Memory training: how to memorize information

I will teach you how to mem­orize any infor­ma­tion. It will help you study bet­ter, cope with your work, and stand out from those who use Google instead of mem­ory

This is inten­sive online train­ing on mnemon­ics—meth­ods and tech­niques of mem­oriz­ing infor­ma­tion.

Before the train­ing, I get to know the par­tic­i­pants and ask them what prob­lems they have come up with.

They usu­ally com­plain that they can’t remem­ber text, num­bers, for­eign words, for­get names and faces, can’t cope with their stud­ies and tasks at work, and make their daily lives dif­fi­cult.

Mem­ory train­ing and courses solve these prob­lems.

For stu­dents, teach­ers, experts, exec­u­tives, offi­cials, sci­en­tists, and any­one else who needs to keep a lot of exact infor­ma­tion in their head.

Train­ing is unlikely to be of tan­gi­ble ben­e­fit if you expect to lis­ten to a pop­u­lar sci­ence lec­ture about mem­ory. Such moti­va­tion alone is not enough to han­dle the train­ing load.

You will mas­ter 10 think­ing tools.

1. A tool for mov­ing through mem­ory as if it were com­puter files. You will read infor­ma­tion from your head in for­ward and back­ward order, selec­tively, by key­word or ques­tion, in alpha­bet­i­cal order, or by a sequen­tial num­ber.

In the past, I was the head of the legal depart­ment. I used to come to impor­tant nego­ti­a­tions empty-handed, without a note­book and a pen. The other side per­ceived me as a lay­man who was invited for the show: “Dif­fi­cult nego­ti­a­tions, and he only lis­tens”. And this relaxed them.

But at the end I took the floor: “In para­graph 12 you said this and that. And in para­graph 47, you said this and that. This con­tra­dicts para­graph 32, where you said this and that. Besides, it’s not clear how it agrees with this and that in para­graph 28”. And so me­thod­i­cally I went on and on about each state­ment. You should have seen their faces. I wouldn’t do that now, it’s a shame to make fun of peo­ple. But when I was young, I used to make fun of peo­ple a lot.

2. A tool for mem­oriz­ing sequen­tial infor­ma­tion. You can mem­orize words of your native or for­eign lan­guage, abs­tract con­cepts, names, let­ter com­bi­na­tions, num­bers, and illus­tra­tions. Sequences can be of any length, and the infor­ma­tion in them can be unre­lated in mean­ing.

For exam­ple, you need to defend your term paper, diploma, dis­ser­ta­tion, speak at a meet­ing or con­fer­ence. You can use a piece of paper like every­one else. But it doesn’t look good, because “any fool can do it with a piece of paper”. You can cram the text of a speech for days. But there is no gua­ran­tee that in a stress­ful sit­u­a­tion noth­ing will fly out.

And with the help of mnemon­ics, you can mem­orize the sequence of all the­ses down to the num­bers and abbre­via­tions that are dif­fi­cult to pro­nounce. And you will remem­ber it in any sit­u­a­tion and any state.

3. A tool for mem­oriz­ing infor­ma­tion about peo­ple. Sur­names, names and patronymics, birth­days, addresses, phone num­bers, nick­names, car license plates, and any­thing else you want to remem­ber about a per­son.

My client was appointed to man­age a large hold­ing com­pany. There was a prob­lem­atic sit­u­a­tion there, and the pre­vi­ous direc­tor was fired with a con­flict. The employ­ees remained the same: they loved the pre­vi­ous direc­tor and were hos­tile to the new one without even know­ing him.

On my advice Robert went to the HR depart­ment and did a sim­ple thing for a mnemonist: he talked to the HR man­ager and leafed through the per­son­nel files. And then in the ele­va­tor, he shook hands with the man and asked him how his son Max was doing at school. And how his mother-in-law Rebecca was feel­ing after the oper­a­tion. Any per­son is pleased to be cared for by a man­ager. And, of course, the employ­ees imme­di­ately respected him.

If there is time left at the train­ing, I can tell you more about how I helped a young law school teacher gain cred­i­bil­ity with stu­dents. It was fun.

4. A tool for mem­oriz­ing infor­ma­tional mes­sages. Store any­thing in your head: exact dates, events, dic­tionary entries, fac­tual infor­ma­tion, terms and def­i­ni­tions, place names, and objects.

