Ed Cooke insists that he can help you master a new language in a week and memorise anything you want.
One-third of British people under the age of 50 cannot remember their own phone number, according to a study conducted by the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin in 2007.
Many would argue that this is due to having a ‘bad memory’, but Ed Cooke would argue otherwise. Cooke insists the key to remembering is learning to think in more memorable ways.
Memory fades with time passing by, but the rate that memory fades depends on the history of that memory.
By repeating a memory, the memory will fade less quickly. That is the reason why when we are younger teachers constantly ask us to practice the same character or same sentence again and again.
By repeating, our memory can be reinforced and last longer and encode into our brain. Cooke said: “If you’ve just started learning something, you’ll forget it in half an hour. But if you’re reminded of that memory half an hour afterwards, it’ll stay in your mind for 12 hours.”
People remember interesting things like gossip or the result of football match, but dates, phone numbers and names are more dull and difficult to remember. We need to use more imaginative ways to help us remember.
To make information more meaningful to the mind we can make things unforgettably vivid.
Cooke built the online learning resource memrise.com to help people to learn to memorize and pick the most suitable way of association in order to remember dull facts.
More imaginative ways of remembering facts work best. For example,It may be boring to memorize Ed Cooke, but associate his name with someone frying their own head in a pan as a ‘head cook’ and the name will remain in your mind forever.
