Gospel Memory Tip #1
“In order to think, we must first speculate with images.”
Aristotle
The older I get, the more difficult it is to memorize things. Actually, that’s not true . . . Since I discovered some memory techniques some years ago; it has become easier to memorize things than ever before. I still forget where I put my glasses, or parked my car at Walmart, but when it comes to memorizing specifics. When I want to remember a shopping list or phone number or more particularly, where to find a specific story in the Bible, well, that’s a cinch.
Aristotle lived 300 years before Christ. He wrote two books on memory. The quote above gives the gist of the key element in memory. Do you remember when computers first hit the market? MS DOS was the main program. What happened? Windows!!!! MS DOS didn’t stand a chance to the visual images that Windows provided. “Click and drag” replaced typing commands.
Unfortunately, most of us still try to use an MS DOS program in our head. Try this simple exercise the next time you park your car at Walmart. First, “speculate with images.” Take note of where your car is in relation to the building. Is it near a door or sign or corner of the building? Imagine something bizarre, such as tying a rope to your car stretching the rope that point, to tie the other end. The funnier, and more bizarre the image, the better you will remember.
For remembering where things are found in the Bible, try this: “speculate with images” that the first four rooms in your house or church are reserved for memory points from the first four books of the New Testament. The first room has a large fluffy Matt, to wipe your feet on. The second room has crayon Mark(s) on all the walls. The third room you must Luke (look) in to find God, and the fourth room is near the John. In these rooms, place a few items from the respective book in a funny creative way. This will not give you “chapter and verse” but it will give you the book.
Have fun!
Gospel Memory Tip #2
“Human beings possess capabilities of mind, literally beyond genius.”
Dr. Barbara Brown, physiologist, developer of biofeedback
Do you get distracted while reading or studying? Do you fall asleep, or your mind wonders? There are several reasons for these things that hinder us from reaching “genius”. There are also several things that we can do to reduce these distractions.
First, God created our mind! He put inside our heads super computers with high-speed modems. I am convinced that part of my problem in the past was the “mouse” . . . (I digress). Anyway, our mind has the “capabilities” but somehow some of us are not plugged in. Here are a few ideas that might jumpstart your brain the next time you sit down to read or study.
A) Try playing Baroque Classical Music softly as in the background. This music allows your mind to shift from beta to alpha rhythm. Children up to the age of about 5, have their mind in alpha rhythm. They absorb information from both analytical and emotional at the same time. (Have you noticed how quickly they learn at that age?) By shifting into alpha rhythm by listening to Baroque Classical Music, we then absorb information in much the same way we did when we were young.
B. Stop reading with your ears and start reading with your eyes. Yes, most of us read with our ears. We hear ourselves pronouncing each word as if we were reading aloud. So even though we are looking with our eyes we are reading only at the speed at which we can speak. At this speed our mind gets bored and drifts or falls asleep. To read with your eyes, practice skimming the page and “looking” for themes and key points, then dipping in now and then to get the gist. You will probably be surprised at your increased comprehension and retention.
C. Choose a few key points as you read that you want to remember. Create funny, nonsensical, action packed images. Involve yourself in the pictures or stories to anchor the points to your memory.
Second, God promised that the Holy Spirit would bring things to our remembrance that we have studied. ” . . . He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” John 14:26.
“The body can’t tell the difference between real and vividly imagined”
Maxwell Mulch, Professor of Cybernetics
Gospel Memory Tip #3
“There are enormous benefits to memorizing Bible verses. It will help you resist temptation, make wise decisions, reduce stress, build confidence, offer good advice, and share your faith with others”
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life, p.189
I am amazed at the knowledge of Scripture that some members in my churches have. On the other hand, I am also amazed at the lack of knowledge of some others in my congregations. If you experience the same thing in your church, you may want to do a Gospel Memory Seminar. It is very easy to teach.
One lady in Tennessee ordered the course and taught it as a mid-week service. She had a group that stuck with it through the entire New Testament. A man in Illinois ordered the course and taught it to the youth group that he leads in his church. I have taught it to hundreds of people over the years, and in many cases, people have told me that this course was a major motivator for them to begin reading the Bible.