My exam­ple again. When I was a young lawyer, I used to run around a lot in court. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the other side first write their claim or objec­tion and then read it out at the ses­sion. In courts, I oper­ated with sums, dates, con­tract terms, and arti­cle num­bers without any papers. This greatly increased my cred­i­bil­ity and helped me stand out from the rest.

5. A tool for mem­oriz­ing struc­tural informa­tion. These are dia­grams, tables, clas­si­fi­ca­tions from any field of knowledge.

Ordi­nary tables are bor­ing to mem­orize. And in train­ing, we try to take tables not just with num­bers, but with illus­tra­tions, def­i­ni­tions, sur­names, and other beauty. For exam­ple, the Archi­tec­tural Style Guide. You mem­orize it, and then I ask, “Who is Pythias?” You answer, “The author of the mau­soleum at Hali­car­nas­sus, one of the chief archi­tects of ancient Greece along with Ict­i­nus, Cal­l­i­crates, and Mnesi­cles.”

I’m like, “Ancient Greek archi­tec­ture... When was that?” You: “7th cen­tury BC to 1st cen­tury AD.” Me: “And what was there?” You: “They invented an order.” I show you a pic­ture: “What kind of order is this?” You: “Corinthian.” Me: “What’s a stere­o­bate?”. You: “The plinth of a tem­ple or colon­nade. In ancient Greece, it usu­ally con­sisted of three steps.” This is the level at which we mem­orize struc­tural infor­ma­tion.

6. A tool for mem­oriz­ing for­eign vocab­u­lary. These are words, hiero­glyphs, signs.

Mnemon­ics will not get rid of the need to learn lan­guages. You’ll still go to courses, tutors, or study on your own. But you will dra­mat­i­cally increase the speed and qual­ity of learn­ing. If a school takes 10 years to learn 3,500 words, you can learn that num­ber in 3.5 months.

And most impor­tantly: if you’ve already taken the time to learn it, you’ve really learned it. And not the usual way: when you spend a lot of time and effort to learn it, it already seems like you know it. But then, for some rea­son, the right word slips out.

7. A tool for sys­tem­atic mem­oriza­tion. They tell you the num­ber of a para­graph or a page, you respond with infor­ma­tion. They tell you the infor­ma­tion, you tell them the num­ber where it is.

This skill is often abused by high school and col­lege stu­dents. Chil­dren are mean, they like to make fun of the teacher. In train­ing, I always admon­ish: “Be human, so you can be treated nor­mally.”

I had a ped­a­gog­i­cal intern­ship in grad­u­ate school and we taught stu­dents for sev­eral years. As a teacher, I would have been trou­bled by a phe­nom­e­nal mem­ory. If I had been an ordi­nary teacher who hadn’t heard of mnemon­ics, I would have thought the stu­dent had a micro­head­phone or some other setup. And even if he proved to me that he remem­ber­ed, it wouldn’t change my bad atti­tude toward him. Not because I was an ass­hole, but because I didn’t need to be humil­i­ated in front of the whole class.

Mnemon­ics should be used care­fully. Always con­sider the con­text. It’s like the super­pow­ers of the DC Comics uni­verse. Super­man didn’t walk around in a cos­tume all the time. He wore it for a cause.

8. A tool for man­ag­ing the reten­tion period of infor­ma­tion. You will decide for your­self how long to remem­ber, from short-term to life­long stor­age in your mem­ory.

For exam­ple, you are dic­tated a phone num­ber. Or a car flees the scene of an acci­dent, and you need to remem­ber its license plate num­ber. We don’t carry a pen and paper any­more. And it takes longer to reach into your pocket for the phone than to mem­orize it: three flashes in your mind and the num­ber is already in your head.

But you don’t have to remem­ber this infor­ma­tion for a long time. It’s enough to hold on to it for an hour to get to a quiet place and write it down there.

And there is infor­ma­tion that you have to remem­ber for the rest of your life. Doc­tors often come to us for train­ing. They always have to remem­ber that a stom­ach ulcer can only be stitched with absorbable thread, even if the ulcer is bleed­ing: non-absorbable thread is more reli­able, but it won’t let the ulcer heal after­ward. The wound in the small intes­tine must be stitched per­pen­dic­u­larly, other­wise, the lumen will nar­row. If a her­nia has impinged, the tac­tics depend on the time of impinge­ment: if more than 3‑4 hours have passed, you need to oper­ate, other­wise, there will be necro­sis because of the lack of blood sup­ply; if less—you can put it into the abdom­i­nal cav­ity. That in case of liver hem­or­rhage the hepa­to­duo­de­nal lig­a­ment can be tem­po­ra­ri­ly com­pressed. That in severe pan­cre­atic injuries cho­le­cys­tos­to­my is per­formed in addi­tion to the basic pro­ce­dures for addi­tional bile out­flow. And so on.

