Discover the Memory Tool-Kit

[Ayinde]

Here we shall explore all the possible ways to not just enhance your memory and take it to extreme levels of excellence but also maintain it in its peak form without compromising on anything important in your lives. Your memory, as has been described in the last chapter, is more of a place than an organ.

How do you make sure that a place is in its prime form? You dust it and then start renovating it. This chapter will teach you exactly that. Let us begin our journey towards a better life. Memory Enhancement is a process that has been split into three stages. These three stages must be gone though in the exact order they have been enlisted otherwise the very point will be defeated in the run. Let us explore the first stage.

Stage I

Stage I involves everything that can help your memory prepare itself to receive the memory training you are going to impart. Imagine a kid going to school the first time ever. Do you directly admit him to the said school and expect him to start rotting up mathematics table? No. You prepare him for the experience. You make sure that he is ready to receive education before he is enrolled into an educational institution. Maybe admitting him to a nursery or a kindergarten would help. You slowly ease him into the experience of academics. Stage I majorly consists of baby steps that are taken in order to ready your brain for the eventual procedure. When you move into a new house, you do not start arranging your things right after moving in. You dust off the place, make sure the shelves are clean and ensure hygiene before letting your kids play around or things moved into the house. Your memory is no different. Let us learn how.

Your memory could be prevented from being on top due to a variety of reasons. There could be many factors contributing to your memory being slowed and tied down. Stage I is where you are to take steps necessary to make sure that such hindrances are removed from your path. You could start off with removing emotional attachment from things in general. Being sentimentally inclined towards a thing or a person blind your memory. When you develop partial feelings towards an entity, you naturally get more inclined towards it than other things in your life. As a result, you end up devoting a major part of your mental energy towards this entity rather than equally distributing it amongst everything. This leads to an imbalance and hence imperfections in your memory. For example, let’s assume that James’ favorite subject is mathematics. He can be seen around his college campus, solving sums and making derivations. However, due to his overt enthusiasm for the subject, he is unable to devote as much energy towards history.

As a predictable result, his history marks suffer. He is not able to recall important historical dates as easily as he’d mathematical formulas. This happened because he was more inclined towards one subject than the rest; so much so that after a point he no longer felt the passion for the rest of the subjects thereby losing his interest in them. Excessive leaning towards anything is a bad thing and must be gotten rid of. You should be emotional, yes, but being partially emotional you are pushing yourself towards doom. Memory is directly related to emotions. The more emotionally attached you are to an entity; the more imbalanced your memory is going to be.Of course some things are supposed to be more important than the others, but an abundance of attention and energy when dedicated to just one leads to negligence and substantial cutting off of the rest. Stage I is very important as it prepares your mind to let go of things you would not have previously. Letting go is a major part of just not memory enhancement but moving ahead in life as well. So long as you hold on to your past, you are not going to be able to even take the first step towards improving your memory.

Stage II

The most important of the three steps, Stage II is about applying direct methods to improve your memory. This step will span over a longer area than the rest two because of how vital and necessary it is. The real crux of this book is hidden in this step, so I’d urge you to pay your utmost attention here.

Watch What You put in Your Mouth

Food is life! A simple activity of our daily routine, eating is usually not considered a very important phenomenon in our lives. However, if you want to make sure that your memory is improving, you must pay close attention to what is there on your plate. Your food is the first key to your memory enhancement. Here is a list of some food items that are a must if you are looking forward to an excellent memory: Tomatoes are a sure shot way to memory improvement. Tomatoes contain sufficient carbohydrates, vitamin A and C, potassium and anti-oxidants. Not only are they rich in the aforementioned elements, they also help your skin glow, which in turn could be a confidence boost to your personality, thereby helping you with remembering things in general.

Coffee is another source of valuable contents that help your memory. Caffeine has been proved to have helped students’ not just stay up long hours at nights, but also develop their short-term memory. Researchers are unclear as to the exact reason behind caffeine helping young guns prepare for exams. It could be because of how it helps you stay up or that the caffeine has the necessary compounds to really enhance your short-term memory, or a mixture of both. Either way, coffee is a must for long nights. Fish is rich in omega three fatty acids, which are excellent for optimum brain and memory functioning. Eating fish at least once a week is good enough to provide your brain the aforementioned mega three fatty acids.

The oil present in the fish is also very good for short-term memory retention. Munching on walnuts is also a helpful tip to improve your memory. Walnuts and other related nuts like peanuts and the like contain omega three fatty acids in abundant amounts. Moreover, they are also rich in elegiac acid, which is a sure shot protective element when it comes to free radical damage to the brain. You must have heard about the powers of rosemary oil. You would be surprised to know the way in which rosemary oil helps you when it comes to memory.You could use rosemary oil to help your memory by burning it and leaving it to spread its essence in your house. It is said that the essence of rosemary oil when burnt somehow helps you memorize things quicker. You can also use the oil in cooking and other food items.

