Remember Mr. Spock, the Vulcan science officer, from the old Star Trek series?

Played by Leonard Nimoy, and wearing the characteristic pointed ears and blue shirt, he was from planet Vulcan, from a human-like race of space aliens who valued logic over everything. Being supremely logical and able to control their emotions had also lead the Vulcans to develop their minds into levels far superior to those of a normal human.

Of course, Mr. Spock and planet Vulcan does not exist in reality. But the whole idea of a logical, emotion-suppressing, calm, person was indeed created by a real human - Gene Roddenberry, to be exact. Even though Mr. Spock is fiction, there are things we can learn from his fictional race of space aliens.

What Makes Spock Tick?

One thing is the striving towards logic and reason - the scientific mindset. Using the faculties of the mind to pierce through that which is false, fantasy, fancy and otherwise wrong or illusionary.

Another thing is the idea of a person who can learn and utilize different techniques to more efficiently use the capabilities of the brains and the mind. Vulcans are not magically born better than most humans, they must explicitly train their minds to become superior and to achieve their full potential.

We do not know the Vulcan techniques in detail, and even if we did, it would not help us as those techniques are by necessity completely fictional. Fortunately, there are various techniques also in here, in this non-fictional world of ours.

These techniques can be used by anyone to improve the way their mind and their brain works. It is possible to learn and to use such techniques in everyday life, at work, and at hobbies - some even while you sleep. Although learning will take some time, there are concrete benefits to be obtained.

Techniques to Improve Your Memory

For instance, to improve memory there are techniques such as the Loci (”locations”) method and the Link + Story mnemonic. These are quite powerful and can offer clear gains in memory recall even after short practice time.

You can read more details from Mind Modifications, about the Loci system and
the Link and Story mnemonics, but I shall also describe these techniques in a nutshell next.

The Loci Method

In the Loci method, you visualize a house familiar to you. As you walk through the (well-known) rooms of the house, you will visualize placing items to be remembered into these rooms; either into the rooms as in on the floor, or by utilizing the usual furniture within these rooms, e.g. a clothes cupboard, a box, etc.

The Loci method works by chaining together something which you know really well (the house and its rooms) with new unexpected things (to make things more memorable). For example, to remember a shopping list, place the first item near the outer door, the next one to the logically next room, and so on. The more memorable you can make the visualizations the better. Absurd visualizations help a lot, e.g. floating and flying eggs in the kitchen to remember buying some eggs for cooking.

The Link and Story Mnemonics

The Link mnemonic helps you remember chains of items (e.g. a checklist) - it works by chaining together pairs in the list to be remembered. For example, if you want to remember “elephant”, “shoe” and “chaos”, you could imagine an elephant making shoes, then a whirlwind of shoes being spread by a chaotic tornado. To recall this list you start from “elephant” and get the “shoes”, from the “shoes” you would get “chaos”. Again, absurd and vivid visualization will help a lot in recall. The Story mnemonic is like Link mnemonic, but you create a fluid story around the paired items by adding descriptive content, as if telling a story.

The common thing all of these techniques, and remembering in general is the following trick: it’s not so much recall that you need to enhance, it’s actually the process of encoding the memory when learning something. When the encoding is proper, recall becomes much easier - thus you remember more things more easily.

Practice Makes Perfect

Note: it is not reasonable to assume that just by reading the article or through a single half-hearted attempt you will magically gain something permanent. No, that is not the case - once you’ve understood how the technique works, it is up to you to put that technique into practice. So do bookmark mindmodifications.com and start practicing!


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