Sexual thoughts boost memory, expert claims

02.01.2015 20:11

You may have been brought up to avoid thinking rude thoughts.

But they could actually keep your mind sharp and help you remember facts, one expert claims.

The Grand Master of Memory, Ed Cooke, says that rude and violent thoughts are more memorable and can be linked with other information to help you recall it.

‘Vivid, meaningful experiences are obviously more memorable than boring,’ he told MailOnline.

Mr Cooke explained that sexual thoughts evoke emotion, and guarantee interest.

‘A great rule of thumb for what’s memorable is "whatever would grab your attention as you’re wandering down the street will grab your attention when you’re looking for a memory".

‘Nakedness, things that are taboo, extremely attractive people, things we intrigued by: these will grab your attention in the world, and memories that have these elements will also stick out.’

For example, school boys have long dreamt up dirty rhymes to remember facts for exams, but such a strategy was originally used by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

A poet called Simonides who lived between 556 and 468 BC, first worked out that transforming information into a sequence of memorable images is an effective way of recalling them.

Techniques were used to remember poetry as well as political and legal debates. Cicero, for example, used surprising violent or sexual imagery to make this process even easier.

‘The Rhetorica ad Herennium - a text on rhetoric by an unknown author that was once attributed to Cicero - carries the example of a lawyer forming an image to remind himself to mention the testimony of a witness,’ Mr Cooke explained.

‘To imprint this memory, he imagines a ram’s testicles - in Latin, testiculi suggests testes or witnesses - on the fourth finger of a hand.

‘This revolting, easily imagined image is, as one can imagine, a hundred times more memorable than the word "witness.”’

He said that it’s not just dirty thoughts that help people remember details more easily.

Colour, movement, violence, humour, absurdity, and things which we are personally interested in can all be used as memory prompts.

Mr Cooke first became interested in memory when he was hospitalised for three months and learned memory recall techniques.

He went on to study psychology at the University of Oxford and became a grand master of memory at the age of 23, having recalled 1,000 numbers in an hour and memorised a shuffled deck of cards within two minutes.

‘Memory isn’t mysterious. We’ve evolved to be good at remembering what we’re interested in,’ he said.

Mr Cooke developed a website called Memrise to help people more easily remember facts for exams and language vocabulary. It has two-and-a-half million users and aims to turn learning into a game of the imagination.

He believes that people’s memory can get better with age – not worse.

‘There’s a general tendency for people to think that their memory is in decline but it’s exaggerated, he said.’

'There’s a string cultural narrative to suggest that memory gets worse as you get older. People interpret memory errors due to a failing brain, so distraction is interpreted as forgetting.

(dailymail.co.uk)

ANN.Az

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