CityView Magazine

Your Health The second in a two-part series on memory Dr. Lenny Salzberg Memory man sights and sounds, even distant childhood scenes, while others slip away? I t’s a subject that has stumped thinkers since Plato: memory. How do mere clumps of tissue hold on to certain experiences, SEA stands for senses, emotions Scott Hagwood may not have all the answers to the mysteries of the brain, but the Fayetteville man is a four-time National Memory Champion. I first met Hagwood at a conference he presented on how we remember and why we forget. Hagwood has a busy career as an author, speaker and memory expert, but he took the time to talk about a few memory tips. “You have to SEA to see,” he says. 54|Special Issue • 2009 and action. If you want to remember something well, encode it well. Use your senses – see it, feel it, touch it, taste it, smell it, hear it. And if you can’t actually do these things, visualize yourself doing them. Next, engage your emotions. Do you remember the first time you heard your newborn baby cry? Do you remember what you were doing on Sept. 11, 2001? When something has an emotional component, we can recall it more easily. Finally, include action in your mental imagery. If you were trying to remember the word flag, you would remember it better if you could feel the fabric of the American flag, see it waving in the wind, hear it whipping back and forth. If you pictured the flag being handed to your mother at your father’s funeral, this would give you both emotions and action. You are unlikely to forget flag anytime soon. But what about the more mundane – ever had trouble remembering a simple grocery list? Use your unlimited visual memory. We each possess unlimited space in our brains for images, and a technique known as the Roman Room takes advantage of this fact. First, you need to prepare a room in your mind. To do this, imagine a room that is

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