This course is neither doctrinal nor denominational. It simply teaches a quick, fun and easy way to remember where to find familiar Bible stories. Sometimes I wonder if this is one of the greatest needs of our church. Rick Warren’s quote says it well. Bible memory affects our life in many ways, including building our confidence to share with others.
Some memory courses encourage carrying flash cards. This works for some. However, after a few dozen flash cards, most people forget the old ones while they are learning the new. Also your pockets can carry only so many cards at a time. If you use the “Gospel Memory Course” techniques you don’t need cards and you can review hundreds of memory points each day by simply drawing from your inner memory.
There are 89 chapters in the Gospels and a total of 260 chapters in the New Testament. As you work through the course you will learn the location of at least one familiar story or text from each chapter, and find that walking through the New Testament in your mind is easy.
Gospel Memory Tip #4
There are some problems that most of us face with memory that can be alleviated with a few tricks. Health and stress can play a big part of our ability or hindrance to memorize.
Stress can come on suddenly. You are relaxed, and comfortable, talking with a friend about the weather, when suddenly the Bible comes up. You know Bible stories that will fit in with the conversation, and you even know where they are located, but suddenly your mind goes blank. (Does that happen to anyone else, or does it only happen to me?)
Winnie the Pooh says “Think, think – – think, think, think, think, think.” When you try to “think”, you sabotage memory. In Gospel Memory Tip #1 I shared a quote from Aristotle: “In order to think, we must first speculate with images”. When you draw a blank, stop thinking, and start being creative with images. With Gospel Memory your right brain is being trained to retrieve memory. Memory is a right brain function. Thinking is left-brain. Stress is alleviated when we are not trying to be profound, but simply start being creative.
As for health, brain cells use glucose for fuel. So the best way to increase quick brainpower is by eating carbohydrates. However, in the long run you want to feed your brain with plenty of low to moderate carbs, protein and a little fat to slow digestion and absorption.
Be careful how much food you eat. Large meals direct all your body’s resources around your stomach, rather than your brain. High fat meals do the same. Instead, eat small, nutritious meals throughout the day. Some health guru’s suggest five to six meals each day with an average of 300 to 600 calories each made up mostly of protein and unrefined, complex carbohydrates.
Eat plenty of fish that is rich in omega-3 fatty acids. Make water a major part of your daily life and don’t skip breakfast.
Dehydration is a major reason for decreased ability in problems solving, short-term memory and hand-eye coordination. The most dependable gauge is the color of your urine. If you are adequately hydrated it should be pale yellow or almost clear (unless you are taking a vitamin B supplement, which causes it to be bright yellow). If you are dehydrated, your urine will be dark yellow and have a strong odor.
You should drink at least 9 to 11 eight-ounce glasses of fluid and half of them should be good quality water. (These facts were taken from “The Powerfood Nutrition Plan” by Susan M. Kleiner and Jeff O’Connell.) Exercise is also important for your memory. Aerobic exercise not only improves your body but also your mind.
Proper diet and exercise, along with good memory techniques, will enable you to develop a Bible memory that will make witnessing easy, and revive your Bible study.
Gospel Memory Tip #5
“Imagination is more important that knowledge”
Albert Einstein
What good is knowledge if you have no imagination to use it? Jesus told parables that at times took a great deal of imagination. I consider myself to have a broad imagination base, but I must admit I often depend on sermon illustrations that I glean from others. Illustrations are remembered better than raw information and knowledge. Therefore we search for illustrations that best teaches the knowledge we want to instill.
The current word for imagination might well be “innovation”. When you want to remember something, when you want to commit to memory a bit of “knowledge”, it is important to be innovative – – use some imagination. Be creative, be exaggerative, and be extreme.
