Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Chooi's techniques to enhance memory

"Memory has nothing to do with age or profession. The secret lies in how one trains one's brain to remember"

Maximising the potential of human brain is his objective. One way of achieving it is by improving memory capacity, says Yip Swe Chooi, World Memory Championship grandmaster. He is in the process of training individuals and corporates in memory techniques. In a conversation with Meera Srinivasan, Dr. Chooi explains some of his methods to enhance memory.

What's the sixteenth word on page 1027 in the Advanced Oxford English Dictionary? "Opaque", comes the reply in two seconds. It took Dr. Yip Swe Chooi five months and three weeks to memorise the Oxford Advanced Learners' English-Chinese dictionary.

Chooi remembers every word from the memory exercise he took up five years ago. "Anyone can," he chuckles. "The capacity of the human brain is immense. It is just that we are not taught how to use it skilfully. Once we master the technique of employing the right brain and the left brain together in our learning process, remembering becomes so much easier."

Ideal Play Abacus India, a Chennai-based learning centre that coaches children to develop their mathematical skills, has now introduced courses on enhancing memory for students using Dr Chooi's methods.

They have simplified difficult concepts and made learning a very enjoyable exercise for children," says Shaarada K Sriram, Managing Director, Ideal Play Abacus, who has incorporated Dr. Chooi's techniques in their teaching methodologies.

"The task lies in associating information with images, which are much easier to remember. We remember stories that were told to us years ago, only because we visualised them. This is the basic exercise that helps transfer information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory," says Dr. Chooi.

Call out a hundred single digit numbers and Dr. Chooi will repeat them faster than you did. As if that weren't enough, he would list them backwards and stun you.

"It's not difficult at all. I assign an image for every number that's called out and make a story out of it. For example, if you said one, I would imagine a stick. I would think of a duck the moment you say two; a sail boat, if you said four. These are simple ways one could devise to suit one's own style and convenience. I think a stick looks like the numeral one," he explains. "You could even go by rhyme schemes. Bun for one, a shoe for two and so on. With practice, one can master the speed element, too." Give Dr. Chooi a date, month and a year. And give him a second. He'll give you the day.

Dr. Chooi, who has come up with several innovative techniques for children, now conducts workshop for corporate executives and professionals from various spheres, to sharpen their memory skills for professional growth. "My oldest student is 86 years old. Memory has nothing to do with age or profession. The secret lies in how one trains one's brain to remember," he says.

Dr. Chooi credits Eastern countries with better retention power. "Though each race evolved its own method for improving memory power, I find the East performing much better. Indians, for instance, devised several interesting techniques thousands of years ago.

"I don't know how these memory pills sell. There's no concrete proof that shows us how these work," says Dr. Chooi when asked about pills that promise improved memory power. "People think memory is related to low-level thinking while analytical, problem-solving or creative skills are to do with high-level thinking. Without a memory bank, we can't do anything," he says.

"The potential of our memory is so great," he re-emphasises. One cannot but remember to agree!

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