.
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Our species has always been social,
so remembering faces and names has always mattered.
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But only recently if we started living in social groups
bigger than a few dozen people, our brains
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didn't evolve to represent the names and faces of 7000 colleagues,
neighbors and Facebook friends.
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And so they aren't very good at it.
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The human brain.
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Your human brain is very good at what it does.
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So what does it do?
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If you wanted to build the perfect hunter
gatherer brain, the perfect hunter gatherer
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information processing machine, what should you build in?
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A few things come to mind right away.
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If you're going to forage for food and avoid predators,
you'd better be able to remember locations really, really well.
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Is this a place I've searched before
now? Was there good food here in the past?
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Was there a lion hiding behind that bush over there?
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What other areas near here might also be good places to look for food.
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Your brain should be
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very good at remembering how information is related
to particular locations within within the environment.
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And it is the brain's very, very impressive with this sort of memory.
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As long as you present that information in the right format,
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the lion, the lion avoidance game that we played
at the beginning of this session provides some good evidence for that.
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Okay, so you have a caveman brain that's good at remembering images.
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It's not it's much less good at encoding arbitrary information
like the things on your shopping list.
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Why would that be?
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Imagine you have a computer with a powerful memory able
to store hundreds of gigabytes of information
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in order for that computer to store any information.
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It first has to be coded into a particular digital format,
likely a long strings of string of ones and zeros.
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The bits of the information
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you can hold up, printed images to a computer all you want.
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But unless they're encoded into a format that the computer
is designed to use, then there will be no memory at all.
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The same is true for humans.
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The best way to enhance your memory is to encode the things you want,
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the things you want to remember into the format
that your caveman brain is good at processing.
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For the rest of this session.
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I'll be talking a little bit more about how memory works.
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What?
I want to give you a quick memory tests that I'm confident you'll ace.
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In so doing, I hope to convince you that your memory, at least
for certain types of material, is very fast and tremendously accurate.
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The methods that I'll describe for memory improvement in this course
are mostly about encoding things that are hard to remember.
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For instance, dates, names and numbers into the types of things
that are easy to remember, things like images and locations.
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When the time comes to remember some information.
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You recall the easy to remember stuff
and just decode it back into the original format.
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After our memory, tests will then start that process of learning
to encode things into your brain in a format that it likes to use.
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The first technique is one of the most basic number
two sound encoding systems.
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It's called the major system.
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I'll talk about how you can
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use it to encode numbers into words
and then into images that you can store very easily in your memory.
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Images that you can recall whenever you like, and then decode
back into the numbers that you'd like to be able to remember.
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Finally, at the end of this session,
I'll give you a little homework for next time.
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Okay. Let's move on to convincing you that your memory is amazing.
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In a moment, you'll see a sequence of images for a few seconds, a piece.
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I want you to watch those images.
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I'll be testing you on your memory for them.
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But there's really no need for you to make any special effort
to encode them into your brain.
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You'll see 20 images for a few seconds apiece.
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As soon as they start,
just please make sure to keep looking at the screen
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for I'm now going to show you another sequence of images.
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This time there will be two images on the screen at once.
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One of them will be taken from the sequence of images
that you just watched.
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The other will be new.
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Your task is to try to identify which one is the image that was
in the presentation sequence a few moments ago and which one is new.
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If this were a real experiment,
we would ask you to press one button on a keyboard.
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If you recognize the image on the left,
then another key if you recognize the image on the right.
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For our purposes, you can just raise your right finger for the right
and your left finger for the left.
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I encourage you, however, to actually do that,
as opposed to simply watching the images.
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After a few seconds, a text label indicate
which one of these images is the new image and which was the old image
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from the original presentation sequence.
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How did you do?
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If you watched those initial images,
you almost certainly did very well on the test.
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Recognizing 19 or even 20 correctly,
the human brain is simply magnificent at this image recognition task.
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You only saw that initial sequence of images for a few seconds apiece.
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During that time, you encoded the image into your memory
in such a way that when you saw
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the image again,
you recognized it as something that was already stored in your mind.
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In the test sequence, I made a point of putting in two images
that you've likely seen in the past.
