How to Memorize Anything - Aditi Singhal and Sudhir Singhal

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After such incidences, you might feel that you have a poor memory and may be
concerned about improving it. Well, one of the best ways to try to improve it is to
understand more about its nature and how it works.
WHAT IS MEMORY?
Memory is the process by which information about the world is stored in our brain in
order to give us a sense of who we are. It tells us what we did yesterday or five
years ago and it guides us on what to do tomorrow. Memories of our childhood may
be triggered by a nursery rhyme or a romantic memory may come to mind when we
listen to a particular song. Just imagine, what would happen if you suddenly lose your
memory? Just stop and imagine for 2 minutes! You would be good for nothing. As
Plato said about memory—‘All knowledge is but remembrance’. If you lose your
memory completely, you would have to start learning everything from scratch, just
like a newborn baby.
In fact, whatever we do in our life every second can be attributed to memory as all
our knowledge is based on it. An example to support this: You would not be able to
read this book right now if you didn’t remember the sounds of the 26 letters of the
alphabet.
POTENTIAL OF HUMAN MEMORY
The human brain consists of about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron forms about
1,000 connections with other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections,
each connection helping with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the
brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a
million gigabytes).
For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a
television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold 3 million hours of TV
shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than
300 years to use up all that storage. That means, we don’t have to worry
about running out of space in our lifetime.
But the reality is that most of us are unaware of the potential of the brain and its
capacity to store information, and the right way to use that. Due to this we are not