How To Develop A Perfect Memory

Hello. My name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I'm going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking.

How to develop a perfect memory? Well, the dangerous word in that statement is perfect. We put an enormous amount of pressure on ourselves striving for perfection, and so really what you need to do is take the pressure off yourself. Now, psychologists will tell us we have a perfect memory.

Everybody has a perfect memory; what we struggle with is recall. Yeah? It's trying to remember what's already in the memory there, somewhere else. Now, if you think about it again, a hypnotist may be able to hypnotize you so that you remember things you didn't realize you remembered.

So, the memory is there. But what happens is when we get under pressure, and a word like perfect puts even more pressure onto us, is we freeze up and we find it harder to remember things. So if you are trying to remember a lot of information, what I would recommend is group it in small groups.

Now, as speakers, we always recommend, put things in threes. Organize things in threes. Now, imagine I'm giving a presentation now.

I've got three points I want to make, and let's say they're three people. I'm going to introduce you to Tom, Jenny, and Steve. And if I visualize that, as I do, like Microsoft files, they're little folders on a desktop: Tom, Jenny, and Steve.

I click on Tom and I open it up. There's another three files in there. What I'm going to tell you about is Tom's family, something about his job and what he does, and something about what he does in his spare time.

I can now click on the file marked 'spare time,' and in there, I can tell you a little bit about his hobbies. He likes music, he likes playing golf, and he likes watching TV. And the point about that Microsoft file analogy is you can store an enormous amount of information in this sort of file tree, or so rather than try to remember twenty, thirty different things, you need to remember, you've got them tucked away in different files.

And the great benefit of that, certainly if you're doing presentations as well, is you can miss out files if you want to. So if you imagine my three key points that I want to put across are the names of the three people I'm introducing, if I've got enough time, and I want to, and I think it's necessary, I can go into a lot of detail on one of them. But if I don't want to, I can skip out a few files.

So what I'm doing is I'm taking the pressure off myself rather than forcing myself to remember too many facts and too many details. I know what my key facts are, my key details. There's only three of them.

But underneath each of those, I've got threes within threes within threes, and in my mind, I can store an enormous amount of information flexibly. So if you want to improve your memory, then use that visual part of your memory. Use files, imagine files, open them, close them, and that way, you can store an enormous amount of information. .