Do you ever forget where you laid your car keys? Did you say “always”? Left brain intellectuals, who organize everything, have a special hook inside the door where they always hang their keys. –That’s a nice way to identify an obsessive-compulsive J
Right-brained, creative (AKA lazy, disorganized) people – like me, use their imagination. Try this the next time you lay down your keys. Imagine that as you lay them down, they explode. If you put them on the end table, imagine that you blow the table to “kingdom come”. Yes, it might be easier to buy a key hook and hang it on the wall next to the door, but it is not near as fun.
Do you go grocery shopping and forget half of what you went for? Worse yet, do you make a list and leave it on the kitchen counter? Maybe I am revealing far more personal shortcomings than necessary?
Try this the next time you go shopping. Don’t make a list; you’ll probably forget it anyway. Better yet, memorize what you need; you always have your head with you. Right . . . ? Use these number pictures to make a list. Here is an example;
Shopping list: Number Pictures
Bread 1=Tree. . . the number 1 looks like a tree trunk
Milk 2=Light Switch. . . a switch has 2 ways
Honey 3=Stool. . . a stool has 3 legs
Cereal 4=Car. . . . a car has 4 wheels
Tomatoes 5=Glove. . . . a glove has 5 fingers
Toothpaste 6=Gun. . . . .a six shooter
Sugar 7=Dice. . . . lucky number seven.
Shampoo 8=Skate. . . skate in a figure eight. 8 wheels
Cat food 9=Cat. . . . a cat has nine lives
Imagine that in your kitchen is a TREE that grows bread. When you turn on the LIGHT SWITCH you get sprayed in the eye with milk. You sit down on your kitchen STOOL and get stuck because someone spilled honey on it. You get in your CAR to go shopping and there is “snap-crackle and pop”, “Tony the tiger,” and the “Honeynut Cheerio Bee”; cereal superstars, sitting in the front seat. You have to put on your GLOVES to remove the rotten tomato from the driver’s seat. If you could find the character who put it there you would shoot them with a GUN full of toothpaste. Hanging on your rearview mirror is a pair of DICE made of sugar cubes, so you take one for as snack. Finally you put on a pair of ROLLER SKATES to hurry to the shampoo isle before the last bottle is sold, so that you can give your CAT a bath before you feed it and let it go to sleep.
Gospel Memory Tip #6
Long-term memory is stored in the brain region known as the cerebral cortex, the outer layer that houses a thicket of 10 billion vine-like nerve cells which communicate by relaying chemical and electrical impulses. Newly formed memory may involve thousands of nerves, spanning the entire cortex. If it doesn’t get used, it will fade quickly, but if it is used repeatedly it will become more and more imbedded into the tissue.
Nestled deep in the center of the brain is the hippocampus, a small, two-winged structure that works like the keyboard on your computer. The hippocampus serves as a switching station for the neurons out in the cortex. As the neurons relay sensory information to it, the hippocampus determines whether to form a durable network or to allow the information to vanish.
The verdict is determined on two questions. First, does the information have an emotional significance, and second, is it related to things already known?
“Perfect retention may sound like a godsend, but when the hippocampus gets overly permissive, the results can be devastating. Neurologists sometimes encounter people with superhuman memories. These savants can recite colossal strings of facts, words and numbers. But most are incapable of abstract thought. Lacking a filter on their experiences, they’re powerless to make sense of it.” Newsweek, June 15, 1998 p 51
Repeating newly memorized information 3 to 12 times in the first 72 hours help anchor it into your long-term memory. For information such as shopping lists and material that is not needed in the future, it simply fades in time while the number pictures remain because they have been repeated often and have formed a durable network in the brain.
“Use sets retentiveness.”
Harry Lorayne, author of “The Memory Book”
As the two quotes above suggests, “perfect retention” is neither necessary nor even desired. There are some things that are just not as important to as others are. We must decide for ourselves whether we wish to click “save” or “delete”.
“The story is told that the great scientist Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein’s reply was. ‘I don’t know. Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?’ Einstein taught us a big lesson. He felt it is more important to use your mind to think than to use it as a warehouse for facts”.
