The controller of our body is a brain; let’s study the power of our brain in this article. Have you ever known that it is made up of 86 billion neurons, which means it can run and remember faster than the supercomputer, and it fits inside your skull.
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These neurons help you think, feel , move , solve critical math problems , dream, and even remember your friend’s birthday, who has been apart a decade before.
Do you know the brain is so genius that it adapts itself based on what you study or develop skill in? Like if you are mastering any musical instrument or any language, your brain automatically builds the path that way, like the city expanding its roads. That’s the reason it’s called neuroplasticity.
How Much Can the Brain Store—and for How Long?
Have you ever played Scrabble? It’s a board game. You have to make words and earn points. The player who earns the most points wins. So the better your language skills, the higher your chances of winning.
Right? Apparently not. Let me tell you about a competition, the Spanish World Scrabble Championship. It was held recently in Granada, and this is no game night Scrabble. This is a highly competitive tournament.
The Scrabble Superhuman: Nigel Richards
The fascinating real-time account of Mr. Nigel Richards, the recent Scrabble world champion, and his brain training can be found here.
It has 147 participants from 20 countries. This time, there was a player from New Zealand too. His name is Nigel Richards. He does not speak Spanish. When he landed in Spain, he could barely exchange pleasantries in Spanish, but he participated in the world championship, and he ended up winning it.
So how did he do it? By supercharging his memory. Richards memorized the entire Spanish vocabulary. It took him one year to do it. He learned the words without learning the language, which sounds a bit sad, but it’s evidently a skill.
It has made Richards the Scrabble G.O.A.T., the greatest player of all time. His victories are legendary. In 2008, he won The UK and The US Scrabble titles. He made history, and this is a big deal because you know how confusing the English language is. British and American English share many words with the same meanings and similar pronunciations but different spellings.
So after Richards won the UK Scrabble, he made his brain forget; listen to this. He made his brain forget 40,000 of those words—forty thousand. He memorized new spellings and triumphed in the American Scrabble. In 2015, he became the French-language Scrabble champion despite not speaking French. He learned the entire vocabulary in nine weeks.
And about a decade later, he’s done it again, this time with the Spanish language. Richards is a memory sabbath. He has trained his mind to the point that now he has photographic memory. He can look at dictionary pages and recall images of them later. Now this may seem almost superhuman, especially because many of us can’t even remember names and words.
Why We Forget Things—and How to Beat It.
We forget why we opened the refrigerator door or where we kept the keys. In fact, fun fact here, more than twenty million people lose their keys every year the world over.
That’s great for the locksmith industry, not so much for us. But Richards’ win is not supposed to make us feel worse. It is meant to show us that we don’t understand the full potential of our brains.
From the moment we are born, our brains are bombarded with information. They try holding on to it. The information is stored as memories, kind of like a computer stores files.
A computer has stored its space, so does our brain, the human brain. Our brain storage is also measured in bits, and do you know how big it is? How big is the storage space? 2,500,000 gigabytes.
That is information worth three hundred years of continuous television. It is virtually unlimited capacity to store memories, so why do we space out so often? Why does it feel like we’ve reached our mental capacity?
Train Your Brain: Tips to Improve Memory.
Why do we keep forgetting things? Because our brain is fine-tuned for efficiency. It prioritizes important events, and it makes room for them.
The brain aggressively discards what it deems less important. We lose two thirds of newly learned information every single day.
So making memories is easy, but keeping them takes effort. So whether you’re learning a new language, prepping for an exam, or cramming names before a dinner party, here is how you can maximize your memory.
Science says treat your brain like a muscle and exercise it. The more you repeat a piece of information, the better you will remember it. If you want to improve your chances, when you can, create stories around what you want to remember. It will stay with you longer.
Like the bedtime stories that you still remember, use more senses while trying to memorize, like taste or smell. Because this involves more areas of your brain, it creates a stronger memory, which is why the aroma of a dish can still take you back to childhood.
It can hold a lifetime of memories, from fleeting moments to decades-old treasures, depending on how you use it .
Basically, there is no singular strategy, but this is the gist. Anyone can be a memory champion as long as you train your brain like one.
