Wed, 10 August 2016
Do you struggle with concentration and memory? Maybe even because you’ve been labeled with manic depression or A.D.D.? I hope you don’t have those conditions, but either way, there’s hope for clearing up any and all brain fog from messing up your memory. And it’s great honor that Rob Lawrence, host of Inspirational Creatives Podcast has allowed me to share his interview with me. In it, we talk about creativity, concentration, musicianship and how all of it ties into living a life of superior memory. Note: Quite a few things have changed since recording this interview. Olly Richards helped me fix a Spanish pronunciation problem created by the power of mnemonics and there have been a number of Magnetic Memory Method podcast episodes on Music Mnemonics For Guitar And Piano that have shown development and huge promise since recording this talk with Rob. With all that said, here’s the transcript for this interview to go with the audio. Enjoy and be sure to read more about Rob Lawrence and get subscribed to the Inspirational Creatives Podcast on iTunes!
Psychic Brain Surgery
Rob: So do I call you Dr. Metivier or Anthony? Anthony: Well that’s always a very interesting issue. I really don’t know. I mean get a kick out of being called doctor, and it certainly circulates around but it’s not necessary. My dad gets a kick out of it too. Actually, it’s funny that you mention brain surgery. Because for years and years he didn’t really quite understand what I did in my Ph.D., so he used to call me a brain surgeon, which there are some elements of that involved in what I do. It’s just psychic brain surgery. Rob: Yeah, there’s some technical accuracy in that. Have you always been interested in memory and imagination? Anthony: In a roundabout way. I basically wrote my first story that I remember, when I was in grade four. By story, I mean something that had a solid beginning, middle and an end. I had an ability to remember stories, as we all do, and loved to retell stories, tell jokes and retained stories in my mind. I’d often watch a movie and then try to rewrite it from memory. Yeah, I’ve always had this interest from a very young age. Rob: Stories are a fascinating concept, something that we tell our children and seem to be something that we’ve done since the beginning of time. Do you think we’ve lost our ability to remember in the way that we used to?
Why You Have Not “Lost” Your Ability To Remember
Anthony: I don’t believe at all that we’ve lost it. But the extent to which we use it has certainly changed. There is a kind of running myth that back in the day in Ancient Greece and in Matteo Ricci‘s era everybody used these memory techniques that I teach. They all memorized thousands of books and this kind of thing, which isn’t true. I would say that the ratio of people who use memory techniques then and in comparison with now is relatively the same per capita let’s say. It’s really just a growing thing. We’re in a renaissance of memory techniques right now. It seems to be happening at the precise moment that technology appears to be taking over or our memory needs, which I find deeply fascinating that this renaissance is taking place now at that technological moment. There are reasons to believe that actually technology is expanding our memory abilities rather than diminishing it. That’s a topic to be explored. It’s very conceptual, and I don’t have any hard data behind it but it’s something that I feel is being enabled by technology rather than the common statement that our memories are being eroded by technology. Rob: That’s fascinating, an absolutely fascinating thought there. So what are the key factors necessary to be able to succeed in improving your memory and using these Magnetic Memory Techniques that you teach? Anthony: Well there are a number of factors, but it all begins with the desire actually to improve your memory because without that there is nothing to ground it upon. Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, always said that the fantasy is better than the reality. That’s not exactly true in this case because you use fantasy in order to create reality, but nonetheless, there is an effort involved. A lot of people don’t have the necessary drive in order to get into it. One of my jobs is to give them that drive. So that’s a key factor there. In many ways, that is what my job is. It is simply to open the door for people, give points of access and points of entry. Beyond that, there’s the willingness to experiment, which is a key factor, the pleasure in imagination is a key factor and also a kind of wish or desire to have this information and to use it. Because if you’re not going to use it, you can have memorize all the things in the world and it won’t do anything for you. Memory champions, for example, can memorize thousands of digits that they forget half an hour later, but they have that particular use value in the competition in of itself. It’s always got to have some sort of use and some sort of pay off. The more you can identify with that use and that payoff is, then the more you have that necessary key factor to succeed.
Don’t Miss The Motivation Train!
