The self-made millionaires in my Rich Habits Study used various strategies to increase retention of facts and figures they deemed critical to their goals and dreams.
I’ve tried several of those strategies, but the one I found to be the easiest and best at improving my memory was one that Abraham Lincoln used.
Abraham Lincoln was considered one of the most electric speakers of his day and many of his speeches have gone down in history as among the best of any president.
Lincoln, wrote almost all of his own speeches even as president, an incredible accomplishment considering he was embroiled in a Civil War that occupied most of his waking hours. One of the reasons Lincoln was such a prolific speaker has to do with a habit he formed long before he became president. Lincoln, in his early years, formed the habit of writing down anything he wanted to commit to memory, three times.
The study of the brain (neuroscience) has advanced more in the last twenty years than is all previous years. One of the more recent discoveries in memory formation found that writing something down three times, doubled your memory.
Writing down anything you want to remember three times, as Lincoln did, activates not one, but two independent brain processes:
#1 The Memory Loop Process
During REM sleep, the cortex and hippocampus engage in offline memory loop processing. This memory loop replays, thousands of times while we sleep, what we’ve learned the previous day.
#2 The Motor Memory Process
When you write something down, over and over again, the cerebellum records it as motor memory and releases that information whenever it is needed.
So, writing something down actually engages two separate brain sections, doubling your memory.
Abraham Lincoln intuitively stumbled upon this neurological phenomenon many years before the memory looping and motor memory processes were even on the neurological radar.
Writing down things he wanted to remember, three times, was central to Lincoln’s success in life.
If you struggle at all with remembering important facts, remembering important names or remembering birthdays of your Rich Relationships, writing that information down three times will double your ability to remember that information.
Improving your memory simply makes you better at what you do and makes success a little bit easier.
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About Thomas C. Corley
Great tip. Thank you.