Learn Anything Easily and Remember It.

There is a lot to learn, but to learn anything easily and remember it has bothered me for the longest time. So, I picked up the book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, which describes the history of memory and ancient techniques used to maximize memory usage. Over a year, using those techniques, the author trained and won a national memory competition – a no-easy feat. He used a technique called the method of loci, to remember and recall information that intrigued me. And here is the experiment I tried to learn and remember the workings of SEO.

Day 1 – The Beginning

The method of loci calls for placing an image, you can animate it if you like, in a physical space you are familiar with. The freedom to create a world that defies realities helps to remember.

Let’s start, so I go back to my childhood house where in the center of the family room, I see a baby. The doorbell rings. The baby crawls to the door, and surprise!!!!! Mothers from all over the world ask for toys based on specific descriptions. And the baby has to serve them all with relevant information about the toys in seconds. Why relevant? Because mothers come from the world over have different preferences and want reliable information. The baby has many checks to do before it presents options to mothers.

Now, how does the baby come to know about new toys in the first place?

Anyone who produces a toy- the toy producer – wants to ensure the baby knows about it. Why? So that new mothers the world over can find it. Every day, a courier guy comes with a container of documents that describe new toys. To arrange these, the baby identifies each document for words that describe it. In the storage space of the family room, the baby checks if any containers match words or phrases that describe the document. For the ones it does find, it places the document in that container. If it can’t find any, it uses a new container and labels it with word or phrases that identify the document. A document is replicated and stored in many containers, given that the baby has millions of containers in storage. Now, how it sorts them in these containers is what makes the baby unique.

At the end of the day, when it goes back to its crib, the mother and father make a clone of this baby. They train it to improve its ability to give reliable information for the mothers. The clone is then tested by testers who trained using a rater’s guideline. If the clone passes certain tests, then the baby gets trained with these new capabilities.