Ilchi Lee

No one in attendance at 4th Annual International Brain Education Conference will forget Eran Katz’ flamboyant hop onto the stage. But perhaps his entrance is not too surprising, given his basic piece of advice on memory skill. The key to remembering something, he says, is to make it interesting, even if artificially.

Eran Katz is a memory expert who has been working on his memory skill for years, starting with his determination to remember all the names of the cows on a ranch where he worked as a young man. Since that time, he has given lectures on the topic to hundreds of thousands of people, written two successful books on memory development, an has appeared on a number of television and radio talk shows to demonstrate the skill.

Katz amazed the audience at the UN by instantly memorizing a string of 28 numbers. He allowed the audience to choose the numbers, which he wrote on a board at the front of the conference room. He then turned away from the board and proceeded to repeat the numbers, forward and backward.

The key to memory, he says, is to really pay attention. The human brain is designed to filter out information that is not significant to the observer. Katz says that if you can make the information interesting, it is like pushing a save button on a computer.

If you have a need to memorize information that is boring or monotonous, you can use association and imagination to make the information more interesting. He guided the audience through an exercise in which he wrote the following words on the board: bed, fish, carpet, dress, dog, and car. Then he had the audience imagine this: a fish in a bed, a fish wrapped in carpet, a girl dressed in a carpet, a dog wearing a dress, and a dog driving a car. At the end of the lecture, the audience was easily able to recall the words, although they had been erased almost a half hour before.

Here are a few other of Katz’ memory tips:

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