These are not my med­i­cal fan­tasies. I am quot­ing the prac­tic­ing sur­geon Norik Kazaryan. He had to take an exam in the US and wanted to get the high­est score pos­si­ble to com­pete. The exam lasts 9 hours, sev­eral hun­dred ques­tions and they give 1.5 min­utes for each one. This is hard to deal with without mnemon­ics. But only if we’re talk­ing about real mem­oriza­tion skills: per­for­mances by pseu­dom­nemonists on TV don’t count.

9. A tool for devel­op­ing atten­tion. You will improve all of its prop­er­ties: con­cen­tra­tion, vol­ume, span, switch­a­bil­ity, and dis­tri­bu­tion.

For exam­ple, you came in tired after work. Chil­dren are run­n­ing around, the TV is loud, you want to eat, sleep, and want no one to touch you. But you sit down for a book or a for­eign lan­guage les­son.

If you have devel­oped atten­tion, you can mem­orize for two hours without being dis­tracted by extra­ne­ous thoughts or exter­nal stim­uli. You don’t feel sleepy, and you don’t have to reread the same thing sev­eral times.

10. A tool for devel­op­ing visu­al­iza­tion. If you read the biogra­phies of geniuses, all were dis­tin­guished by their devel­oped visual think­ing.

Nikola Tesla:

I am not say­ing that if you develop visual think­ing, you will nec­es­sar­ily become a genius. But without devel­oped visual think­ing you def­i­nitely will not become a genius.

• how to work with imag­i­na­tion to make the brain mem­orize infor­ma­tion: the mne­monic square, for­mu­las for con­nect­ing images, think­ing oper­a­tions, rel­a­tive sizes, rules for form­ing con­nec­tions.

• how to mem­orize infor­ma­tion in lists and sequences: basic tech­niques;
• how to mem­orize num­bers: why you can’t mem­orize exact infor­ma­tion without spe­cial train­ing;
• prac­tice: mem­orize to-do lists, lists of meet­ings, sequences of talk­ing points;
• prac­tice: mem­orize num­bers.

• how to con­vert unre­mem­bered infor­ma­tion into the mem­orized form: ways to encode it into images;
• prac­tice: mem­orize abs­tract words, names, abbre­vi­a­tions, let­ter com­bi­na­tions, syl­la­bles, for­eign words;
• prac­tice: mem­orize twenty dif­fi­cult to pro­nounce words—lav­ma­jkal, bab­safwal, tas­mavhac, pedwacrak, fasvil­cem <...>, repro­duce them in for­ward and back­ward order (this will help to mem­orize real for­eign words on the sec­ond day of train­ing).

• prac­tice: in 5 min­utes we mem­orize 20 words under ordi­nal num­bers (I say a num­ber, you answer with a word, or I say a word and you give me the num­ber under which you mem­orized the word; this is some­thing you may see on TV shows like The Brain, Super­human and others);
• prac­tice: men­tal exer­cise—in 10 min­utes mem­orize a 200-digit num­ber (this keeps the mem­ory skill in work­ing order and helps com­bat age-related mem­ory impair­ment).

• how to upload infor­ma­tion into our head for a self-deter­mined period;
• how to freely read infor­ma­tion from mem­ory without stut­ter­ing;
• prac­tice: mem­orize dic­tionary arti­cles in infor­ma­tion block—para­graphs, sec­tions, chap­ters;
• prac­tice: mem­orize fac­tual infor­ma­tion with a lot of exact infor­ma­tion.

• prac­tice: mem­orize dia­grams and illus­tra­tions;
• prac­tice: mem­orize ency­clo­pe­dia arti­cles.

• prac­tice: mem­orize tab­u­lar infor­ma­tion—from two-col­umn to multi-col­umn tables;
• prac­tice: mem­orize terms and their def­i­ni­tions.

