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By the way ... As phones get smarter, are we getting dumber?
âHow did you do that?â asked the girl behind the airline check-in counter who was impressed when I recited my flight booking computer code to Bangkok by heart
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'How did you do that?' asked the girl behind the airline check-in counter who was impressed when I recited my flight booking computer code to Bangkok by heart.
Yes, I had turned my cold eight-digit reservation code, IDX2W131, into a funny short story that goes something like: 'The Indonesian Stock Market (IDX) sent two women (2W) to Bangkok (this is to make sure I remember where I am flying to), but they were unlucky (13) to be flying in the same plane with 'The Number One'.'
People say that short notes are much better than a long memory, but now I enjoy memorizing long numbers, or anything that exercises my brain. This helps me not to rely too much on smartphones, which, thanks to their huge memory capacity, have spoiled our brain.
Once when I was keying in someone's details a message popped up on the screen alerting me that the person was already in my contact list. Even worse, nowadays I can hardly remember my own 12-digit phone number.
Am I getting dumber?
A myth says that we use only 10 percent of our brain. Whether true or not, many studies have shown that our brain cells are likely to degenerate if they are rarely used. For example, blindness can occur if the eyes receive no visual stimuli early in development.
You could prevent your neural pathways from degenerating by regularly exercising your brain. Such exercises should be done correctly ' otherwise your brain may become stressed or even 'injured', resulting, ironically, in memory loss.
The good news is that there is a method to train your brain. It is called Memory Sport.
I had an opportunity to spend a few days with Indonesia's number one mnemonist Yudi Lesmana, a civil engineer and Grand Master of Memory, who ranked 52nd in the world.
Yudi can memorize the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards in 47 seconds, memorize 210 random words in 15 minutes and, of course, he never has a problem remembering his ATM PINs.
'You might admire a person with an athletic body. As there are no babies born with athletic bodies, there are also no persons possessing exceptional memory unless they regularly train and give their brains methods of exercise,' Yudi said.
Memorizing tricks have been developed since ancient times.
A technique known as the Memory Palace, for example, was 'refined and codified in an extensive set of rules and instruction manuals by Romans', Joshua Foer wrote in Moonwalking with Einstein ' The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
Now the method of memory training has been so much developed that an annual worldwide competition has been held since 1991 and followed by many regional and national level competitions and open tournaments.
What's the point of memorizing meaningless sequences of numbers, or even remembering orders of random playing cards, aside from losing friends because you always win your poker nights?
Experts say that focusing on memorization may obstruct learning. Understanding things enables a person to apply a concept to a real-life situation, while memorizing only keeps the concept in mind.
Yet memory training is meant to help people improve their ways of learning, accelerate understanding and increase consciousness in working with information. By consciousness, I mean we think about the information we get, respect the details and shine a mental spotlight on it. We also ignore everything else that is not important.
This can be achieved, first by being mindful of the information you want to memorize, then by creating analogies, scenes or a story board that may catch your brain's attention.
So build analogies and scenes you are familiar with, such as your home or your favorite places, and then create an exceptional imaginative story board, chaining to it the keywords you want to remember. Pour some emotion and excitement into your story. The more unusual your imagination, the easier it is for your brain to remember.
Try it! Take it from me: Memorizing can be challenging and fun. It teaches me to be mindful, imaginative and respect details. These are attitudes essential for learning and understanding things.
Relying too much on my smartphone has made me unmindful, ignorant and therefore dumber. So, it's good to take notes. Just make sure you remember where you put those notes.
' Bey Sapta
