The Book of Ashes

Revelations 7:23AM

Monday was Monday, I did a little work, studied a bit and then went and sat my exam in the afternoon. It was all sweet, 57 multi-choice questions and one bottle of coke later and I was buzzing. Note to future self - investigate adrenaline-coke mix, affects on body are most satisfactory. Yeah so I passed, 85% or so with a pass mark of 68% or so. Now I'm half way to being an OCP (Oracle Certified Professional) only two more exams to go. So that was my day. I got home and asked Gerry what the most outrageous thing she would concievably do right now would be. She replied buying a ticket to Auckland and flying up there tomorrow to visit her friend and calling up sick. Not bad. I said I'd dress up in a Hawian shirt and go down the street and ask the first female I saw to marry me. Gerry said she would do the dishes for a year if I did this, but only if they said yes. Well thats pretty safe then isn't it. I would consider it if they didn't have to say yes. Anyway lets instead talk about effective study and what helps and what doesn't...

A Discussion on Effective Means of Memory Retention.

- By Dr Ashley Bryant.

(Well it says Dr on the Fly Buys letters they send me so it must be legit... right?)

Ok so last night I was studying and this morning as well. Sometimes I can read stuff and remember everything and other times I can read it 5 times and not remember a single word of it. What is it that helps you to remember stuff? Ok so repetition is proven to work, if you read it enough times it'll eventually get stuck in your head, the brain will continually reinforce the pathways required to access that bit of information until it will be hard not to know it. The thing is, this is just learning the hard way, you're forcing the brain to learn something and its taking five times as long as it should do. You know your brain is capable of reading something once and remembering it all, word for word. Everybody is capable of this, some people just have the right techniques to do it (whether by accident or on purpose) while others are ignorant of their own abilities. Let me start with examples from today. I was sitting at work, stressing a little, and reading over some study material. It was pages after pages of stuff on the computer screen, not really that riveting and my mind was worrying about the exam. Now I would start reading a paragraph, get halfway through, realise that I didn't have a clue what I'd just read and go back to the start. I did this quite a few times. Why? Because the brain had something else on the mind. You can't learn when you're thinking/worrying about something else. Here my poor brain was, churning over how bad the exam might be and trying to read some text off the screen at the same time. The reading was given secondary priority while most of my resources were devoted to worrying. No wonder I didn't get much from that.

Lesson #1: Clear the mind first, remove all worries and distractive thought, you cannot study effectively with them.

Your concentration should be fully on the material you wish to learn. Any side thoughts that creep in are from higher priority thoughts that are taking away emphasis from the learning. Even if you can't fully clear the mind, at least notice when there are other thoughts there effecting your ability to learn

Part 2 7:38AM

So after I had read through all of this study material (some of it weeks ago) I decided to take a pracise test. I went through and got about 80% but there were a few questions there that I knew I had read about but couldn't remember the correct answers. So I went back through some of the text and while reading I found some of the answers. Because I was looking for them specifically they stood out and made sense the first time round AND I REMEMBERED EVERYTHING ABOUT IT THIS TIME ROUND.

Lesson #2: If you have an interest or need to know something you will remember it much better than if it were some item that has no meaning to you.

I know this to be a fact for me. If I'm reading about black holes giving off a small but measurable temperature or the theory of photon entaglement allowing instant messages to be sent across great distances I remember much better than if I'm learning about the history of the royal family. Ok so this points more to how much of a physics geek I am and not the historian you might have thought if you were to go by my boyish good looks but its true. If you're interested in something you remember it. I remember one of the dumbest people at school having amazing knowledge on guns, he knew everything and picked up anything about the subject. He wasn't really dumb just had his focus or interests in other areas.

Lesson #3: You can't truely learn something unless you are motivated to do so.

This is so true. I know that when people tell me about languages and their history its in one ear and out the other. I just don't care. But the other day I picked up an interest in olden speak due to the movie ""A Knights Tale"" that is coming out soon. This kind of speak is cool and I wanted to find some so I could copy it a little. I ended up reading a number of sites on the internet about where English came from and translations between different versions of it, etc, etc. I was motivated to learn it, because it suddenly had an interest to me and so I learnt it. The single most important aspect of learning is the desire to know that information.