• prac­tice: mem­orize for­eign words (uni­ver­sal tech­nol­ogy helps you mem­orize words of Western and Eastern lan­guages);
• prac­tice: mem­orize infor­ma­tion about a per­son—names, faces, addresses, phone num­bers, car license plates, birth­days, bio­graph­i­cal details.

This is not a record­ing of the train­ing. This is not a mail­ing list of assign­ments or mate­ri­als. It’s not access to les­sons on a restricted sec­tion of the site. Not an online broad­cast of a live event where I teach in the room and you pas­sively watch through a web­cam.

You are a direct par­tic­i­pant, and I will train your mem­ory as if we were in the same room.

You’re in your home, but you’re train­ing face-to-face with me and the other par­tic­i­pants. You see the desk­top of my lap­top instead of look­ing at the screen from the hall. We work together on pre­sen­ta­tions, doc­u­ments, and appli­ca­tions, and syn­chronously view train­ing sites, videos, and images.

I give feed­back in real-time. I can tell by the expres­sion in your eyes what mis­takes are and cor­rect them right away.

Peo­ple come to me not for the­ory, but for direct feed­back, to finally be able to mem­orize.

I could record the train­ing on video, and sell it on record.

But all train­ing is dif­fer­ent. I cre­ate an atmo­sphere for a spe­cific group and teach mem­oriza­tion tech­niques, adjust­ing each time to the com­po­si­tion of the par­tic­i­pants. That’s why one record for every­one is use­less.

There is no per­sonal con­tact with me on the record. You can’t ask a ques­tion. You don’t feel like an equal par­tic­i­pant.

I want train­ing to be ben­e­fi­cial, so every train­ing is an inter­ac­tive con­ver­sa­tion here and now.

At the train­ing, I try to pay atten­tion to every­one. Every­one should have the oppor­tu­nity to ask a ques­tion, get an answer, and share their expe­ri­ences. Only 4 par­tic­i­pants fit on the screen—to see the next four, I scroll through the tape. There­fore, I take up to 12 peo­ple to the train­ing. Only then am I con­fi­dent that I will help get results.

At a reg­u­lar offline train­ing ses­sion, you can sit in the back and be lazy. With me, you can’t cheat—I see every­one

Peo­ple often ask us these ques­tions before they buy a train­ing ticket.

As an expe­ri­enced inter­net mar­keter, I advise to make a sales fun­nel: 1) the per­son sees your ad and goes to the reg­is­tra­tion page for a free webi­nar, 2) he leaves his mail and then you warm him up with let­ters so he doesn’t for­get, 3) on the webi­nar you sell him a full course, 4) after the webi­nar your sales team calls him, and 5) at the end you fin­ish him in let­ters and mes­sen­gers.

Why would we want to do that? We sell an under­s­tand­able ser­vice. It’s no dif­fer­ent from other ser­vices in estab­lished mar­kets: driv­ing courses, account­ing, or for­eign lan­guages.

When we want to learn how to drive, we enroll in a driv­ing school and don’t ask them for free webi­nars. You already know what they will teach. The main thing for us is how many years they have been on the mar­ket, what rep­u­ta­tion they have, and that they sup­port us at the exam at the traf­fic police.

When we go to for­eign lan­guage courses, we under­s­tand that there. And selling fun­nels will only get in the way. Another thing if it’s quack­ery: sup­pos­edly unique lan­guage learn­ing meth­ods devel­oped by spe­cial ser­vices, or some other non­sense. Such courses can­not be sold without webi­nars and aggres­sive adver­tis­ing.

With us it’s sim­ple. You see the pro­gram and under­s­tand what you get for your money. I’ve been doing this train­ing online since 2015. Before that, I spent 5 years trav­el­ing around the cities and teach­ing in live halls. There’s a huge amount of feed­back on You­Tube about us. I mean, we’ve been in the mar­ket for a long time.

We’ve been build­ing our rep­u­ta­tion for a long time. And we’re wor­ried that free webi­nars will put us in line with inter­net mar­keters. These guys love aut­o­fun­nels and know exactly how to push emo­tion to buy their prod­uct.

But they don’t sell what they them­selves can do, but what they’ve been taught in other courses. We don’t want to be mixed up with them: a per­son comes in, sees “sign up now and get a tuto­rial,” thinks it’s another scam, and closes the page. Our whole rep­u­ta­tion is down the drain.

Lan­guage schools have trial les­sons. They are free, but it doesn’t smell like a scam: You need to see who is going to teach.

