In 2007, a man named Dave Farrow broke the world memory record for the most decks of cards memorised in a single sighting. 59 decks of cards to be precise. That’s a total of 3,068 individual cards which took him 14 hours to memorise, and 9 hours to recall.

That’s a pretty astonishing feat. I’d probably max out at ten, I think.

Ten cards that is, not ten decks!

I wonder what would happen if you asked him now, ten years after this unbroken record was set, to recall the cards. How many would he be able to recall?

I doubt he would be able to recall the whole sequence, but I’m sure he’d remember at least some.

Or maybe not…

He’d be using a totally different part of his memory to recall that sequence ten years after. His long-term memory would now be responsible for recalling those cards. The cards that he would recall now would be the ones that he has a “memory” of. A memory like the ones we have of our childhood holidays, for example.

And long-term memory lacks detail.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]

The way these memory champions perform these incredible feats is by training and stretching their short-term memory – which has limited capacity – via a variety of techniques to recall in perfect detail a random sequence of cards.

Long-term memory is almost limitless, but lacks detail. Short-term memory has incredible detail, but is quite limited.

Think of a computer. A standard computer has two types of memory: RAM and a hard disk. The computer uses RAM to “remember” information that it needs to use in the immediate future, and uses the hard disk for “storing” information in the long-term. RAM memory is relatively small, but the hard disk is much bigger.

Another key point is that with RAM memory (and human short-term memory), when the information that it needed to remember has been used for the task at hand, the information is discarded and lost.

Do you remember “cramming” for an exam at school or university? Everybody did it! How much information do you remember from that exam? Probably very little, right?

By cramming (forcing things into a small place), we use our short-term memory. We do this because most people only care about remembering the information required to pass the exam. As a result, when you finish the exam, your brain discards the information.

So how do we transfer information from short-term to long-term memory?

With our good friend “working memory”, of course!

Working memory is responsible for the manipulation of information that is stored in the one and a half kilos of jelly inside our skulls. And by “manipulating”, I mean “using”.

And that’s where the common expression “use it, or lose it” comes from.

The problem is that when we want to remember vocabulary, dependent prepositions, or verbs that are followed by gerund or infinitive, we use this cramming technique.

And cramming is a bad technique to use if you want to remember these things long-term.

All you need to do is use the language you want to remember, and there’s a simple exercise you can do to easily remember vocabulary when learning a second language, in this case English.

A technique I call passive memorisation.

With active memorisation, which is the classic technique language learners use, a student will have a list of vocabulary and will actively try to memorise the list.

This doesn’t work long-term, however, because the brain will recognise this information as something it needs now, and will activate the short-term memory, which you now know is useless for really remembering things long-term.

So here’s what you do.

Take a list of vocabulary, for example dependent prepositions, which English learners often have problems with.

Now print the list out or save the tab on your laptop, whatever, just have it near you for a week or so.

Read the list aloud, and make an example sentence with each verb and dependent preposition. A simple sentence, it doesn’t matter.

By reading aloud and making example sentences, you’re manipulating the information by reading it, saying it, and using it in a sentence.

The more manipulation, the better. More brain cells will be firing.

There’s a saying in neuroscience, “brain cells that fire together, wire together”. Connections aren’t fixed, wires are.

Read them all aloud, but don’t try to memorise them. Just read them aloud.

Do this in the morning. It takes no more than five minutes.

At lunchtime, read the list aloud again. Again, it’ll take no more than five minutes, then continue doing what you are doing.

Finally, repeat the exercise one more time in the evening, making a new sentence with each verb.

Do this every day for one week, and after one week, you will just know instinctively which preposition is correct. It’ll just “sound” right.

And this is how they sound to native speakers. If you ask a native English speaker which preposition is correct, they’ll be able to tell you. If you ask them why, they’ll simply say “erm…I dunno, it just sounds right”.

This is what you’ll achieve from doing this simple, zero-effort exercise.

The easiest way is sometimes the best way.

The following week, find a new list and repeat the exercise. In a few months, you’ll have remembered an incredible amount of new vocabulary.

You’ll be a vocabulary machine!

Active memorisation requires a lot of effort and time in the short-term, but only short-term success.

Passive memorisation requires very little effort and time, gives no short-term success, but guarantees long-term success.

And long-term success is what really matters in mastering a language.

I downloaded a productivity app today called Momentum. What it does is every time you open the Internet, it shows you a beautiful image from somewhere in the world, asks you what your goal is for the day, and gives you an inspiring quote to get you started.

I opened it a moment ago and it said, “Good afternoon, Adam. Today, write a new blog post”, with a beautiful photo of a rural landscape. Underneath it there was a quote which read, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

Quite fitting, I think.[thrive_leads id=’1049′]