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An image of the Mona Lisa
and an image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
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Your task, of course, was not to just know images
that you'd seen at some time in the past,
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but rather to pick out images that you saw in the presentation sequence
just prior to the test.
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I think it's really notable here that we can do that
pretty effortlessly.
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You know, just accurately, quickly, almost perfectly recognize images.
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You can recognize with some impressive accuracy
when and where those images were seen.
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Many experiments have been run on human image memory like this.
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Several really fascinating things are worth noting about them.
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The first is that these image memories you've created are very durable.
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If you were to go away and come back to this test in 24 hours
or even a week, you would still perform very well.
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Our brains are affected in long lasting ways
by experiences that we have all the time.
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Even right now.
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As you're listening to the things I'm saying.
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The physical structure of your brain is being modified.
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These changes, once they're made, can be very long lasting.
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They certainly are. With images that you've seen.
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Another aspect of these experiments on image
memory is worth noting here.
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In many ways, this is the most remarkable.
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I've noted that you can remember images
even with just very little exposure.
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A few seconds is enough.
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I've noted that these memories can be very long lasting.
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This third thing has to do with how many images you can remember.
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I showed you and tested your recognition of 20 images.
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In the interest of time, I didn't show you more than 20,
but I could have if I'd shown you 100 images.
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The results would have been the same.
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You would have encoded the 100 images
and been almost perfectly able to recognize any of them.
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If I'd shown you a thousand images, the story would still be the same.
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One recent experiment conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology participants watched 3000 images for about 3 seconds apiece.
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That's about two and a half hours of just watching a very,
very long slideshow.
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The experimenters
then presented these participants with pairs of images.
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One of the images was one that had been in the original marathon
slideshow, and one of the images was new.
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The participants tried to pick out which was the familiar image
and which was the new one.
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Just like the task you did
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the study, participants had very average memories based on other testing
that was done probably very similar to yours.
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They were able to correctly pick out the correct image 92% of the time,
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even in
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cases where an image was specifically selected
to be similar to one of those demonstration images.
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With, for instance, many of the same objects placed in it.
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Participants still identified it as a new image 88% of the time.
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The human brain is simply very,
very good at encoding and later recognizing images.
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It seems to be something that we're just built to do.
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If you're like many people,
you may feel that your memory is very limited.
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But trust me, it is remarkable.
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We may have trouble remembering phone numbers and names at times.
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We may have trouble remembering where we left our keys.
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We may even have trouble remembering facts for an exam.
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Even though we studied extensively for it.
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All of these failings, however, are not due to limitations of our brain
to encode and store information.
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We all have this capacity to a remarkable level.
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The trick of improving our memory
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performance, essentially all of the techniques
that I'll teach you about in this course revolve around a single goal.
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If you want to remember something both accurately and for a long time,
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you need to take the information that you want to remember
and transform it into something that's easy for your brain to remember.
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Something like an image.
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Later, when you want to recall the information,
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you recall the image, and then decode it back into the information
that you wanted to remember in the first place.
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And voila.
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Rapid, accurate, seemingly unlimited recall.
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Let's begin that process now.
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We live in a world in which we're asked to remember many numbers,
phone numbers, birthdates, Social Security and ID numbers,
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locker combinations.
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And one of my nemeses, the number of the parking lot zone
where I parked my car at the airport.
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Our brains, my brain to are really good at remembering things
but numbers not so much.
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How can we convert hard
to remember numbers into easy to remember images?
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There have been many systems developed for this.
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Some of them are extremely complex.
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I want to start with a classic,
a relatively simple one called the Major System.
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It was developed by Johann WINKELMAN in 1648.
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When you want to encode numbers into your memory,
you'll be able to do that quickly.
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But you first need to add some tools
to your mental toolkit for next time.
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I want you to do some homework.
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There won't be a quiz, not a graded one anyway,
but there will be some demonstrations that you can do yourself.
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If you just invest an hour or so memorizing that major system.
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The major system converts numbers into letters.
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Sounds actually each digit from 0 to 9 gets a particular phonetic sound.