Rob: You’re talking about motivation there, and you’re also talking about trying to find ways to get started exploring these techniques. Anthony: It’s not particular to the field of memory training. All areas need points of access and entry points. With music for example, people who would be perfectly capable of becoming very good musicians don’t get the point access that enables them to enter the kingdom. It could be that they didn’t get the right teacher or they didn’t get enough sleep or enough Cheerios or whatever the case may be. They just missed that train which is very sad because we all have musical capacities. That really is, I think, one of the key factors of all education is helping people find that entry point, as many as possible, because it’s really sad. We all have the ability to do anything really. We just need the prophets and the leaders who are able to show the way. Rob: I’d love to come back to that point about music because I’ve heard you’re a musician. Before I do, with your work, what are some of the key access points that you help people with in terms of being out to get a footing on these Magnetic Memory Techniques? Anthony: Well for me the big thing is the Memory Palace. The reason why I focus on it so specifically and teach so much about it is because it’s not only the fundamental memory technique, but it is the memory technique that you can use all of their memory techniques inside of. If you can get going with that, then you have enabled yourself really to have a success with every other memory technique. One of the other reasons that I focus on Memory Palace is because everybody knows where their toilet is. Everybody knows where their bed is. Everybody knows where their kitchen is. Because of that innate ability to recall locations with great detail, just conceptually knowing the distance between different areas and where they’re located in space in your home or in your workplace, you can then leverage that power and place information by the sofa or on the desk and recall it at ease by simply mentally going to that location. That is a major point of entry if you can learn how to use that technique correctly, instantly use it for something that is interesting to you and makes a significant difference to your life. Because so many people encounter memory techniques and they say well memorize your grocery list. Nothing in the world could be more boring than memorizing a grocery list, which is another reason why people don’t find a point of entry. But when you say memorize the lyrics of your favorite song that somehow evade you are using a path from your sofa to your office desk to your dinner table, well then that’s interesting because you get a great deal of pleasure out of it. Now you can sing along with that song. Now you can annoy your spouse or your friends by singing it over and over again or whatever the case may be. That makes a difference in your life. Those are two points of access, the very specific technique and then how you’re going to use that technique to get a victory, that make you feel good. You see the possibilities for what else you could memorize.
Two Kinds Of Memory Palaces … Take Your Pick!
Rob: That’s fascinating. So there is this concept here of Memory Palaces and are they real places or these places that we make up in our minds? Anthony: You can make them up in your minds or people use video games. There are all kinds of possibilities in what I call virtual Memory Palaces. I typically do not recommend that people use them at least not at the beginning stage. Yes, you want to ground your Memory Palaces on real locations, places that you’re familiar with and generally places that you have a positive association with. I have worked with people over the years who suffered abuse in a home, and they just keep coming up against those memories when they’re trying to use it as a Memory Palace. You could use a Memory Palace technique to help cleanse those bad memories, but until that that has taken place it’s really best just to use places with positive associations or at least neutral associations, which is another technique that you can use to have a clinical approach to things so that positive and negative memories don’t really play. For example, high schools have both positive and negative memories. If you can get a neutral approach or a clinical approach, then they’re pretty safe to use and very detailed so that you can get a lot of action out of them.
Familiarity Is The Key
Rob: Is there an advantage to using places that you already know you know? Anthony: What you are going to do is actually create a journey through a home, or a school, or a church, or a movie theater or whatever the case may be. You’re going to follow that journey the same way every time. It’s not exactly like following a movie through your mind, but it’s more like following a play through your mind because you restage it every time. It’s going to be slightly different. But nonetheless, a movie or play, you’re going to move on that journey in the same way. I mean there’s later techniques were you leap frog around in order to overcome what’s called the forgetting curve but in general you follow that same path just as you would basically follow of the same path from your door to your driveway. I mean you could walk around in circles around your car, but normally you just go from the door to the driveway to the door of your car. Because that is so ubiquitous, so every day and so commonplace, there’s nothing to remember or forget about it. You just know that intuitively and intentionally because it’s what you would do in real life anyway. Instead of just walking passively alongside the rosebush, now you have a giant clown who is eating your slippers to remind you that they need to go buy new shoes, or to help stimulate a line of poetry, or a foreign language word, or whatever the case may be, you’re actively using that location instead of passively. It’s just something that you pass by every day anyway. Rob: It sounds to me like something we intuitively do as children when we’re younger and we recount stories. That thought is inspired by something you just said there which is the clown eating the slippers. It’s part of the technique to exaggerate and create these kind of images in our minds.