So how does the brain remember things and what aids in this retreival of knowledge? You tend to remember more easily things you've heard before or things that fit into a gap and link up with other facts. If I tell you that when boiling water the bubbles that are created are not the water splitting into its component Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms (as I thought for a while as a kid) under the intense heat but rather another gas - steam. The heated water becomes gasesous at the point of heat causing bubbles of steam to rise to the surface. Now you probably already know this but if you didn't then you shouldn't easily forget this. Its a simple piece of information that fits a gap in your knowledge. Now if I were to give you another piece of knowledge, say that white pigment or gypsum, calcium sulfate, and hydrochloric acid may be produced using sulphuric acid and calcium chloride, then you would probably forget this as soon as you heard it. Why? Because you don't really know any of these things nor can you link them into the rest of your knowledge. They don't affect you, you don't care, you don't remember. Calcuim what

Part 3 8:31AM

Lesson #4: The brain creates links between new information and already existing information. These links then provide a path back to this information. The more links, the more likely you will remember something.

If you go into a room and try and memorise a list of items, then it has been shown that going back to that room can help you remember items on the list. The visual sight of the room brings back memories which are linked to the events of the time, eg the items you were trying to remember. This is why sights and smells and sounds can bring back memories, they are all LINKED together in the brain. Current theory states that trying to remember a list by brute force repetition alone is inefficient. The masters of this technique create stories in their mind, linking all the items together and not just verbally but visually as well, enforcing links in as many different ways as possible. Let me give an example. Say we wish to memorise the list of items, DUCK, CAR, PENCIL, CLOUD, APPLE, DIAMOND, HOSE, FLOWER, BALL, MAT. Now ignore the fact that the list isn't THAT long and just note that this technique can be extended to a longer list. We start by making a story such as this...

The DUCK hopped into his CAR and removed the PENCIL from the glovebox. Just then a CLOUD flew overhead and dropped an APPLE on him which turned into a DIAMOND and set the car alight. Duck quickly turns the HOSE on watering the FLOWERS at the same time and setting a BALL rolling towards his front door MAT. Now we close our eyes and picture this, visually without words. Imagine DUCK maybe wearing his good clothes, opening his CAR door, climbing inside, well probably wadling inside, reaching over for the glovebox, opening it and finding his trusty PENCIL. Just then a CLOUD shoots by overhead and he looks up to see an APPLE fall from it. As it falls it becomes a DIAMOND which smashes through the bonet of the car shooting up a wall of flames. Duck runs out, grabs the garden HOSE and begins to put it out. As it goes out he sees his precious FLOWERS at the side and waters them too. In doing this the water hits a BALL left there which rolls over onto his front door MAT.

If you've done this properly then you should not forget these items so easily. You can shorten the story a bit once you get better at it but its amazing how the mind remembers stories. We must have been told a few since birth or something.

Lesson 5: Chunking. The short term memory can only hold about 7 items on average. Rather than try increase this number why not try to compact more information into each item.

This is true, if I rattle off a list of random numbers, if you're an average person, you'll be able to remember about a list of 7 of them. But what consitutes an item. Say I read out 7 words and you remember them all. In reality you've actually remembered a much larger list of all the letters. Say they're all 5 letter words then thats a list of 35 letters you've remembered that you probably wouldn't remember if the letters were just read out one after another and especially wouldn't remember if they were all mixed up. So chunking is the technique of making a larger item just one item. Heres an example from the text book. This dude wanted to try and increase how many digits he could memorise. He started out at the average of about 7 and practised everyday for a year. He found that he increased a certain amount then leveled off till he overcame some kind of barrier. What was happening was this. He started off remembering single digits. Then after a while started grouping the digits into pairs so that 71 and 63 were each one item to remember. Then after that it became triples with 491 being just one item to remember. He was chunking. By the end of the year he could memorise over 30 digits using this technique

