and start this workshop is called more memory tricks and i know some of

you were here

last week at the regular memory tricks

if you weren't

you'll be able to catch on to this i think very quickly anyway but i have so

many memory tricks that it's hard to

uh...

cover them all in one workshop so we're going for two uh... these are the four

things that i'm a going to talk to you about today this one is really quick and then

we're going to spend a lot of time on these next couple

uh... last week for those who were here one thing that you should remember

is that um...i taught a couple of math tricks at the beginning of the workshop

and that was not designed to teach math

it was designed to just show you the power of tricks in knowing shortcut

ways to do things

and so uh... i'm gonna show you one more math trick and now as just a little

warm up

this is nothing you need to write down or anything but again it's to show you

something about again the power of tricks

so if i ask you

to do a problem

like that

nine divided by point two five

what you would need to do in order to solve that would be

to do this

and then this and then you have to move the decimal point over and just do the

whole thing

if you know the basics of how to do it it's not that hard it just takes a

little while to kind of process through

but if you know the trick you can do it in about one second

without having to do any of this and that is

whenever you have a math problem where you have a number divided by point two

five

that's the exact same as multiplying it by four

which is a lot easier than the other

so here's your math question for the day what's nine times four

thirty-six ok and if you had done

all of this

and all that and done it... you would have come up with the same answer it would have

just taken you are a lot longer

and so six divided by point two five would be

twenty-four right six times four

and the fact that you can do that once you learn this in about one second

doesn't mean that you're any smarter then you were when you came in here in

math it just means that you know the shortcut again the trick

and so with the goal of last week's workshop and this week

is to show you some applications of how you can use tricks to make your memory

absorb more and do better on tests as a result

and that's what these three are going to be all about okay

so whether you follow that completely or not doesn't particularly matter for our

purposes today but

what i wanted to do first

in terms of uh... actual teaching

has to do with mental pictures and uh... quick uh... recap for those who were not

here last week just so that you have an idea of what we're doing

i explained last week that one of the best memory tricks you can have

is learning how to close your eyes and getting a picture of something in a

certain way and then it

sticks

that kind of glues into your brain and you remember it

all of us have imagination all of us can close our eyes and see things

but two of the qualities of a good mental picture that i gave last time

that you need to be aware of

for what we're about to do right now is that if the pictures are really

stupid and bizarre

you remember them better and so everything i'm about to do with you is

gonna seem to be pretty stupid

and that usually sounds bad but in this case it's going to be good i'll show you

the other one

is that you very often have to involve play on words which means

rhyming words other words that sound similar to be able to see things in

picture form and again i'm gonna show you specifically how to do this now

now if you are very tired today

i'm extremely nervous about what's going to happen in the next couple of minutes

because i'm gonna ask you several times

to close your eyes

and get a picture of something that i'm describing and i want you to do that i

don't want you to sit there and kind of

stare at me i want you to close your eyes

but then when i'm done you need to open them

and so if you're really tired i don't hear snoring anywhere in the room so

hopefully we'll be ok with this

what i'm gonna teach you is going to actually require no note-taking

whatsoever so usually i like people to

write down some things that i teach that they find helpful but for the next

five minutes or so

i don't want you to write

anything down

it kinda defeats the purpose of this

i'm gonna teach you something that i'm going to test you on at the end of the

workshop

and i think if you do this the right way you're going to be shocked at how easy

it is for you to memorize what i'm about to show you without writing it down

without doing anything like that at all so

again i want you to just uh... follow my direction and when i have you close your

eyes

i want you to close your eyes

and the big thing remember is i don't want you to try

to close your eyes and listen and remember what i'm saying

because you won't

i want you to see the pictures that i'm describing and if you see them clearly

you're gonna remember them later okay so here is the strange little teaching

here

i'm gonna teach you twelve names of

streets that are all in the long beach area you'll probably recognize most of

these streets

three of them are in group a

three in b three in c and three in d

when i give you a test at the end of the workshop what i'm going to expect you to