In social net­works we post frag­ments of train­ing ses­sions: you can look at the man­ner of teach­ing. If it doesn’t suit you, feel free to go to my col­leagues. Choose a trainer with whom you feel com­fort­able. I am inter­ested in this myself: I need you to work without being dis­tracted by the tim­bre of my voice, the color of my shirt, or the fact that I am sip­ping my tea.

To summarize.

You can go on free webi­nars and courses end­lessly. You can watch videos and read PDF-instructions “How to improve your mem­ory in 5 min­utes a day.” After that, it seems that you know every­thing and under­s­tand mem­ory bet­ter than a neu­ro­sci­en­tist. But you still can’t remem­ber a text­book or num­bers before a meet­ing.

Don’t waste your time on this. Money can be earned. Health can be improved. But an hour of life on a free webi­nar can not get back. As for me, it’s bet­ter to pay and in 2 days to leave with a ready mem­ory skill.

I don’t mind free mem­ory courses. It’s great if you enjoy the pro­cess itself. You come in after work, and there’s a webi­nar: you relax, switch your atten­tion, chat. In the begin­n­ing, you lis­tened to every­thing inter­est­ing, and when the sale started—you left.

If it’s a form of leisure, that’s fine. But it cer­tainly should not be seen as full-fledged learn­ing.

It is pos­si­ble. You have stud­ied at the week­end and already on Mon­day at school or work you mem­orize the nec­es­sary infor­ma­tion.

Another thing is that any skill can be pol­ished end­lessly. You came to the driv­ing school, learned the the­ory, mas­tered driv­ing, passed the exam, and got your license. But you are obliged to drive with the sign “70” for another 2 years (in my coun­try, Ukraine, it is so). Why, if you already know how to drive? Because your driv­ing expe­ri­ence is short. It’s phys­i­ol­ogy: until you’ve driven the required num­ber of hours, you’re still an inex­pe­ri­enced driver. And no instruc­tor can drive for you.

My job is to teach you how to mem­orize. And you will hone your skills without me in the course of your life. It is not nec­es­sary to find spe­cial time and do spe­cial exer­cises: each time you mem­orize edu­ca­tional or work infor­ma­tion, your mem­oriza­tion rate and the amount of infor­ma­tion loaded into your head will increase.

Two days is 16 hours. 16 hours is 16 classes in your mem­ory courses. If you have two les­sons a week, that’s two months. By that logic, my train­ing is more exten­sive.

A two-month course may sell more expen­sive because its value seems higher. But the mem­oriza­tion skill is bet­ter embed­ded in a two-day inten­sive. That’s why we don’t spread the train­ing pro­gram over time.

I am a mne­monic teacher, not a teacher of geniuses.

A teacher at the school teaches writ­ing but does not promise that the child will become Stephen King and make a $400 mil­lion for­tune.

It’s the same with me—I teach you to mem­orize, but I don’t know if you will become a genius. I know one thing for sure: you can give birth to some­thing new out of your head if you have some­thing in your head. And to have some­thing in your head, you have to mem­orize this “some­thing” before­hand.

These promises are backed up by con­crete fig­ures: “You will be able to grad­u­ate not in 5 years, but 1‑2 years. Become an expe­ri­enced pro­fes­sional not in 15 years, but 3 years. You will be able to save for an apart­ment in 2 years, not 10 years.”

What are the prac­ti­cal ben­e­fits of your train­ing? Will I be able to become finan­cially inde­pen­dent?

These promises are aimed at sim­ple-minded peo­ple. They are not related to the ser­vice offered and put pres­sure on basic human needs: “Take a mem­ory course and save for an apart­ment not in 10 years, but 2 years”! They are not backed up by any­thing: “You’ll start earn­ing times more right away! How does it work? Thanks to the lat­est advances in neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy!” They are super­fi­cial: I don’t know how busi­ness works, but just in case I say “make the right deci­sions quickly.” I don’t under­s­tand how the edu­ca­tional pro­cess works, but just in case, I’ll write “you’ll grad­u­ate as an extern.”

I under­s­tand that if they write that, it works. But I pre­fer to treat my clients with care and respect, regard­less of wheth­er they are smart or stupid, rich or poor.

