Page 143 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

with things we have memorized in order to form chunks.”

—Forrest Newman, professor of astronomy and physics, Sacramento City College

Can You Remember Where Your Kitchen Table Is? Your
Supersized Visuospatial Memory

It may surprise you to learn that we have outstanding visual and spatial memory
systems. When you use techniques that rely on those systems, you’re not just
relying on raw repetition to burn information into your brain. Instead, you’re
using fun, memorable, creative approaches that make it easier to see, feel, or
hear what you want to remember. Even better, these techniques free up your
working memory. By grouping things in a sometimes wacky yet logically

retrievable fashion, you easily enhance your long-term memory. This can really
help take the stress off during tests.
Here’s what I mean about your good visual and spatial memory. If you were
asked to look around a house you’d never visited before, you would soon have a
sense of the general furniture layout, where the rooms were, the color scheme,
the pharmaceuticals in the bathroom cupboard (whoa!). In just a few minutes,
your mind would acquire and retain thousands of new pieces of information.

Even weeks later, you’d still hold far more in your mind than if you’d spent the
same amount of time staring at a blank wall. Your mind is built to retain this
kind of general information about a place.
The memory tricks used by both ancient and modern memory experts taps
into these naturally supersized visuospatial memorization abilities. Our

ancestors never needed a vast memory for names or numbers. But they did need
a memory for how to get back home from the three-day deer hunt, or for the
location of the plump blueberries on the rocky slopes to the south of camp.
These evolutionary needs helped lock in superior “where things are and how
they look” memory systems.

The Power of Memorable Visual Images