title: Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory
author: Peter M. Vishton
description: What was the name of your first pet? Where did you put your house keys? How do you get to work every morning? Most likely, you didn't need to look up the answers to these questions. You remembered them. Memory is, without a doubt, the most powerful (and practical) tool of everyday life. By linking both your past and your future, memory gives you the power to plan, to reason, to perceive, and to understand. As long as thinking and insight are important in how we live our lives, memory will be critical as well. And the better your memory, the more information you'll have at your immediate disposal and the better your thinking will be. We've all long held people with fantastic memories as somehow superhuman; but the truth is that anyone can be a memory whizprovided they know the skills for doing so. And now Scientific Secrets for a Powerful Memory offers you the key to unlocking your memory's vast, untapped potential.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ![cover](cover.jpeg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  NOTES
  
  
  1: THE SMARTEST MAN IS HARD TO FIND
  
  12 $265 million industry in 2008: Sharp Brains Report (2009).
  
  
  2: THE MAN WHO REMEMBERED TOO MUCH
  
  27 80 percent of what they’d seen: Lionel Standing (1973), “Learning 10,000
  Pictures,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 25, 207-22.
  
  27 2,500 images: Timothy F. Brady, Talia Konkle, et al. (2008), “Visual Long-
  Term Memory Has a Massive Storage Capacity for Object Details,” Proceedings of
  the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 38, 14325-29.
  
  28 “details could eventually be recovered”: Elizabeth Loftus and Geoffrey
  Loftus (1980), “On the Permanence of Stored Information in the Human Brain,”
  American Psychologist 35, no. 5, 409-20.
  
  28 Wagenaar came to believe the same thing: Willem A. Wagenaar (1986), “My
  Memory: A Study of Autobiographical Memory over Six Years,” Cognitive
  Psycholog