Improving Memory

The memory techniques taught in Mind Control can reduce our use of telephone directories and tremendously impress our friends.

But if I want a telephone number, I look it up. Perhaps some Mind Control graduates do use their skills for remembering telephone numbers but, as I said in the previous chapter, desire is important in making things work, and my desire to remember phone numbers is something less than spirited. If I had to cross town every time I needed a telephone number, my desire would perk up.

It is basically unsound to use Mind Control techniques for anything but important matters because of that desire, belief, expectancy trilogy.

But how many of us have memories as efficient as we would like?

Your new ability to visualize and re-create past events while you are in Alpha has a certain carry-over to Beta, so without any special effort your mind may be working in new ways for you.

Still, there is room for improvement In Mind Control classes we have a special visualization exercise. In this exercise the lecturer writes num- bers from one to thirty on a blackboard, then the students call out the names of objects—snowball, roller skate, ear plug—whatever comes to mind. He writes each word opposite a number, turns away from die blackboard, and recites them in order. Students call out any word and the lecturer gives the corresponding number.

This is not a parlor trick but a lesson in visualization.

The lecturer has already memorized a word for each number; thus each number evokes a visual image of its corresponding word. We call these images “memory pegs.”

When a student calls out a word, the lecturer combines it in some meaningful or fanciful way with the image he has associated with the word’s number.

The memory peg for ten is “toes”; if a student offers “snowball” as the tenth word, the resulting image may be a snowball on your toes. This is not difficult for a mind trained in visualization.

The students begin to learn the Memory Pegs by being at their level while the lecturer slowly repeats them.

Then, when they later undertake to memorize them in Beta, the job is easier because the words seem familiar.

I must omit die Memory Pegs from this book because too much time and space would be needed here to learn them.

You already have a powerful technique for improving your visualization and your memory at the same time: the mental screen. Anything you believe you have forgotten is associated with an event.

If it is a name, the event is die time you heard or read it. All that you have to do, once you learn to work with your mental screen, is visualize a past event that surrounds an incident you believe you have forgotten, and it will be there.

I say an incident you believe you have forgotten because in reality you have not forgotten it at all.

You simply do not recall it There is a significant difference.

The world of advertising offers us a familiar illustration of the difference between memory and recall.

We all see television commercials. There are so many of them and they are so brief that if we were asked to list five or ten that we saw during the past week we would be able to cite only three or four at the most.

A major way in which advertising creates sales is by causing us to “remember” a product below the level of awareness.

It is doubtful that we ever really forget anything. Our brain squirrels away images of the most trivial events.

The more vivid the image and the more important it is to us, the more easily we recall it.

An electrode gently touching an exposed brain during surgery will trigger a long-“forgotten” event in all its details, so vividly that the sounds and smells and sights are actually experienced.

This is the brain being touched, not the mind.

be, he will know—something tells him—that he was not really reliving them. This is the mind at work—the super-observer, the interpreter—and no electrode has ever touched it The mind, unlike the tip of our nose, does not exist in a specific place.

Somewhere thousands of miles from where you are sitting, a leaf is falling from a tree.

You will not remember or recall this event because you did not experience it, nor is it important to you. How- ever, our brains record far more events than we realize.

As you sit reading this book you are going through thousands of experiences of which you are not aware. To the extent that you are concentrating now, you are unaware of them. There are sounds and odors, sights in the corner of your eye, perhaps the small discomfort of a shoe that is too tight the feel of your chair, the temperature of the room—there seems to be no end.

We are conscious of these sensations but not aware of being conscious of them, which seems like a contradiction until we consider the case of a woman under general anesthesia.

During the course of her pregnancy, this woman had developed an excellent rapport with her obstetrician.

Between the two there was friendship and confidence.

Came time for her delivery and she went routinely under general anesthesia and gave birth to a healthy baby.

Later, when her physician visited her in her hospital room, she was strangely distant even hostile toward him. Neither she nor her physician could account for her changed attitude, and both were eager to find some explanation for it They decided to try, through hypnosis, to uncover some hidden memory that might ex- plain her sudden change.

Under hypnosis she was led through time regression, from her most recent experience with her physician back to earlier ones. They did not have far to go.

In a deep trance, instead of skipping over the period when she was “unconscious” in the delivery room, she recounted everything the doctor and nurses had said.

What they said in the presence of the anesthetized patient was at times clinically detached, at other times humorous, and at other times they expressed annoyance at the slow progress of her delivery. She was a thing, not a person; her feelings were not considered. After alt she was unconscious, wasn’t she?

I question whether it is possible ever to be Unconscious. We either can or cannot recall what we experience, but we are always experiencing and all experiences leave memories firmly printed on the brain.

Does this mean that with the memory techniques you are about to learn you will be able ten years from now to recall the number of this page?

You may not have looked at ft, but it is there; you saw it out of the corner of your eye, so to speak.

Perhaps, but probably not.

It is not and probably never will be important to you.

But can you recall the name of that attractive person you met at dinner last week? When you first heard the name, the hearing of it was an event You need simply re-create the surrounding event on your Mental Screen, as I have explained, and you will hear the name again.

Relax, go to your level, create the screen, experience the event. This takes fifteen or twenty minutes.

But we have another way, a sort of emergency method, which will take you instantly to a level of mind where recall of information will be easier.

This method involves a simple triggering mechanism which, once it becomes really yours, improves in effectiveness as you use it.

Making it yours will require several meditation sessions to thoroughly internalize the procedure. Here is how simple it is: Just bring together the thumb and first two fingers of either hand and your mind will instantly adjust to a deeper level.

Try it now and nothing will happen; it is not yet a triggering mechanism. To make it one, go to your level and say to yourself (silently or aloud), “Whenever I join my fingers together like this”—now join them—“for a serious purpose I will instantly reach this level of mind to accomplish whatever I desire.”

Do this daily for about a week, always using the same words. Soon there will be a firm association in your mind between joining the thumb and two fingers and instantly reaching an effective meditation level.

Then, one day soon, you will try to recall something—someone’s name, for example—and the name will not come.

Try harder and it will even more stubbornly refuse to come. The will is not only useless; it is a hindrance. Now relax. Realize that you remember and that you have a way of triggering recall.

A teacher of fourth-graders in Denver uses the Mental Screen and the Three Fingers Technique to teach spelling. She covers about twenty words a week.

To test them, instead of going from one word to another and asking for the correct spelling, she asks the students to write down all the words they studied that week. They remember the words and how to spell them —with their three fingers together, seeing them on their mental screens.

“The slower ones,” she says, “take about fifteen minutes with fhe test” Using the same technique, she teaches these fourth- graders the multiplication table up to the 12’s by November.

This normally takes an entire school year.

Tim Masters, the college student-taxi driver mentioned in the last chapter, often gets passengers who want to go to addresses in neighboring towns where he has been so long ago that his memory of how to get there has dimmed. Not many hurried passengers would understand if he went into meditation before starting off. But with his three fingers together, he “relives” the last time he drove there.

Before he took Mind Control, Tim’s grades at New York Institute of Technology were all B’s and one A.

“Now I’m a scholar—all A’s and one B,” he reports.

He uses Speed Learning when he studies—you will read about this in the next chapter—and he takes exams with his three fingers together.

There are other uses for this Three Fingers Technique, which you will read about later. We use it in several unusual ways. It has been associated with other meditative disciplines for centuries. The next time you see a painting or sculpture of a Far Eastern person—a Yogi, perhaps, sitting cross-legged in meditation—notice that the three fingers of his hands are similarly joined.