do is when i give you the name of a street

i expect you to know which group it's in

and a lot of times when you have many things to learn it's easy to get 'em mixed

up and in the wrong groups but if you do this right

you're gonna be perfect at the end and sort of surprised again at how well this

worked

so here's the first uh... picture ok we're gonna end up with several pictures

here

we're going to use

this sound alike word hay

okay everybody i think knows what

hay looks like whether it's

a big bale of hay or like loose hay or straw that's a picture i want you to get

and i have a little visual aide here

just to kind of make this a little bit even easier for you

the first street in group a

is

this one

which is

market ok so this is the first part of the first scene again just follow me with

this even if it seems weird

you'll find in the end it works i want you to close your eyes

and i want you to get a picture of

the market the supermarket and you're walking down the aisle with your cart

shopping

but everywhere you look on the left and the right

on the floor in front of you there's hay

stickin' off the shelves

bales of hay in front of you you have to even swerve your cart around

so i want you to really see that again don't just listen to the words but try

to get that picture in your mind

okay now you can open your eyes

i'm gonna show you something cuz otherwise you wouldn't get this

as you're going down the aisle

all these people are there

nothing unusual about that except they're not shopping their standing

there kind of blocking your way and every person you're looking at

has something in front of their face you can't really see their face at all

and what they have what they're doing is they're reading magazines

while they're standing there in the market

go ahead and close your eyes and this is where i want your imagination to work

i want you to imagine all these people in front of you

standing there reading magazines and i want you to even read

the cover of the magazine in other words

what magazine is it that they're reading really be specific about it 'cuz that

helps

so kinda get that picture in your mind

okay and then you can open your eyes and

what street is that supposed to help you remember well this is one of these

weird tricks that actually works it may sound a little bit odd it's for

this one magnolia

what does that have to do with what i just described

well just this part

the mag as in magazine

if i ask you to close your eyes and get a picture of a magnolia tree

could you do that

uh... maybe a few of you but i have no idea what that looks like so i can't

really get a picture of it but a magazine

that i know right so we stick with things that we know

okay and then go ahead and close your eyes one more time for this weird picture

you get very angry with all these people in front of you when you finally say

could you move out of the way i have to go through and shop and i want you to

imagine every person

who has those magazines in front of them lowering the magazine and looking at you

and now you can see 'em but in place of their eyes

picture big red

cherries

right in place of their eyeballs and imagine as you look at each person what

it would look like to see

cherries

stuck there

okay and then you can open your eyes and that street if you can't figure out we're

in trouble

that's a simple one right so this one is easy some were a little bit harder

okay now that picture that weird little picture with the hay in the market

is supposed to connect all those together and we'll see how that goes

later the second category we're going to use the letter or the uh... the

insect the bee everybody knows what a bee looks like but don't picture a bee that

looks like this picture

one that's the same size you are

that would get your attention in a hurry with the big stinger so a five or six

foot bee

coming after you

ok the first street in group b

is this one

and that is park

okay so here is a new

strange picture i want you to get go ahead and close your eyes and hopefully

you're not falling asleep on me at this

close your eyes and imagine yourself standing in the park

in the playground area where the swings and the slides are

and everywhere you walk in the park there's this giant bee that is

trying to buzz by and sting you

got to get that image in your mind

okay and then go ahead and keep your eyes closed

you look around the park

and there is

nobody there you're all alone except for the bee

and you decide

i haven't gone down the slide

since i was a kid and nobody's here to look at me

so i'm gonna try it again and so imagine yourself climbing up the ladder

to the top of the slide

but you're in for a shock when you get to the top of the slide you

see a man sitting up there

you didn't see him before but there he is

he's dressed in red

bright red

he has a big white beard

and he has big black belt

ok who are we talking about

yeah santa claus well

what street is that

okay this is another one of those partial ones that still works ok and so

if you weren't sure who i was talking about go ahead and close your eyes back

up and again imagine santa