How To Experience Cartoons In Your Mind
Anthony: That’s a fundamental part of it. So on top of the journey through a Memory Palace, every place that you want to memorize a target piece of information you create an image in order to encode it. Then when you go along that journey again in your mind you, decode it. The way that you remember the coding is by making it big, large, bright, vibrant and colorful, and on top of that, including some kind of zany crazy bizarre action. The more that you can focus on doing that, which in the beginning can be a bit of a challenge for some people, but gets very easy very quickly with some exercises and just practice, you can shock yourself into remembering anything. The more that you have cartoon-like silly engaging actions between characters, like an action with a reaction the way you would have in Wile E. Coyote cartoons with the Road Runner, or Pinky and The Brain or whatever these cartoon characters are. They are actually quite rigorous with one another. One would even say violent, but in a cartoon way, then they’re going to capture the interest of your mind’s eye in the way that a car wreck on the highway causes the rubberneck effect and you have to see it. Then you decode it and you get your target information back. If you do it a sufficient number of times, then you don’t need the image anymore. You have affectively learned and memorized the information and it’s yours.
How To Harness The Memory Power Of Emotions
Rob: Wow! That’s pretty fascinating. So it sounds to me like these techniques are more objective than they are subjective. What I mean by that is you were talking earlier about positive and negative emotions. I guess one of the assumptions I made automatically before I spoke with you today is that you use some kind of emotional power to help you remember certain things. Would that be an accurate reflection or is it a bit more complicated than that? Anthony: Technically you’re using an objective process to create subjective experience that relates to an object memory or some piece of information that is a kind of object. It’s a living breathing object. Yes, emotions are involved. I mean if you see your spouse smashing something with a hammer, there’s going to be an emotion involved. That emotion can be anger. Some of the images involve kissing which can involve romantic elements. You do want an emotional element to it, but you want it objective in the sense that there is a strategy involved. So in the same way that Hugh Grant might not be in love with Drew Barrymore and yet they’re kissing and projecting that emotion, you’re going objectively to create an emotion through deliberately rigging images in your mind.
The Real Reasons Why Anyone Can Improve Their Memory
Rob: Got it. So is this something that anybody can develop in your experience? Anthony: Everybody can experience memory improvement. They’re already doing it at some level anyway. So it’s just a matter of understanding how that your imagination works, which is pretty simple and easy to do, then leveraging it and then developing it in certain directions. But even if you don’t develop it, you still have the ability to do this at an intermediate level. There’s no elementary level to it whatsoever. You can go from intermediate to an advanced level. Anybody can do it. I mean I have podcast interviews on my podcasts with 10‑year-olds, 8‑year-olds who are using these techniques. I have personally trained 88‑year-old individuals and people in their 80s, 70s, 60s and 50s. There’s even very interesting research going on right now by someone in Kasper Bormans who is using the Memory Palace technique to help people with Alzheimer’s remember the names of their family members and getting results with this which is absolutely incredible. So there are curative properties for people who have brain damage. They’re also using Memory Palace techniques for what’s called chemobrain when cancer patients have to take a lot of chemotherapy and they lose their memory, and they lose general cognitive abilities. So they are getting results with this kind of memory exercise as well. So anybody can do it. Rob: Wow! That’s pretty incredible and something I was going to ask you about. But it is pretty inspiring to hear that these techniques can be used, or similar techniques to this, can be used to help improve the memory of people that have health conditions, which are affecting their memory. That’s pretty inspirational. What are the common applications that your students tend to use? You’re talking about very young people there and very old people. In your experience, what do people tend to use these Magnetic Memory Methods for?
