Brain Power
Dave Farrow appears in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the world’s greatest memory. As a student, Dave had a learning disability called dyslexia.
(11) his struggles with subjects like reading and writing, Dave found ways to improve his memory in order to do (12) in school. In 2008, he set a world record by memorising the (13) of 59 decks of playing cards in two days. How did his brain store all of this information? According to Dave, anybody’s brain can do it, but it helps to understand how memory works.
Your brain is (14) taking in information through your senses. The information enters your sensory memory, which has the capacity to hold lots of information, but only for a few seconds. If you (15) the information, your brain will discard it. However, if you pay attention to it, the information goes into your short-term memory. This is why learning to pay attention is an important first (16) to improving your ability to recall what you learn.
Your short-term memory can only hold information from 15 seconds to a few minutes, so people like Dave have to rely on different tricks to remember long lists.
One trick is to look at the first letter of every word you want to memorize. Then,
(17) your own word, phrase or sentence using all of those letters. This is called an acronym. For example, if you want to remember all the colours in a rainbow, try remembering the name Roy G. Biv. Each letter in this name matches the first letter of a colour in the rainbow.
Another trick is to organise information into chunks or pieces. For example, when you try to remember a telephone number, your brain usually remembers it in chunks. You remember the area code as one chunk, the next three numbers as another chunk, and the last four numbers as another chunk. This way, your brain only has to remember three things; (18) ten. Whenever you learn a new word, study words that share the same meaning. Such words are called synonyms. For example, synonyms for the word big are huge, enormous, gigantic, large and massive.
If you don’t keep using the information, your brain throws it away. If you keep reviewing the information, it will go into your long-term memory. The more you practice
(19) the information, the better you will be at remembering it. Try these tips the next time you are (20) to remember a phone number, a new word or something for school.