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0ss or S one gets T, or D, or
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two gets N, three gets M,
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four gets R, five L, six gets a choice of either or
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seven K or G, eight F or V and $0.09 or B.
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I suggest making flashcards on one side of these.
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Put the numbers from 0 to 9 on the other.
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The major system sounds that go with them.
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You can just write them down without the flashcards,
but cards have a great characteristic to them for studying these.
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They can be shuffled.
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You'll need to recall the digits in many different orders.
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So you'll need to study them that way.
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You want to study these ten letter to sound connections
such that if I were to say any digits,
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you would instantly be able to come up with the letter
or sound or letters or sounds that go with that particular number.
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You also have to be able to go in the other direction.
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That's just as important, actually.
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If I were to give you a particular letter sound, you should be able to
instantly, or at least very quickly tell me which number goes with it.
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Like many homework assignments, this one won't be especially fun,
but trust me, it will pay off in the next session.
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With this information and a little practice, you'll be able to memorize
and remember any number up to ten digits in just a few moments.
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And the best part is that once you have them memorized as an image,
you'll essentially never forget them.
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It might be worth stopping here for a moment
to talk about the limitless capacity of your memory.
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I'm a fan of Sherlock Holmes,
as imagined and described by the great author, Sir Arthur CONAN Doyle.
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These books have great stories, and the detail with which
they're imagined and written is actually endlessly impressive.
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So Arthur knew a lot about a lot of things,
but his knowledge of memory seems to have been largely incorrect.
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Sherlock Holmes
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occasionally described his thinking to Watson
and anyone else who would listen, but mostly to Watson.
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In one story, a study in Scarlet, he described his memory as being
very good, but also very carefully governed so as not to overfill it.
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In the story,
Watson had just discovered that Sherlock is smart as he was,
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didn't understand the basic mechanics of the movements of the planets
in our solar system.
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Holmes explained that he'd heard of this information,
but then chosen to forget it
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so as to save space for other, more useful information
that would help with his detective work.
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You see, he explained,
I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic,
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and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.
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Holmes then describes this attic analogy in great detail,
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arguing that he intentionally chooses to forget things all the time
so as not to overfill his mental attic.
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Depend upon it.
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There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge,
you forget something that you knew before.
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This is a lovely little passage,
but it's also completely, completely wrong.
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Science has repeatedly tested the capacity of human long term memory,
and the result has always been the same.
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There seems to be no upper limit.
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It's never the case that in order to learn something new,
you must forget something else that you already know.
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We do forget things, of course.
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Sometimes things we learn, like the new phone number of our new home
can interfere with old or knowledge.
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Like our memory for the old phone number at our old home.
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But when associations are linked with new contexts,
new times and events, we just don't run out of memory space.
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We just don't run out of it.
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This is remarkable
just to know, I think. But it has a direct relevance for this course.
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I'm going to be asking you to practice memorizing a wide range
of different things that probably aren't especially important to you.
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Don't worry.
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However, I wouldn't dream of doing this
if it would somehow use up your limited memory resources.
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Those resources, as far as we can tell, are unlimited.
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Okay, so I've given you your homework of memorizing those number
to sound associations.
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Let me use our last few minutes here to demonstrate
how we're going to be using them.
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Let me describe how I would memorize a string of important numbers.
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Let's say I learn in a
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passing conversation
that my friend Sebastian's birthday is December 13th, 1994.
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I'd like to be able to remember that when it comes up in the future.
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Now, I could just say it over and over to myself.
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But as soon as I'm distracted by something else, it would be gone.
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I'm unlikely to be able to remember it
unless I can encode it in some meaningful, easy to remember format.
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I'll use the major system to accomplish that.
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Okay.
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December 13, 1994.
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Can be thought of as 12 1394.
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I just have to remember those six digits, those three numbers
and I'm all set with the major system.
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Those three pairs of numbers become ten, D, M and F are
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with the major system.
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You start with these consonant sounds
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and then intersperse vowels in other non-major system consonants
to make words of items that you can easily imagine.
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So let's start with ten.
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When your words come to mind for you.
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Ten tangle tone.
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Tiny. Actually, Tiny might not be a good word to use here.