The Most Common Applications Of Memory Techniques
Anthony: The biggest application in my personal experience as someone offering these is with foreign language vocabulary and to a certain extent grammar principles. This has been tremendously successful because it’s one of the hugest pain points in the world. People want to learn new languages. They want to improve their own language, but words just don’t stick without either massive amounts of repetition or some kind of technique. There are all kinds of techniques in the world for using your memory to help you better recall words. But there is no specific strategy that was developed just for word retention and recall. So I developed it. I developed it out of my own personal need, shared it and it just became wildly successful because so many other people have that pain point. That’s really the largest part of my training is specifically for the purpose of learning languages. Rob: So I’m guessing you speak different languages? Anthony: I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise because I just don’t have any kind of natural ability the way some people do. But of course, some people don’t have a natural ability. They are just using certain techniques in their minds that relate to what I teach, but without a kind of actual apparatus. I never it was very successful despite a deep interest in languages throughout my life. But being able to build a number of Memory Palaces and put large amounts of vocabulary with a basic understanding of grammar, vocabulary being like a kind of petrol or gas that you put into an engine, and grammar being a kind of engine, then you can get very far very quickly. You just need to add speaking, reading, writing and listening to the mix. Things happen very quickly. Rob: So can you give me an example of perhaps one of the languages that you’ve begun teach yourself, and can you talk me through how you’ve perhaps memorized the phrase or something like that with these Memory Palaces in mind? Anthony: One thing that I’ve been developing for some time now but that I really love is Spanish. So imagine you came across the word abuela. Abuela means grandmother, and you wanted to memorize that. There are really not any cognates with English. There’s no relationship grandmother and abuela. So you’ve got to find a point of access. One thing that you can do is split the words in different pieces. So there’s ab-u-ela. One thing that I like to do is use famous people. So ab reminds me of Abraham Lincoln and ela reminds me of Ella Fitzgerald. I imagine that Abraham Lincoln encounters Ella Fitzgerald dressed as his grandmother and she is saying boo like a ghost. So now, you have ab-u-ela. You can add abuelo for grandfather just by having some Jell-O or whatever the case may be. Now you’ve got that word and that is on the bed in a Memory Palace that I have. Then just move to the next one, the next one and the next one so that you’re collecting words. Just imagine that there are a number of words in Spanish that start with “ab.” Abraham Lincoln moves from place to place to place interacting with different other people. You can pick up a lot of words really quickly. Then again, using them in speaking, reading, writing and listening, you’ll encounter them, you’ll hear them, and you’ll use them. Everything is just absolutely fantastic. You might even call it Magnetic.
How To Memorize Grammar Concepts Fast
Rob: How does it work with grammar without getting into too much detail because I imagine that’s a slightly different ballgame. Anthony: It is and it isn’t. A lot of grammar has to do with conjugations. I mean grammar is a big world. One of the things is verb conjugations, which are very difficult for people. So imagine that you create a Memory Palace for say the “to be” verbs. Spanish has two, so let’s just deal with one. You would have ser. For me, I used Hamlet serving desert because ser is in desert. It’s not a one-to-one correspondence but it works for me. You’re rarely going to find one-to-one correspondences. There are a number of conjugations of “to be” like you are, I am, they are. You have a sufficient number of stops or stations in a Memory Palace and you just see Hamlet helping you remember all of those different conjugations. So ser is to be. Yo soy is I am. Tu eres is you are and so forth. So yo soy, Hamlet is injecting the cake into a bathtub of soy. Tu eres is this giant statute of Aries and he is throwing the cake at that statue’s face and so on. So that’s one way for verb conjugations. You pick any verb that you and you conjugate them. But you also generally pick up the way that the regular and irregular verb contributions work. So after a while you really don’t need to do that for every verb. You just need the verb.
