If you read this blog regularly, you will know I am fascinated by the power of the mind. Like Brown, I had my own revelation at a hypnotist show a few years back. In my case, it was seeing a normal chap being asked to lie across three chairs then told to go as stiff as a plank. He did, which is not the amazing bit. What blew my mind was that the hypnotist then asked a girl to stand on the chaps stomach, and then removed the middle chair! This was no hectic uber strong person he had found, it was a normal guy. This normal guy carried the full weight of this girl and kept his body straight balanced between two chairs his full body length apart. Wow.
We are capable of all sorts of amazing stuff. A lot of what we can't do is because we think we can't.
A lot of Brown's book is about deception and trickery, but he also has some simple 'Mind Tricks' that look at things such as memory. These are just common learning techniques and many are similar to ones I used to learn lists upon lists at university. One technique I hadn't come across, I just tried and in 3 minutes was able to learn 20 completely random words and subsequently able to repeat them, in order, both forwards and backwards. He maintains you can extend this much much further... guess I will read on.
The crux of it is visualizing the words in a way that links them to the subsequent word. The three elements required are:
1) The picture should be vivid
2) The elements of the picture should interact
3) The picture should be unusual
In my study techniques at school, I subjected both friends and family to some pretty unusual and vivid mnemonics. That normally did the trick too, but only really gave me the first letter of the words. Random words are perhaps easier than financial words to 'empathetically visualize' though.
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