How To Develop a Photographic Memory

Do you have a really bad memory that cause both annoyance and embarrassment? Have you ever been in the situation where you find yourself at the supermarket or hardware store wondering what you went there to buy? You are not alone in this and you are certainly not useless! Did you know that you can learn techniques of how to develop a photographic memory and here is just one technique that I now use every single day. It has increased my capacity to remember (in particular to remember lists) and made my life just that much easier and less stressful..

This is probably the most common technique used in memory improvement courses, and it's called Visualisation. This is where you take a list of items that you want to remember and associate it with images in a story-like fashion.

For example, say you need to remember a list of items to take for a family day at the beach. To help you remember the list of items you associate each item on the list with an item that you are familiar with on the walk from your bedroom to the front door.

i.e. The first item on your list is the umbrella, imagine yourself in your bedroom just about to walk out to the door, but you can't get through the door because there is a big umbrella that is open and it's blocking the doorway. The next item on the list is sunscreen, imagine that it's smeared all over the door handle, making it slippery and gooey. Next you pass the hall lamp and it's got sausages sticking out the top of. Try and make the images as ridiculous and vivid as possible to make them stand out in your brain.

You keep doing this through the whole list of items, associating each one with an item on your path from the bedroom to the front door.

With practice, this process does become easier and quicker, but you will need to stick at it for a few weeks to get it ingrained into your mind and become a habit.

Just follow the link for more information and resources on how to improve your memory and how to develop a photographic memory.

Brain Exercises When You Want To Improve Memory

Did you know that the human brain is a complex and amazing organism? It's vital for life, yet there is so much that we don't know about it! One thing we do know though, is that if we don't exercise our brain and it's functions, our mental ability and capacity will decrease.

Mostly this is seen in old age (in cases like dementia and Alzheimer's) and when there is a brain injury or trauma; but to a lessor degree it affects every person in some way.

There are now many courses available on improving your memory, developing photographic memory or mental photography, but all of them revolve around using brain exercises to improve brain capacity, function and memory.

For those that just want some simple (i.e. free) and fun exercises, these can be found all over the internet. The benefit of these brain exercises is that as they get you to use new skills (such as in problem solving or lateral thinking) it creates new neural pathways and strengthens existing neural pathways in your brain. This opens up more and more of your brain capacity and part of that brain capacity is the function of memory. So as you improve your brain, of course you improve memory as well.

Online Brain Exercises

There are a number of sites on the internet where you can go and play some fun games. Often these will get harder as you progress through the levels. My two favourite sites are: braingle.com and lumosity.com. Both these sites have games, riddles, tests and trivia that will stretch you AND keep you entertained! I like them because they both have a lot of content in the one place.

But when you're not at a computer you can do puzzles in the newspaper such as sudoku or the crossword; and instead of watching TV all night, you could take half an hour out to read about a topic that is interesting to you.

Whatever brain exercises you choose to do, just the fact that you are exercising (and using) your brain will help you to improve memory and overall brain function. You can find more brain exercises to improve memory here.

Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve It

There's a bit of a buzz at the moment... a new book is out by Dr. Higbee that teaches you some of the tried and true techniques when it comes to improving your memory. His new book is called "Your Memory: How It Works And How To Improve It".

The first point that Dr. Higbee talks about, is I think the perfect one to start with. It's all very well learning all these new skills and tips and techniques for improving your memory, but if you don't know how your memory works in the first place then possibly you won't be able to fully grasp the importance of the steps that you are learning?

How I Was Able To Improve My Memory With Photographic Memory

Photographic memory can be a scary phrase to someone like me who just wants to improve my memory. When people say 'photographic memory' I immediately conjour up images of savant's or highly intelligent humans who leave us gobsmacked with their ability to take in information and then recall it at will.

I've learnt that we are all born with a photographic memory, but as we grow up we lose that ability as we take on and learn new skills in our lives, such as reading.

However, that aside, the point still remains that we do have the ability to firstly just improve our memory and then ultimately develop photographic memory.

There are many courses you can do (which is what I did, I did the mental photography course by Zox Pro) which take your thinking and your brain to a whole new level, or there are simple exercises that you can do to improve your memory.

I started out just wanting to use my brain a bit more, so I would do the sudoku in the newspaper. At first it took me a while to grasp how they work but once my brain got used to the problem solving of sudoku's I was able to do more and more difficult one's. And so I moved on to crosswords.

This is what I needed to do to improve my memory. I could have stayed doing that and kept increasing my skills but I decided to take the plunge and do a full on course that would teach me more sophisticated techniques for improving my memory and developing photographic memory. But that's for another blog post.

Is Mental Photography For You

Mental photography was first coined by a young man called Richard Welsh. Here's a little bit of the story of how is all came about...

Welsh had spent 15 years in the insurance industry and had become very successful in what he did. At the ripe old age of 34, having become quite wealthy from his work, Welsh decided to retire and moved to a remote location to ponder his future.

Welsh decided to buy a speed reading company and it was from here that things really took off. From the course in speed reading that Welsh's company provided, he invested many years and much finance into the research and development of speed reading techniques and brain management. Universities conducted studies and trials on course participants to test Welsh's techniques and the speed and comprehension of the participants.

The results proved to be amazing and it was at this time that Mental Photography became a topic in its own right.

The difference between speed reading and mental photography was that mental photography was an entirely different way of looking at learning. Instead of just teaching how to scan pages quickly, mental photography developed the natural skills that everyone has for photographic memory. Welsh believed that we were all born with the ability of a photographic memory, but as we grew and were taught to read, we lost that ability and began to rely heavily on what we read instead of everything that we see.

The science of mental photography keeps on developing and improving. Instead of having to go to a course for a few days you can now even download these courses from the internet. So what began as simply a speed reading course has progressed and grown into mental photography. You can read more information about mental photography at http://www.squidoo.com/mental-photography-for-you