Learning is a human talent and there are no boundaries to the
quantity or quality of skills that we can learn. Discover the
incredible nature of how your brain learns new skills and improve
memory.
One day my son ask me when can he take off the training wheels from
his bicycle. I replied, “When I was your age, my father pushed me. I
fell and bruised my knee. But I wanted to ride my bicycle so badly that
I always got up and tried again”. My son frown at the prospect of
constant falls and said, “Did you always fall every time you got up on
your bicycle?” “No”, I replied, “If you practice you will learn, and it
will work out fine, soon you’ll be an expert.” My son grinned and he
got on his bicycle and tried again. Sure enough, he was soon paddling
his merry way in a couple of days.
Whether you are learning how to ride a bicycle for the first time or
learning to play the piano, most of us need time to master any new
skills we desire to learn.
It may take some time and effort in the
beginning but it’s all worth it, considering we retain the ability to
learn right into old age.
If you want to learn a complicated skill,
you need time and patience. And as soon as the right sequence of
movements has been learned, you can no longer imagine how difficult to
take those first steps.
The human mind and body has an innate ability to learn almost
anything imaginable.
From learning to play the guitar to juggling
balls. In any circus or carnival, mind-boggling array of skills and
stunts are demonstrated.
For example, performing somersaults in the
air, juggling knives, balancing spinning plates on sticks.
If you hold a
baby upright with their feet touching the floor, they will instinctively
start making walking movements with their feet. Almost a year will pass
before they have found the muscle control to be able to put one foot in
front of the other all by their self. In this time, the baby gradually
learns to control their movements, first learning to creep, then to crawl
and finally to stand upright without holding onto someone or
something.
It is during this process that they progressively establishes
the necessary nerve links between the brain and the muscles. Just like learning to walk upright is a skill that almost everyone
can master, we too have the mental skills to train our memory to perform
astonishing feats of memory and improve memory.
Memory trainers use an
array of clever techniques like mental association. Such techniques
have been used for centuries by the Greeks and ancient cultures to amass
large amounts of information long before printing was the common enough
to hold the massive information required to be pass from generations to
generations.
An example of association is to use a technique known as pegging as
an anchor or source to hold a piece of information.
The body can be
used as a reference for pegging. For example, the toes, the knee,
muscle, shoulder, collar to the face. Extremely easy to use, it can be
the basis of more advance methods of association. Soon, just like
learning to ride a bicycle, anyone can use such techniques to master
long chains of numbers, lists or mathematical formulas. There are of
course many other methods that anyone can use to boost his memory.
Dominic O’Brien for example, likes to use the loci method as pegs for
his memory feats. Dominic is of course, the world memory Olympiad
champion and uses his jogging route to help him remember long strands of
numbers or long list of items in the hundreds.
There is much to be gained from a trained memory. Besides making
tests and exams a walk in the park, learning a foreign language or
“cheating” in a card game,
a trained memory has been known to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s
disease or other age related memory problems. You might want to explore
the different ways you brain can be trained today both to improve
memory and for a healthier mental health.
#15. Change the Things that Aren’t Working for You
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein
As Tony Robbins reminds us, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
If things aren’t working for you, change them.
Change yourself first.
The fastest person you can change in any
situation is you.
If you’re not getting the results you want, try
changing yourself first.
Change your rules.
It’s easy to create a bunch of rules for yourself that make success impossible, or always out of reach.
Change your environment.
As Deepak Chopra , “You can’t make
positive choices for the rest of your life without an environment that
makes those choices easy, natural, and enjoyable.”
Change your relationships.
As W. Clement Stone says, “Be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.”
Change your metaphors for life.
Is your life a comedy? A tragedy? A sitcom? An epic adventure? A dance?
Change how your represent things.
Change what they mean to you.
When you change how you represent things, you change how you experience
them.