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I could certainly imagine something that is tiny,
but that could get confusing later when I have to remember
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letters for the adjective tiny
rather than letters for the noun to which tiny refers.
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The best words for this type of task are those that have a clear
imaginable object directly associated with them.
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For me, t n sounds like tun.
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I imagine a giant metal weight with the words
one ton written on the side.
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How about dum
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dum dimple dummy dimmer?
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Notice that with dimmer there's an extra sound there.
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D goes with the number one and goes with the number of three.
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But there's still that ah sound at the end of dimmer
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that could go with the number for later on.
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That might be confusing for me when I'm trying to decode dimmer.
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I'd have to remember do I want one, three or one, three, four?
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I could use dimmer as in dimmer switch here.
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As long as I've decided
that I'm always going to use two digits per object,
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as long as I'm consistent about that with dates,
which I am, I'll be fine.
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Actually, DM makes me think of dime.
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I imagine a giant balance scale now with the
the one ton weight on one side and a giant dime on the other side.
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Apparently my giant dime weighs a ton
because that's why the scale is balancing.
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How about f r?
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Our last pair of sounds represents that year of 94
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Friar Fair
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Forest Fork. There are a lot of words that you could think of here.
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This one actually makes me think of fire.
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Now I have the last big piece of my image.
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I imagine my friend Sebastian
holding a raging campfire in his hands, in my imagination.
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This does not hurt or even bother him.
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He's holding the fire, standing next to the balance scale,
saying this fire weighs one ton also.
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One last thing.
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I have a particular arrangement of these items in my mental image
from left to right.
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The one ton weight is on the left side of the balance.
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The giant dime is on the right side of the balance.
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And there's Sebastian, a little further to the right.
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Holding his fire in front of the whole arrangement is one more thing.
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It's a key that I always use for birthday birthdate memories.
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A giant birthday cake. That's a pretty memorable image for me.
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It might not be for you, but with some practice,
you can take any set of numbers and generate one for yourself.
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Once you've memorized those number
to sound associations, that's fairly easy.
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This image will stick with me for a long time.
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Actually, I think it will stick with me pretty much forever.
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This is like one of those images
that we watched in the image memory test.
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It just sticks.
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00:31:33,992 --> 00:31:36,194
So fast forward a few weeks or months.
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00:31:36,828 --> 00:31:39,797
What's Sebastian's birthday? When is it? Hmm.
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00:31:40,198 --> 00:31:42,800
The image comes back really easily on one
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dime and fire that becomes a ton.
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00:31:47,906 --> 00:31:57,649
Ten time doom and fire f r that becomes one, two, 1394.
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00:31:58,082 --> 00:32:00,485
December 13th, 1994.
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Got it.
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In this session,
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I hope I've convinced you that you have a remarkable memory ability,
just as remarkable as people who seem to effortlessly remember things.
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The only difference between people with an excellent memory
and those with an average memory is how they use it.
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I've also taught you how to use your own memory.
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Better to encode arbitrary numerical information.
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You need to memorize those major system lengths,
but as soon as you do, you'll be able to.
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And that's easy. You'll have a tremendous new tool at your disposal.
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Over these six sessions, we'll discuss everyday
memory problems that people have and how to solve them.
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We'll also explore the science behind why those solutions work.
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In the next session, we'll do some more practice with the major system.
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Once you get the basics links down,
you should start to practice encoding things right away.
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Ask someone what their birthday is
and then create an image to go with it.
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If your driver's license is all numbers, memorize it.
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Do the same with your license plate if you can.
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00:33:07,285 --> 00:33:10,121
We'll also talk about the method of loci next time.
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00:33:10,855 --> 00:33:13,891
This is a powerful method for remembering lists of items.
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00:33:14,559 --> 00:33:21,599
The method of loci can also be used in combination with the major system
to encode some rather impressive amounts of information.
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00:33:22,500 --> 00:33:24,569
In the meantime, get studied.
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00:33:24,569 --> 00:33:29,674
I look forward to seeing you and your newly turbocharged memory
when we start the next session.
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00:33:30,308 --> 00:33:32,844
Happy study.
41323
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