The Magic of Thinking Big, David J. Schwartz p.38
Gospel Memory Tip #7
As noted in an earlier Gospel Memory Tip, memory requires using a bit if imagination. The more often you form conscience visual images the easier it will become because you will be improving your imagination as you improve your memory. As Aristotle explains in De anima:
“The perceptions brought in by the five senses are first treated or worked upon by the faculty of imagination, and it is the images so formed which become the material of the intellectual faculty. Imagination is the intermediary between perception and thought. It is the image-making part of the mind that makes the work of the higher processes of thought possible. Hence the mind never thinks without a mental picture. No one could ever learn or understand anything, if he had not the faculty of perception; even when he thinks speculatively, he must have some mental picture with which to think.”
Aristotle went on to say that all men can think because “it is possible to put things before our eyes, the way those who invent trained-memory techniques teach us to construct images.”
I guess it is safe to say that The Gospel Memory Course doesn’t “invent” anything new in terms of memory but uses age-old techniques that have been proven over time.
Gospel Memory Tip #8
Savant (s vänt), n.. pl. savants (sa vänts), a man of learning. [t. F, n. use of (former) ppr.. of savior, g. L. sapere be wise].
“When J. Langdon Down first described savant syndrome in 1887, coining its name and noting its association with astounding powers of memory, he cited a patient who could recite Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire verbatim. Since then, in almost all cases, savant memory has been linked to a specific domain, such as music, art or mathematics. But phenomenal memory is itself the skill in a 54-year-old man named Kim Peek. His friends call him ‘Kim-puter'”.
Inside the mind of a Savant, Darold Treffert & Daniel Christensen, Scientific American. Dec. 2005
Kim knows all the zip codes in the U.S., together with the television stations serving these locales. Among his interests are American history, sports, movies, geography, space programs, actors and actresses, the Bible, church history, literature, Shakespeare and classical music.
If you have “savant syndrome” the kind of memory that Kim Peek has, you probably don’t need the techniques from “The Gospel Memory Course ©”. But if you are like me, you need any edge you can find, to help remember things. Nevertheless, understanding the savant’s mind can give us ideas on how memory works, and it is amazing how savants use the memory techniques taught here naturally.
“Overview/Peek’s Peaks
1. Great powers of memory run through every known manifestation of savant skill. In the case of Kim Peek, memory itself is the skill.
2. Kim’s brain exhibits many abnormalities, including an absent corpus callosum. The role of that particular abnormality in Kim’s case remains to be explained, but it evokes a question raised by the skills of all savants: Does brain damage stimulate compensatory development in some other area of the brain, or does it simply allow otherwise latent abilities to emerge.
3. Kim’s rote learning later developed into a form of associative thinking, with clear evidence of creativity. His success then helped him engage the wider world. The authors conclude that savant skills should never be dismissed but should be cultivated for the patient’s intellectual and social development.” Ibid. 110
Gospel Memory Tip #9
In the movie “Rain Man” Raymond Babbitt, is an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman. The movie is fictional and not all, autistic people are savants. Rain Man is a movie about two conditions – autism and Savant Syndrome. Only one in ten autistic persons have savant abilities.
One of the true savants that Dustin Hoffman got to know well was Joseph Sullivan who lives in Huntington, West Virginia. Joseph is fascinated with numbers. Like other mathematical savants, numbers are his friends. The strength of his memory was demonstrated when he was given a 36-number grid to study for two minutes; he was able to then recall all 36 numbers correctly as they appeared in that grid in only 43 seconds.
You might like to try this yourself to see how you do. Study the grid for as long as you like, then remove it and write the figures on another sheet of paper from memory:
624849
732503
489343
135894
572842
247903
How did you do? If you remembered one of the six lines of numbers you are about average. If you remembered two or more lines of numbers you are above average. If you want to remember all six lines of numbers (in only two minutes) it is easy . . . if you use the memory techniques taught in The Gospel Memory Course.
First, choose six locations to remember the information. Next, make a funny story using the picture numbers for each line. If you are able to make a story in only 20 seconds using the numbers in each line, you will be able to memorize the grid in only two minutes.
