It’s tempting to say that Dominic O’Brien has forgotten more about the workings of the memory than we will ever remember – but given the nature of his achievements, that would be rather inaccurate. As eight-time winner of the World Memory Championships, O’Brien has tuned his brain to deliver competitive results on an extraordinarily consistent level, demonstrating that the mind, like an athlete’s muscles, can be trained and bulked.
Indeed, once it has been refined, the memory is capable of pulling off hair-raising set pieces that are directly analogous to athletic feats. For example, in 2002, O’Brien secured a Guinness World Record for recalling, in sequential order, 2,808 playing cards – that’s a whopping 54 decks – after viewing each card only once.
For those of us who struggle to remember where we last put our keys whenever we’re heading out, O’Brien’s tour de force may feel like a slice of science fiction. But the man himself is eager to stress that building the memory’s strength and capacity is a process accessible to everyone. All it takes is some work and dedication. And there is strong evidence to suggest that those who are willing to put in the hours will see the benefits reflected in their careers.
“A good working memory,” O’Brien tells The Treasurer, “is a predictor for how successful you’re going to be in life. It serves as a benchmark for how effectively you will perform in exams, for example. A colleague of mine, Dr Tracy Alloway – who has written several books in this field – can predict with 99% accuracy the grades of a student, just by measuring their working memory. And, of course, that indicates how well they’re going to do in business – and even, to an extent, how happy they’re going to be.”
With all that firmly seared across our synapses, then, here are five methods that O’Brien uses to enhance his powers of recall, which anyone can adopt for their own purposes:
“This is also known as the ‘Story Method’,” O’Brien explains. “If you have, for instance, a shopping list of items, you can imagine a story that links each one to the next. So let’s say you need to buy cornflakes, chicken, soap and some ginger beer. You can imagine tipping a pack of cornflakes over a chicken; then the chicken rushes towards a washing machine with soap in it; then the machine springs a leak… and ginger beer spouts out of its drum instead of water. Now you’ve thought of all your items in the context of the same narrative. You’ve made connections.”
“This is a stronger method,” O’Brien says, “which is often called the ‘Memory Palace’. Picture a journey – say, around your own house – and in each room, you can imagine between four and six items, working around clockwise.
“We could even use our shopping list again, here, to demonstrate. So, your front door is the first stage, and that’s where you find a pack of cornflakes. Tie the objects to their locations with some internal logic: why are the cornflakes by the front door? Perhaps the milkman left them there as a gift? Then you go down your hall, and there’s a chicken running around – perhaps a headless one. Then you find there are soap suds all over your living room. Maybe they’ve come from the kitchen, and there’s been some sort of plumbing accident?
“Now you’re connecting the information in a more structured way – not the cornflakes to the chicken, but the cornflakes to a specific location. Plus, you’re not going to lose the order of that information, because you worked out the journey, which you should do in advance of placing the objects or thoughts.”
“Many people have problems with names and faces,” O’Brien notes. “Typically, if you go to a party or networking event and you’re introduced to five or more people, you forget their names almost straight away, which can be very embarrassing. My main way of resolving this is to link new faces to locations.
“Four years ago, I met a couple in a restaurant. The guy’s name was Shaun, and I just imagined him cutting his hair at his table – ‘shorn’, right? And I imagined his wife, Jenny, pulling a ripcord on her back, because her name is short for ‘generator’. So I get people to perform their names in my mind. Then I imagine the routines are playing out at the locations where I’ve met those people. If I’ve visualised a performance two or three times, I don’t have to rely on it so much, because by then the information is embedded.
“With foreign names consisting of greater numbers of syllables, you can break them down and find some associations – then use the Link Method to support your recall of the syllables, just like we did with the cornflakes tipped over the chicken.”
“When we take notes for study or work,” O’Brien says, “we’re always concerned that the information won’t ‘go in’. Sadly, education’s greatest secret is that up to 80% of everything that’s taught is largely forgotten 24 hours later, because students – and some teachers – don’t appreciate that we have a huge memory drop-off. So how can you bake notes into your long-term memory? Reviewing, or spaced repetition, is a great solution. When you’re getting near the end of a seminar on, say, a technical aspect of finance, quickly put your notes together as a mind map. Once you’ve emerged from the session, review your mind map immediately. This ensures that you’ll retain the information for a good 24 hours.
“Review the mind map no more than 24 hours later, and you should have it for another week. If you review it one week later, then you’ve probably got it for a month. If you review it a month later, you’ve got it for three to six months. And if you look at it three to six months later, you should have it for life.”
O’Brien stresses: “It’s not a foregone conclusion that, as we get older, our memories fade. They can be maintained. A lot of it is down to lifestyle. Get a good night’s sleep, and have a balanced, Mediterranean diet with lots of omega-3, which comes from fish, among other sources. Take at least 15 minutes of physical exercise per day and, in tandem with that, give your brain a few challenges. A really accessible one is that old game where you have a tray with 20 items on it, and you cover them with cloth and try and remember what they all are. By using the Link Method or Journey Method, you’ll find yourself getting faster at it. So, play games, get your family and friends to give you challenges, and give them challenges, too.”
Visit Dominic O’Brien’s Peak Performance Training websitefor further details.