I was preparing for the 2009 USA Memory Championship and so I contacted the then World Champion, Ben Pridmore, and I asked him for advice. His input straight forward and simple….trust your memory.
That was it….trust your memory!
What did he mean? For example, when you are memorizing a deck of cards the faster the time the better (if you get the order correct of course). Yet, sometimes in this effort to get it correct I would find myself looking at each card for 4-5 seconds to really cement it into my memory. My time on memorizing a deck of 52 shuffled cards at one point was 5 minutes! Not a good score :)
Ben was suggesting that I glance at each card much quicker and trust my memory that I would retain it instead of obsessing over it for 4-5 seconds. Interesting strategy I thought and Ben was the World Champion so I put his theory to the test. WOW! I was going faster than I thought possible for my brain to recall it and Ben was right! My memory was retaining the cards.
It is much like speed reading. Most of use read slow not because that is the fastest that we can go but we really don’t understand how much our brain takes in going at fast speeds. Think about driving down the road at 70mph and all the signs, billboards and movement you are able to take in. Howard Berg, the World’s Faster Reader says that ‘turning the pages’ is what slows him down the most about reading! Learning to trust your brain to move faster and comprehend or trust is big.
Trust your memory, trust yourself and you will be amazed at how good your memory and brain really is.
This article was shared by two time USA Memory Champion and memory speaker, Ron White.