Along with olive oil rosemary oil adds to the aftertaste of many food items. Turkey, an important food during thanksgiving, is also a good memory booster. When properly roasted, turkey lets out L-Tyrosine, an element that helps you improve mental alertness. It does not let you ignore that matter to you and your overall alertness is increased twice the amount. L-Tyrosine can also be found in yogurt, cheese and chicken. Choline, a precursor of acetylcholine, can be found in eggs. Eggs besides being really tasty food choices can also help you on your way to memory improvement. Acetylcholine is a neuro-stimulator that helps pass on messages from one nerve ending to another. When you have abundant amounts of acetylcholine in your system you tend to be more alert when you are surrounded by distractions.

Meditation is the Key

Few people recognize the potential of a good meditation session. Meditation can be best described as the shutting down of all the senses for a while before letting your mind focus on one point, irrespective how the number of distractions wandering around you. Meditation is an ancient art of clearing out your thoughts and paying attention to only that which is importune to you. Saints and sages from the past have always recommended it and so are yoga gurus these days. The importance of meditation cannot be put into words. It improves not just your memory but also your health. Doctors have begun acknowledging the value of a good meditation over medication. Medical practitioners around the world have come to recognize meditation as a full proof medical practice to get rid of things that couldn’t have been cured by general branches of allopathic medicine.

How does Meditation help?

Meditation is nothing but focusing your entire attention pool to one point and not letting distractions sway your focus. With regards to how it helps your memory, it has been established that when you focus all your energy to a single pint, you learn self-control and focus. Self-focus and self-control are two such things that can anyway sharpen your memory like a whetstone sharpens a sword. When you are equipped in handling your energy according to where you want it to focus,you naturally learn how to control it. Gaining control over your attention radar is a major achievement.

Once you have gained this said control, you have improved your memory by half of what it used to be. Meditation is therefore, a proven technique to help you improve your memory.

How do I meditate?

You do not have to wander around to some countryside, find a big tree and sit under it trying to focus your energies. You really do not need any special place for meditation. Although meditation can be performed really anywhere, for beginners, it is advised that they follow some tips n order to successfully meditate. Let me share some of these tips with you: Choose a quiet place for meditation. This place could be anywhere, like for example your personal study room, your office cabin or even a park. Just make sure that the room or the place you have chosen is free for the next one hour.

Make sure that you are not hindering in anyone’s activity while you are occupying the space you have selected for meditating. Assume a cross-legged position and sit down on the floor. Floor is preferred over any other place to sit while meditating because a cross-legged position on the floor has been proved to be the best position to meditate. This is said to elevate all your senses to their maximum level. Before assuming the mentioned position, mark a point on the opposite wall. This point will be the point of your focus. It is a very important step for beginners since they will need a reference point to focus their energies on. As soon as you are done performing this step with the help of a pencil or a dark marker, get back to your sitting position. Start your meditation by looking at the marked spot with a clear vision.

Start off easy. Do not focus too much of your attention on the spot as it may lead to severe headache after some hours. Make sure you remove any sort of distraction from the place you are meditating in. When you do that, you ensure that no one or nothing proves a disturbance to you while you are tying to focus. When you have looked at the mark for long enough, try looking at it with more focus now. Do not, however, squint your eyes as this may lead to acute issues of headache later. Focus with a normal gaze and try to muster all your vision to that particular spot only.Switch off your mobile phone before starting the session. Bolt the doors and the windows so that even a car honk or a buzzing fly would not be able to take your mind off the spot. The purpose of isolating you while you are focusing is to make sure you become an expert at separating things eventually. Deliberate isolation is helpful only at the start, hence the bolting of the doors and the windows.

But after you have gained some mastery over focusing yourself on the said spot, try to keep the doors and the windows open, thereby challenging your focus. If you have reached a stage where even the loudest ring of your mobile is not able to distract you from your spot, know that you are progressing. When you perform this, you enhance the energies in your body. Chakras that are supposed to be your pressure points are in their peaks and you experience liberation of a different kind altogether. You not only are at the peak of your senses but also your powers of imagination. After you have focused on the spot, for about an hour, you can gradually start focusing on different things in your environment. For example, try looking at how pretty the vase kept in the corner of the room is, or try smiling at the photo of your kid hung up on the wall, just above the spot you were just so focused on. Do not suddenly snap out of your meditation as tis could lead to issues.

Make the way out gradual and simple. Memory is directly linked to how well you focus. Normally, your attention span is weak and you do not really remember everything that you see. Either that, or you try to remember everything and retain nothing. Meditating heightens your senses to unimaginable levels and makes you the master of your attention. You will realize that once you have gained control over what you want to see what you don’t, things start becoming simpler for you. What used to bother you before is no longer such an issue anymore. You start seeing yourself in a new light since the senses that you have mastered are now your servants and hence, so is your memory, which has grown sharper, better and stronger.

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