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The Myth of Average Memory, along with the Western Approach to education, has left me feeling pretty pissed off.

Western Approach to Education

After going to 18 years of school in the public education system in Florida, I feel like a know a bit of how it feels to be left in the dark.
Wait, hear me out – I performed pretty well in school, went to an International Baccalaureate Middle School and High School, and passed about 13 AP Exams. By credentials should matter to the topic of this post, however.
What I am going to write about, if you haven’t heard about new approaches to memory, may be interesting.
Let’s start with my French Class. I’ve have taken French for 7 years – 3 in middle school, and 4 in high school, and yet, I still barely know how to speak or write fluently. You could blame me, (which you have a right to as well because I did not study as well as I should have in French class), but I will be giving you another boogeyman to blame.
Our education system throws tons of books, facts, formulas, dates, and assignments at us with such rapid pace that only the most studious children can get up top. The ones that stay up all night cramming for an exam, or the valedictorian that took a class in basket weaving. However, the “normal” or average children, either just barely skim by, or are doing just alright enough to not catch the guidance counselors door.
I would say I am an average student, despite the number of AP exams I’ve taken. Especially when it comes to memory, I believed my memory was only amazing at remembering experiences, and not dates, facts, and most certainly not French verb conjugations.
All that changed this summer.

What American Schools don’t teach

Like I said above, schools entertain you with a barrage of information, but they never once tell you how to memorize it.
Oh sure, you’ll tell me – Reading the “7 habits of highly effective teens” will help you, stop whining and put in the effort.
Oh sure – just rereading the passage until it is burnt into your mind will surely help you get an A on that assignment.Oh sure – Staying up late with a few of your Friends to cram for the exam tomorrow will help you. You know, until you are so tired you black out, and after the exam you forget everything.
You’ve heard it times and times before – schools are factories of burn, test, rinse, repeat – they don’t make you think critically, and they just test you on memorization.However, I disagree with the first point – IB, and most of the classes I took (history, economics, and other) really did make you think critically of the world, as long as you didn’t struggle to memorize the concepts.
And here is the crossroads we meet. If the dominant complaint about western education is false, then what am I here to complain about exactly?

The Memory Problem

Schools do throw a lot of information at you. If you’ve been through public school, or at least the IB program, then you know that what I am saying is true.
However, the thing that western education never teaches you to do – is how to memorize. Like above, it usually reduces to reading the “7 habits of highly effective teens”, which is really a book for motivation and study skills, not memorization – and when western education does concern its self with memory, it is usually surface level mnemonics such as “King Henry died by drinking chocolate milk” to remember the metric prefixes.
What is truly interesting then, is how western education, and teachers themselves, push of the exploration of memory. In High school, My History teacher had us memorize the dates of important events during the cold war, and a quiz thereafter. Obviously, the usual scrabble emerged – in the class before history, economics, in this case, we all crowded into a party and read of the dates and quizzed each other like it was doing us any good. Now, of course, some people have better natural memories than others, but some do not. I scraped by with a 70% on the cold war quiz, while my friend received a 90%.
I will never forget the look on his face when I told him I got a 70. His face contoured into a disgusting expression, one where I’m sure in the deep recess of his mind, was the image of a troglodyte or some other unholy creature. “It’s just memorization” he spoke with a bombastic tone that paved my hatred for anyone who was able to memorize dates and facts easily.
In the same case, and like I said, even more interestingly, my history teacher was quizzed by the students, and he got every date right. “See, it’s not impossible,” he said, laughing. “You just have to study”.
Herein lies the problem – How could my friend memorize dates without effort? Is the natural gap between people’s memories so large that I was actually an unholy creature? Or was there more to memory than my teachers and stuffy educational apparatus were willing to tell me?
This question, and my general desire to improve my memory lead me to a fascinating world unknown to modern man.

Finding the Course

Fast forward to college, and after my first year (Fall and Spring semester), I took one summer term. After reading my statistics textbook and understanding it 100%, then forgetting the equations mid-Exam, I followed my “sub par” memory skills back throughout my life. I wanted to improve but I didn’t know where to start.
Since I was learning about the Arduino from Udemy, after logging in, I was prompted with these 10$ course deals. I saw a course dubbed: “Become a SuperLearner V2: Learn Speed Reading & Boost Memory”, which immediately caught my eye.
Honestly, the title made it sound a bit gimmicky, but the reviews very glowing and the description was enticing. I purchased it, and although I haven’t finished it at the time of writing this article, I couldn’t hold my thoughts in any longer, and I had to write this blog post.
This course leads me to a fascinating world unknown to modern man.

