Where’s my car key… Where’s my car?

We all have those blank moments when we walk into a room and then have no idea why we’re there. Then we walk back from wherever we came from, and of course, it all comes back to us.

They’re usually called “senior moments” but I’m sure many youngsters suffer from the same dilemma as seniors. 

Eran Katz

Eran Katz is an expert on Super Memory. He is the bestselling author of Secrets of a Super Memory, Jerome Becomes a Genius, and Five Gifts for the Mind, which have been translated to 18 languages. He also holds the Israeli Guinness Book of World Records title in memory stunts, being able to remember a sequence of 500 random digits while most of us have trouble remembering a phone number of 10 digits.

The secret, according to Katz, who was recently in Bangkok to share his memory tips courtesy of the Israeli Embassy, is association. To illustrate, he asked his audience to give him a series of about 50 random numbers. He wrote them on a flip chart, then asked one of the participants to read them to him one by one, since his memory is better triggered aurally. And just like that, he was able to recite the numbers correctly, not only forwards, but also backwards.

Katz giving a talk at Bangkok Bank

Having captured the audience’s intrigue, he proceeded to throw out a random list of 10 items: bed, fish, carpet, dress, dog, car, TV, plant pot, cigarette, trumpet. The audience was able to remember bed, then maybe fish, but were a bit lost after that regarding the sequence.

The reason we can’t remember them, according to Katz, is that we can’t find any association between the individual words. So we have to create that association, and that can be done by a very childish game, using your imagination. The images that he conjures up as an example were:

1. Imagine your bed at home. 

2. Imagine there’s a big, slimy, wriggling fish in your bed. 

3. Imagine there’s a carpet next to your bed, but suddenly the carpet is gone, and instead, the huge fish is on the floor, and you have to step on the scaly skin instead of the plush carpet. 

4. Imagine you’re going out, but you have nothing in your closet, and there’s someone at the door, so you have to grab the carpet to wrap around you like a dress. 

5. You’re wearing your carpet dress out on the street, and of course, the neighbour’s dog starts to chase you, and you have to run for your life. 

6. Suddenly you’re not running anymore but riding in the comfort of a car, and the dog can’t catch up with you. 

7. You’re driving along the road, minding your own business, when suddenly a huge old-fashioned box television the size of a car comes rolling past in the opposite direction, which causes a double-take from everyone. 

8. The old-fashioned box TV has all its components removed, and the housing is being used as a pot, with a huge plant growing out of it.

9. The green, leafy plant has suddenly turned into a huge cigarette, sticking straight out of the pot. 

10. You hear the sound of weird music, and you see someone playing a trumpet, but instead of musical notes coming out, the trumpet is spouting out cigarettes. 

By this point, everyone in the room could recite the list of 10 random items without any problem. And they would probably remember this list after a year, as long as they are able to remember the association.

Katz also insists that languages can be picked up just as easily. It has been proven by several studies, he notes, that we require a minimum of 1,000 words in our vocabulary to be able to read and understand the gist of articles in The New York Times. And that goes for any language. So all we have to do is add 1,000 words of any target language, and we should be able to understand enough of that language to get by. 

To find out what those 1,000 words are, just Google “1000 most used (Spanish) words.” It’s as simple as that.

Now, to remember those 1,000 words, don’t forget your fish and carpets and snarling dogs.

For more information, check out Eran Katz’s website.