Transcript
My name’s Barry Reitman. I’m the author of Secrets, Tips and Tricks of a Powerful Memory and I’m going to speak a little bit about the connection between your memory and sleep. There’s a big connection. In addition to the general 1, where you need a healthy amount of sleep, just to maintain good brain health, there’s a more important 1. I’m not a medical doctor, I’m not a psychologist, but I know it by experience and it works like this.
When I’m looking to remember something important with any of the many systems that I use and teach, if it’s difficult, or big, or important, I will try to learn it before my evenings’ sleep. Think about it a little bit and then when I get up in the morning, go back to it. Scientists are saying that there’s some connection and that the dream cycle’s in some strange way, helps to enforce memories. Let me tell you how important it is to me, if I have to remember something, like a list of attendees at an event where I am a public speaker and I just get an hour or 2 before I start, I will study the list, apply my techniques and then find a quite corner and sneak in a power nap. It does the trick.
If I am remembering the crossword puzzle that’s in that days newspaper and I only have a little bit of time, a few hours; it’ll take me a few hours to do the puzzle, maybe twenty minutes or a half an hour and then I’ll spend another ten minutes using my techniques to remember it and again, I’ll sneak in a nap. I find that that virtually doubles my capacity to recall things. Try that. Try doing your studying for school at night and then pick it up again in the morning, or anything else that you have to remember. I think you’ll find that it helps a lot.
