Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles ok I'm going to go ahead and start this workshop is called more memory tricks and i know some of you were here last week at the regular memory tricks if you weren't you'll be able to catch on to this i think very quickly anyway but i have so many memory tricks that it's hard to uh... cover them all in one workshop so we're going for two uh... these are the four things that i'm a going to talk to you about today this one is really quick and then we're going to spend a lot of time on these next couple uh... last week for those who were here one thing that you should remember is that um...i taught a couple of math tricks at the beginning of the workshop and that was not designed to teach math it was designed to just show you the power of tricks in knowing shortcut ways to do things and so uh... i'm gonna show you one more math trick and now as just a little warm up this is nothing you need to write down or anything but again it's to show you something about again the power of tricks so if i ask you to do a problem like that nine divided by point two five what you would need to do in order to solve that would be to do this and then this and then you have to move the decimal point over and just do the whole thing if you know the basics of how to do it it's not that hard it just takes a little while to kind of process through but if you know the trick you can do it in about one second without having to do any of this and that is whenever you have a math problem where you have a number divided by point two five that's the exact same as multiplying it by four which is a lot easier than the other so here's your math question for the day what's nine times four thirty-six ok and if you had done all of this and all that and done it... you would have come up with the same answer it would have just taken you are a lot longer and so six divided by point two five would be twenty-four right six times four and the fact that you can do that once you learn this in about one second doesn't mean that you're any smarter then you were when you came in here in math it just means that you know the shortcut again the trick and so with the goal of last week's workshop and this week is to show you some applications of how you can use tricks to make your memory absorb more and do better on tests as a result and that's what these three are going to be all about okay so whether you follow that completely or not doesn't particularly matter for our purposes today but what i wanted to do first in terms of uh... actual teaching has to do with mental pictures and uh... quick uh... recap for those who were not here last week just so that you have an idea of what we're doing i explained last week that one of the best memory tricks you can have is learning how to close your eyes and getting a picture of something in a certain way and then it sticks that kind of glues into your brain and you remember it all of us have imagination all of us can close our eyes and see things but two of the qualities of a good mental picture that i gave last time that you need to be aware of for what we're about to do right now is that if the pictures are really stupid and bizarre you remember them better and so everything i'm about to do with you is gonna seem to be pretty stupid and that usually sounds bad but in this case it's going to be good i'll show you the other one is that you very often have to involve play on words which means rhyming words other words that sound similar to be able to see things in picture form and again i'm gonna show you specifically how to do this now now if you are very tired today i'm extremely nervous about what's going to happen in the next couple of minutes because i'm gonna ask you several times to close your eyes and get a picture of something that i'm describing and i want you to do that i don't want you to sit there and kind of stare at me i want you to close your eyes but then when i'm done you need to open them and so if you're really tired i don't hear snoring anywhere in the room so hopefully we'll be ok with this what i'm gonna teach you is going to actually require no note-taking whatsoever so usually i like people to write down some things that i teach that they find helpful but for the next five minutes or so i don't want you to write anything down it kinda defeats the purpose of this i'm gonna teach you something that i'm going to test you on at the end of the workshop and i think if you do this the right way you're going to be shocked at how easy it is for you to memorize what i'm about to show you without writing it down without doing anything like that at all so again i want you to just uh... follow my direction and when i have you close your eyes i want you to close your eyes and the big thing remember is i don't want you to try to close your eyes and listen and remember what i'm saying because you won't i want you to see the pictures that i'm describing and if you see them clearly you're gonna remember them later okay so here is the strange little teaching here i'm gonna teach you twelve names of streets that are all in the long beach area you'll probably recognize most of these streets three of them are in group a three in b three in c and three in d when i give you a test at the end of the workshop what i'm going to expect you to do is when i give you the name of a street i expect you to know which group it's in and a lot of times when you have many things to learn it's easy to get 'em mixed up and in the wrong groups but if you do this right you're gonna be perfect at the end and sort of surprised again at how well this worked so here's the first uh... picture ok we're gonna end up with several pictures here we're going to use this sound alike word hay okay everybody i think knows what hay looks like whether it's a big bale of hay or like loose hay or straw that's a picture i want you to get and i have a little visual aide here just to kind of make this a little bit even easier for you the first street in group a is this one which is market ok so this is the first part of the first scene again just follow me with this even if it seems weird you'll find in the end it works i want you to close your eyes and i want you to get a picture of the market the supermarket and you're walking down the aisle with your cart shopping but everywhere you look on the left and the right on the floor in front of you there's hay stickin' off the shelves bales of hay in front of you you have to even swerve your cart around so i want you to really see that again don't just listen to the words but try to get that picture in your mind okay now you can open your eyes i'm gonna show you something cuz otherwise you wouldn't get this as you're going down the aisle all these people are there nothing unusual about that except they're not shopping their standing there kind of blocking your way and every person you're looking at has something in front of their face you can't really see their face at all and what they have what they're doing is they're reading magazines while they're standing there in the market go ahead and close your eyes and this is where i want your imagination to work i want you to imagine all these people in front of you standing there reading magazines and i want you to even read the cover of the magazine in other words what magazine is it that they're reading really be specific about it 'cuz that helps so kinda get that picture in your mind okay and then you can open your eyes and what street is that supposed to help you remember well this is one of these weird tricks that actually works it may sound a little bit odd it's for this one magnolia what does that have to do with what i just described well just this part the mag as in magazine if i ask you to close your eyes and get a picture of a magnolia tree could you do that uh... maybe a few of you but i have no idea what that looks like so i can't really get a picture of it but a magazine