I offer my clients a part­n­er­ship: I hon­estly solve their mem­ory prob­lems, they hon­estly pay me for it. I like to com­mu­ni­cate as equals. I don’t con­sider myself smarter than my clients. They will make the right deci­sion on their own and I respect their right not to come to me for train­ing.

This approach is jus­ti­fied for me not only morally, but also prac­ti­cally. If a per­son buys into the promise of a pay raise after a mem­ory train­ing, sud­denly he will really come. And then what will I do with him?

I agree, “phe­nom­e­nal mem­ory” sounds like “exclu­sive pre­mium ser­vices of unpar­al­leled qual­ity from a team of highly qual­i­fied edu­ca­tors from one of the lead­ing com­pa­nies in the edu­ca­tional ser­vices mar­ket”.

But I don’t know what other phrase to use to describe how peo­ple remem­ber after our mem­ory train­ing.

No, because there are no tech­niques. This is a public­ity ploy, exploit­ing the tra­di­tional inter­est in the work of the intel­li­gence ser­vices.

The scouts in fea­ture films are fic­tional char­ac­ters from World War II, “solv­ing spe­cial prob­lems behind enemy lines.” To do this they had to mem­orize ciphers and loca­tions of enemy units.

Today’s Bonds and Bournes don’t need mem­ory in the movies or life. No one mem­orizes leg­ends and pass­words any­more.

I have an acquain­tance—a major gen­eral, for­mer head of the Main Direc­torate of Intel­li­gence of the Secu­rity Ser­vice of Ukraine. He comes from a gen­er­a­tion of Soviet spies. They were roman­ti­cized, books were writ­ten and movies were made about them. The image of a hero with a phe­nom­e­nal mem­ory was highly pop­u­lar­ized back then.

When we opened the Mem­ory Devel­op­ment Cen­ter in 2012, I asked them to orga­nize a mas­ter class at their academy for PR pur­poses. But the gen­eral said that modern intel­li­gence offi­cers don’t need it. Lan­guages, psy­chol­ogy, the abil­ity to make con­tacts and gain the trust of strangers, yes. But no one needs mem­oriza­tion skills nowa­days. These are all myths from books and movies.

If future spies are sud­denly intro­duced to the ele­ments of mnemon­ics, it’s a small part of what I give in mem­ory train­ing. So it’s not us, it’s them who use our mem­ory tech­niques.

Easy. Sports mne­monic tech­nique is prim­i­tive: learn the image codes of play­ing cards and scat­ter them into sup­port­ing images. Three months before the com­pe­ti­tion, six hours a day, train your­self in this, and if there is not some­one more stub­born, vic­tory is assured.

Sports mnemonists mem­orize non­sense like cards, binary num­bers, and blots. Look at the con­tes­tants on You­Tube: they are either chil­dren who are obliged to please their par­ents, self-affirm­ing teenagers, or over­grown freaks.

They do not know how to mem­orize com­plex infor­ma­tion that we encounter in real study or work. At the same time, at com­pe­ti­tions, they mem­orize for a short time in order to answer and then imme­di­ately for­get. But in life, you have to be able to remem­ber for a long time. I pre­pare my clients for life, so I think it makes no sense to waste time on com­pet­i­tive mne­monic tech­niques.

The same can be said about tal­ent shows. All these Superhuman, The Brain and other TV pro­duc­tions are far from real­ity.

Alzheimer’s and Parkin­son’s diseases are fatal neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive diseases. They have an unclear eti­ol­ogy and patho­ge­n­e­sis and are cur­rently incur­able. It is uneth­i­cal to manip­u­late the fear of death and guar­an­tee 100% insur­ance against incur­able diseases.

By engag­ing in mnemon­ics, you keep your mind active. Com­mon sense dic­tates that active thought activ­ity should slow the death of brain cells.

But it is unlikely that Ronald Rea­gan (US pres­i­dent) or Mar­garet Thatcher (Bri­tish prime min­is­ter) did not use their heads enough.

Rea­gan was an actor when he was young, and actors train their mem­ory all the time. Rita Hay­worth, Charl­ton Hes­ton, Peter Falk, Ani Girar­dot were actors, too, and they died of Alzheimer’s. Ask this “brain gym” if Iris Mur­doch, the Booker Prize-win­n­ing English nov­elist, and philoso­pher, didn’t think enough.

Or did writ­ers Arthur Haley and Terry Pratch­ett need to “turn on spe­cific brain pro­cesses” so they wouldn’t die?