How To Develop Unconscious Competence
Rob: I’m guessing that over time through practice that you become unconscious competent at this. I guess the language just starts to come naturally does it? Anthony: Yeah, especially if you do a kind of alphabetization that I was suggesting because, not in all languages but in many languages, you get a feel for how the structure works. So in German, for example, there are a lot of words that start with ent. That generally, but almost always, suggests something about the next part of the word. Also with words that start with ber. Whatever follows that generally has something to do with what that ber characterizes about the language. That works in English as well with endings and with some beginnings. You get a feel for it. You get to a point where you can guess with some accuracy what a word means. Of course all language learning is experimentation, testing. Do you get a result from the use of a word or is it making sense when you read. Of course, words have multiple senses. But language learning, like memory itself, is not a fixed piece of glass. It’s something that is wet and movable. You just go with the flow, and you use memory as a kind of surfboard to navigate through torrid waters. Mnemonics for Music Memory Hacks In Development
Rob: Got it. I’d like to turn our conversation towards creativity, and come back to this point about music and appreciate that you’re a musician. How long have you been a musician? Have you been a musician your whole life? Anthony: I played guitar in my dad’s lap. It is one of those classic images where the father is helping you press down your fingers on the guitar. After that, it’s kind of a long story, but when I got to band class in grade six they didn’t want to let me into band class because I didn’t pass the proper tests. I persisted anyway even though I was tone deaf or whatever those tests were that they had. I persisted. I wanted to play bass guitar and they said you can’t. We’re not going to buy an amplifier for the class just so you can play bass guitar. I said well what’s the next closest thing and they said trombone. I went with it. Then I played trombone until I got grade nine, and I was able to finally able to get a bass. Then I just started in bands and went from there. I ultimately wound up playing in a band in Germany and going on tour and having lots and lots of fun as a result. Bass has always been my thing, but I’ve also played sitar, flute, banjo, a bit of piano and a little flute that I got in Prague once upon a time. Rob: I read, I think it was on Amazon actually, that you were memorizing Bach’s compositions on cello. Can you describe to me a bit about how your methods apply to creative endeavors, for example, playing or more writing music? Anthony: I’m learning the Bach cello pieces on bass guitar for performance on bass guitar. One of the things that really help is if you are able to create an image for each string. So E is for Ernie. A is for out Al Pacino and so forth. Then you can have each fret have a sound attached to it or an image. There’s something called the Major Method where each number is a sound. So 0 is “sa,” 1 is “ta” or “da,” 2 is “na,” and so forth up until 9. Then you can create combinations. So if something where at the twelfth fret, for instance, that would be tan because 1 is “T” or “D”, and 2 is “N”. You don’t even have to be as specific as the string if you don’t want to. But if you know something’s on the twelve fret, and it’s on the E string, then that is Ernie getting a tan. Or it’s Al Pacino getting a tan. It’s just a quick thing where you can look at a piece of sheet music and you can navigate quite quickly and establish not needing to look at the sheet music and not really needing as much dedicated practice looking back and forth, closing your eyes, playing, and looking back and forth. It really helps. But you need the basis first. If you are trying to do this while you’re learning the memory techniques, then it probably would be more of a barrier than anything, or if you were trying to use it while you’re learning music it would probably be more of the barrier than anything. But if you have both of those things in combination, then it’s a beautiful thing.
The Real Secret Of A Solid Memory Is Sleep
Rob: So get some music theory first, learn the memory techniques, then try and put the two together. Anthony: Basically, but I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from trying to do both at the same time. My feeling is that having learned music myself and having learned to do dedicated practice playing with that rote learning style, I can see that they would jar with each other. Rob: Yeah and how reliable have you found these techniques in terms of your music and being able to memorize such compositions? Anthony: Well I’d say that it’s basically an 88 to 98 percent success rate. A lot has to do with how tired one is, how well fed one is, how much the bodily needs are taken care of so they can use your attention, which is going to be true one way or the other. Also, it has to do with motivation and intensity. When I was playing, I just came back to Germany from Canada and I needed to be prepared to go on the road with The Outside. Rob: The band. Anthony: There wasn’t a whole lot of time for me to think F, G sharp and all that stuff, and try and get it. I just needed to know that those were the notes and as quickly as possible. So it really helped in that in that case rather than feeling around. Plus we were tuned in C#, and that doesn’t really go with my ears that well. I really needed to know what the notes were, I couldn’t hear them as well, and as I mentioned, I sort of have had historically a difficult time with learning by ear. It’s really helped me out to pick up things fast that way. It also helps build concentration.
The Bare Minimum Time Investment In |