An Introduction to Our Brain



Our brain is like a library and at that well stocked library but alas the arrangement within is not systematic. So if we wish to find any information from this library, what do we do? Well, we simply apply the process of hit and run, In this way we may either find the information or lose it. This is because the information was not systematically stocked. Memory techniques are actually ways of properly cataloging the brain, so that learning becomes fast, retention becomes perfect and recollection becomes optimum.

However it is necessary to know about our brain if we are aiming at achieving a perfect memory. Primarily our brain is divided into two parts – the left or logical brain that is associated with activities like calculation, repetition etc. and the right or creative brain that takes care of activities like writing poetry, imagination with colors etc. It is right brain that is more capable and all human evolutions and revolutions have been the work of the right brain and yet ironically hardly 2% of it is ever used by us. Another detail related to the brain is that our brain always learns in terms of pictures. Just as when using a computer stores in its own language similarly, when we feed any data into the brain it always transforms them into pictures and then stores them. So we have no other choice but to improve our use of right brain if we really wish to perfect our memory. We can try some exercises for this.

E.g- Take a glass of water, sit at your table and drop four each at five different places on the table. Now study each patch of water and identify at least five shapes in each. They could look like a car or a star and so on.

Go for a walk to your neighborhood park and pick up anything that comes your way, be it a flower, a broken piece of branch or even a chocolate wrapper, now try to decide 10 different uses that you can put it into other than the obvious. For example we know the obvious that a chocolate wrapper can be used to wrap chocolate, so ignore it. Instead think that it can be used as a bookmark or can be made into a glider and so on.

We should remember that the ultimate goal for us is not to create outstanding abilities but to bring our memory in general to a higher level. The difference between a trained and untrained memory does not lie in remembering words, numerical, appointments or business details but in the ability to remember all things that we need to know in order to conduct our affairs smoothly. In fact our entire knowledge rests on memory. Progress in civilization and culture would have stopped in the absence of memory because every invention rests on the kind of knowledge gained and remembered. So it is high time we understood our memory and trained it to serve our purpose so that we can achieve that goal which we have long dream about.