Other 9:23AM

Another known factor that can affect memory retention is intense emotional stress. If you are in a car accident your body may be kicked into over drive in the fear and stess of the situation, adrenaline is pumped into the body in massive doses and your body is alert to its fullest trying to save your life. Due to the excess chemicals in the body you may remember everything. On the other hand you may forget or repress everything. Afterwards the body can't handle it and may go into shock but during this time the brain can become like a silicon chip where memories are burnt in forever, never to be erased. There are known drugs and stimulants to also asist in memory recollection. One thing that is interesting though is the apparent ability of the brain under hypnosis to recall events to a level of detail that one wouldn't have thought possible. The hypnosis is not always reliable, under it people are open to suggestion and very willing to impress. Infact too willing to impress. Quite often they will reconstruct events, sometimes making up bits as they might have happened. This does not negate the fact that a lot of true information has been remembered. I believe that the brain is usually preoccupied with everyday life. It spends a LOT of its processing abilities applying rules to every thought that we have. Hence just to come up with the thought, I might go buy an icecream, the brain has ruled out many other thoughts such as let me steal an icecream, scream for food I'm hungry, I want to scratch myself, I should hit that person, etc, etc (I'm just making these up, don't take them too literally). So the brain is so preoccupied that when it searches for a memory it is only devoting maybe 10% of its current processing to the task and we know that the more you're worried (or focused) on another thought the less time there is devoted to the memory retrieval process. So what is hypnosis? Pretty much its removing the concious mind, that part which is like the operating system on a computer that applies all the rules and allows us to sucessfully work things out in life. We're very gullable when hypnotised, very open to sugestion, we don't apply as many rules as we should but then we can also achieve amazing things. Our body does exactly what its told without questioning, without slowing down the process and we achieve a lot. The sub-concious is what is now operating, kind of like the processor of a computer that carries out assembly language commands, the basic stuff. It looks up memory, tells us to move and when to eat, it doesn't tell us not to cry in front of people or whether what that man is saying is really true or not. Its more lead by emotions. (I'm going from memory and filling in the gaps here so this may not all be 100% correct). Now it must be possible to reach a state, like that of when hypnotised, where the memory recollection functions at its fullest capacity. This will be when the mind is cleared ENTIRELY of all other thoughts and worries. You will have no dialog in your mind like you constantly do, this is higher order thinking, you will just know and feel the thoughts without the sub-vocalising. Then maybe you will have super access to your memory. I believe I accessed something like this when I was hung over and didn't want to think about anything, my mind was clear to stop it hurting and I was almost asleep when I could picture in amazing detail, images of friends from primary school. I just jumped through a whole lot before it broke up. I am going to try some experiments in this area and let you know what I find out. The secret of the memory shall be mine. Well thats about enough out of me for now..

A few tips for the unwary... 9:36AM

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A few tips for the unwary.

Tip #1: Don't get a hot tray out of the pre-warmed oven, place it ontop of the oven and hold up an open bag of potatoe wedges by the end and try to shake some out. The wedges falling out will weigh down the plastic bag which will fall onto the hot tray and melt. The wedges then fall all around the melted plastic which is a real bitch to get rid of.

Tip #2: Don't sing in an elevator unless you are prepared to have others listen to it.

I was singing away to myself a while back and it stopped and the door started to open. Unfortunetly once the door has begun to open everyone on the other side has heard you singing. You can either stop right then and everyone pretends they didn't hear you singing even though they did in an awkward silence (often with the other parties trying to supress a smile or two) or you can continue singing in front of everyone as if its normal and have people stare at you cause you're not fitting in and doing what is expected of you. Did you know you're not meant to sing when wearing a suit? I didn't know that rule but people stare at you if you do.

Luckily my mother taught me not to care. Not a hell of a lot phases her. Once she decided to go to a (younger persons) pub in Palmy. The bouncer stopped her and said ""Sorry, Trousers"" pointing to her trousers. We all know what this is like, you're not dressed up enough so you get denied. My mother is rebelious though and wouldn't stand for that so she says ""What? You're not going to let me in with these trousers?"" the bouncer goes ""No"" and she replies calmly, ""Well then I'll take them off"" and proceeds to unbutton her pants, fully intending to walk into the pub in her undies. The bouncer is shocked and lets says ""Fine, fine, you can go in"" so she does. She is a legend. Just the other year she decided to cycle round the South Island. She started at Picton, went down the West Coast and ended up in Dunedin I think. She just took her time and enjoyed herself. When asked beforehand if she had been training for it she said, ""Yes, I've been eating heaps!"" her biggest worry was loosing weight after cycling for so long. This feat kicks arse over any I have ever done. Just cause she's done it, I'm going to have to do it now. That sucks, its such a hard thing to do. Anyway loose you inhibitions people. I used to have heaps, I used to be so shy and so embarrassed at everything. I'm half way there now and getting better every day. Forget about your worries, who cares what others think of you. Just as long as you like yourself. PS Apologies for writing so much, this is left over energy from the adrenaline-coke mix I had earlier this arvo. It is not bad huh? Also having passed my exam I have no immediate worries, hence the mind is free of all thought to concentrate on these writings. I think they're quite good tonight, albeit quite lengthy. Later aligator..