In the last posting I pointed out that the brain is a muscle. Well memory is part of the equation. I know this is going to sound a bit stupid, but it’s really important:

If you want to be productive, you are going to have to remember how to be productive.

Remembering things is something that most people are not good at. That’s why 3M made a fortune out of Post-it Notes. That, if nothing else, proves the point: most people don’t actually know how to remember things. Most of us never got taught how to remember things, so we’re pretty much useless at it. At school, I remember having having to learn a Latin prayer when I was 10 years old.

Here it is:    Quid retribuam Domino pro omnibus quae retribuit mihi, calicem salutarus accipiam et nomen Domini invocabo.

We had to repeat this once every week in the morning school service. I believe it comes from the Lyons Rite and I have no idea why it was thrust upon me and others. I know what it means (What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me, I shall take the cup of salvation and call upon the name of the Lord) because we also had to chant that. Why did we have to chant it in both English and Latin? I have no idea. In the first weeks of going to that school we were tasked with learning this by rote. Everyone had to do it and no-one had any problems with it.

It is possible to learn anything by rote, if you repeat it often enough. Rote is the sledgehammer memory technique. It’s the memory technique of last resort. I advise you to have as little to do with it as possible, otherwise you might, for example, end up knowing a Latin prayer and also knowing it’s English translation, without knowing for sure which Latin words correspond to the English ones.

Some Jews make it their goal to memorize the whole of the Torah, and some Muslims take on the task of memorizing the whole of the Koran. Such efforts take several years. You may think of such effort as  meaningless activities, but I can tell you for nothing you wont be able to do that using rote memory.

It’s true, as I wrote in the last posting, that the brain is a muscle and if you start learning by rote and do some rote learning every day, you’ll get better at it. But like a I said, rote is a poor technique. You need better techniques. You need to learn and use other ways to memorize things.

So let me give you the first thing you need to know about memory:

Memory is completely associative.

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