The Modern Western World vs. The Old one

The Course, which I highly recommend, firstly made me rethink my misconceptions of our ancestors.
The story that “shook” me was about Simonides, a poet, who, after just finishing his speech, walked out of the banquet hall. As soon as he walked out, the hall crumbled and fell apart, crushing everyone that was inside, beyond repair. It is said that the memory technique, “The Memory Palace”, or method of loci, was born here. Accordingly, Simonides was able to close his eyes, and envision where each person was sitting before the collapse, and he could point out to the distressed loved ones exactly where their family member was in the ruins.
This technique is one that I have only heard extremely briefly when I was a kid, and I thought nothing of it. In fact, whatever sliver of information I knew about memory palaces, I thought it was fake and some sort of charlatan act. It was only until I started putting memory palaces into use, was I able to see just how real they actually were.
The point of the technique is to imagine a place, be it a street you’ve lived on, your home, or even your room, and place images of things you are trying to remember at different locations in that place. Since our brains work well with visual memory and not so well with other types, it will be easier to recall everything you’ve stored into your memory palace.
The title of this section and all the readings and videos I’ve watched on memory techniques have really changed my conceptions of the past. Now, and it’s not just me, we would like to think that we are better than our ancestors ever were because we have computers and electricity, progressive values, and we’re not racist (yeah, okay) anymore.
Taking this course almost completely destroyed this notion. Yes, of course, our ancestors were racist and didn’t have progressive values, but they were not stupid, which is the default adjective associated with the first two points, in modern society.
In fact, the old west had many stories (that were true) of people who had memorized entire books and entire speeches. There was a story of a person who could recite a book from memory – backward. What we like to think we have a monopoly on today – working out the body and mind – is in fact trumped by ancient times. They viewed having a great memory as  “good for the soul”, as well as having a healthy body – how could you understand the philosophy and its implications if you did not commit these books to memory?
These facts truly blew my mind, and It really made me appreciate humanity more. Now, I would take these old techniques and bring them back with me to today.

Putting it into Practice

I had learned these techniques after summer school had ended, so I do not have “concrete” evidence that these techniques work in a school environment. However, I do have real stories that blew my expectations after a few weeks.
Firstly, I actually didn’t try the memory palace, because I hadn’t gotten that far in the course yet. What I did do, however, is transform images, or words, into raunchy, disgusting, hilarious, unbelievable scenes.
For instance, when I was doing this memory test located here, when I got to Level 5 or higher, I would make an unbelievable story out of the images – turning it from 2D to 3D, and from 3D to movement and life. I would imagine the guy from the begging of “Get Out” with that straw hat on, wearing those white shoes and missing his New York hat, while he and his mistress threw scissors at a DVD, which snagged in the DVD’s center, thereby passing through a Chinese lantern, igniting it, which would require it to be put out with a watering can, which a black doggy, a brown cat, and a yellow duck would drink from after they had eaten an orange, and a pineapple, because they were tired of playing baseball and basketball in Canada. (Canada reminded me of the green leaf).
This exercise was easier for me to do after a few days because I didn’t feel such a Resistance to it as I did for memory palaces. Memory palaces, every since I heard about them, seem like a gimmick. But this real memory test, helped me get from Lvl. 1 to Lvl. Max without failing once, after just a few days.
After That exercise, I would train with memorizing numbers on a screen – which I will not describe here, as this post is getting long. However, I do recommend looking up the technique I used to remember more than 5-7 numbers: Chunking.
Now the best technique, The Memory Palace, is what provided me the incentive to write this post. While I mostly have been using it for practice with already instructed construction – i.e, The Memory Palace in Joshua Foer’s Book: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, I still remember the full grocery list, albeit scattered all around my house.
Since I am still learning, what I use memory palaces for, right now, is to store my pages in books since I do not have a bookmark, and I absolutely abhor bending the corner of the page. It may seem like a lackluster application for such a profound technique, but I am working on it.
For example, when I was washing my clothes last night at the laundromat, and I had to close my book, I put the page I was last on inside the washing machine (mentally), so after I removed the clothes and put them in the dryer, I came back, and I tried to remember what page I was on, and I could see the page sitting in the washing machine: “14”. Same thing for at home – I put the page of the book I read on top of another book cover (mentally). I do not put the page inside of the book, for if I close the book, I lose my memory! If I imagine the page on top of another book, I know that the page would never be for the book that the page is on top of, so I immediately know that the page is for another book close by.

Final Thoughts

Though remembering pages seems like any easy feat, all through my life I would remember looking at the page I was on, repeating the number to myself many times, closing the book, and immediately forgetting what page I was just on.The ability to do something that I could never do before, even if it is small as pages, really sold me on the memory palace.
One last thing – the reason the memory palace works is not just because you are using a known place, but because of the vibrant images that you put in those places. I imagined the page and mentally threw it in the washing machine. It wasn’t too interesting, but imagine if you saw someone angrily tear off a page from a book and throw it in with their clothes to wash. Wouldn’t you remember that weird person and what they did?
My true goal is to store mathematical formulas in my room and store philosophical concepts along my street. I am long ways from there, but practice helps.
Returning to Western Education, as I said in the title, I am pissed that now on taught be these techniques.We are taught how to be productive and study “hard”, but that’s the problem!
Why hasn’t anyone taught us, that the key isn’t to study harder, but to memorize easier?
I truly hated French in high school, and I forgot much of what I tried to “memorize”. But now, through this Udemy course, and grit, after I have some down time from College (I’m majoring in Computer engineering, so It will have to be over summer), I will look back at the French language, and over the cold war and see how much I remembered, How I remembered It, and how my new style of memorization can help me.
I’m Jean-Luc Hayes,Thanks for Reading.