Example: 624849 could be located in your kitchen. Go into the kitchen with a GUN (6). Shoot the LIGHT SWITCH (2). The bullet ricochets and hits your CAR (4). You put on your SKATES (8) and skate to your CAR (4), and find your CAT (9) has had kittens on the front seat.
Gospel Memory Tip #10
“If you really want to improve your life, memorizing Scripture may be the most important habit you can begin.”
Rick Warren, Purpose Driven Life p. 13
“The main dinner course was just being served in the massive, ancient Greek hall when the expansive ceiling collapsed, crushing every one of the many guests in their seats. Not a single attendee survived, except for the poet Simonides, who had left the room just before the tragedy. In the days that followed, workers who lifted the heavy rubble found that the victims were so horribly disfigured that they were impossible to identify. But Simonides was able to help. By mentally walking alongside the long table, he found he could reconstruct which guest had been sitting in which place. Based on where the bodies lay, he named each one of the deceased.”
“Four hundred years later Roman rhetorician Cicero related Simonides’ story in one of his instructional books on learning and memory. Whether the diners’ deaths actually happened is not clear, but according to legend, Cicero wrote, the ceiling collapse motivated Simonides to develop a visual memory technique that still prevailed in Cicero’s day, used widely by the Roman Empire’s politicians and lawyers. These professionals were looked down on if they could not memorize the long speeches they often had to give; it was important for them to recite complex strains of an argument in moving oration….”
Scientific American Mind June 2005
Yes it is true. I don’t mean the story. I mean, yes you can use the techniques in The Gospel Memory Course to remember names. When you are trying to share the Gospel with someone it helps to remember his or her name. Quite often I find myself talking to new people. It might be a store clerk, a new neighbor, or a lead that I got from someone at church. I have found that if I use their name in conversation they respect me more and are interested in what I have to say.
I once went a friend during Christmas vacation. When I arrived I discovered that there were quite a few people of whom I had ever met. I was introduced to each one, a total of 20 people. Since I were spending the night, when the party was over we said goodbye to those who left, and you should have seen their surprise when I called each one by name as they shook my hand since most of them had forgotten my name hours ago. How did I do it?
It is actually easier than you might think. It is the same principle that you have been using thus far with the memory tips. Imagination! First, when you meet a new person for the first time, ask yourself what characteristic about them stands out the most. This is what you will attach their name to. I call it the imaginary nametag. Since the memory technique includes using “imagination” in a funny, silly, goofy fashion, you may not always want to reveal to someone how you remember their name. The first thing you might notice about a person may be their nose or hair(or lack thereof). It might be their glasses or ears, or eyes. Keep in mind that familiar names can be forgotten just as easy as unique ones. A common mistake is to think, “Oh his name is Bob, and I’ll remember that.” Five minutes later you are thinking, “is his name Bob, or Bill?”
Let’s say that before you are introduced to Bob you notice his funny round wire-rimmed glasses, and his receding hairline. A picture that I use for the name Bob is a quail, or otherwise known as a “Bob-white” because of their call. When you are introduced and discover his name, you might make a funny picture in your mind of a Bob-white quail sitting on Bob’s wire-rimmed glasses pulling out what hair Bob has left.
Beside Bob is his brother. He is dressed in a nice suit that looks very expensive. When you are introduced to him you discover his name is Bill. For the name Bill, I usually imagine a picture using dollar bills. You might imagine that dollar bills are sticking out of every pocket of Bill’s suit. When Bill smiles you see little pictures of George Washington on his teeth. You try to pick pocket Bill but you get caught.
Now when you see Bob or Bill you might chuckle a little to yourself, but you remember their names. When it comes to witnessing, we want to introduce people to Jesus. How nice it is to know a person’s name when you are the one doing the introduction.
A good exercise it to watch people at the mall for example, and see if you can pick out one or two things about each one that is noticeable and something that you can attach a name to. Practice learning the names of cashiers who wear real nametags. Attach their name to their imaginary nametag so that you will remember them in any other situation.
Remember, introduce people to Jesus, and have fun.
The Gospel Memory Course 