last year i realized i'd forgotten everything i was learning i mean everything determined to remember at least a single thing from the halfway sentient daydream that was my covet experience i created a system to remember everything fast forward an entire year as it felt like 2021 did automatically and i've followed this system religiously this video is the most important piece i've shared so far and this technique is really the only reason i've been able to learn so much over the past two years in this piece i'll explain the memory system i've created why it works
according to science and how it enables me to remember every single thing i learn without exception [Music] when it gets right down to it our brains work pretty flawlessly as it is our brains could have evolved to remember every minute detail and event that's happened throughout our lives but there needed to be a reason to which there just never was creatures evolve through life or death experiences if we remember which mushroom will kill us you know we have a better chance of living if we remember what the clouds looked like on our sixth birthday it
just doesn't give us a lot of information just imagine if one minute from now you remembered every little detail in this frame every previous frame of video you've ever seen also 99.9 of that would serve no purpose a large part of the autistic spectrum consists of differences in how people's brains are unable to filter out over stimulation through the complexities of our world but most brains are amazing at forgetting useless information you'll probably understand the general concept and point of this video we won't remember what i said word for word in the introduction the point
of having a photographic memory shouldn't just be to remember every little detail of perception but instead remember what we deem as important not what our subconscious automatically filters out this is the reason i developed this system part one the science so how do our brains choose what information to store and what to discard well it isn't just life or death related i'll remember for the rest of my life a dream i had when i was five where the animated trolls from the original hobbit invaded my kitchen and yet that's not increasing my chances of survival
the average layperson trying to learn nuclear physics for the first time will probably find it very difficult to retain that information this is dr sean kane explaining his research on the cognitive psychology of learning and memory what it shows us is two things the first is that our brains remember importance the second is that importance is determined by value relation and repetition these three items are what all non-physical cognitive memory research revolves around understanding this is critical to understanding how to create a photographic memory for yourself value our brains decide what is valuable based on
its use in our lives that's why as king said learning nuclear physics is difficult when i was five my brain subconsciously decided that this recurring troll nightmare had value now why was this you know most of the time what the case is is that our brains have an emotion bias if we elicit a strong emotion like pure terror our brains treat that event as valuable otherwise why would we have not slept for days just because these stupid cartoon drills won't stop entering every single dream youtube relation more than anything i consider myself a filmmaker i
remember lens characteristics and lighting setups etc because all of this information relates to me relating information to yourself is something that happens consciously but still impacts your subconscious what's powerful is that if you start learning something new like music at first it won't relate to anything but soon that new information relates to previous information in that same category repetition now to get back to the nightmare trolls another strong reason why i remember these little men is the repetition of this memory i've thought about this memory consistently since i was five every time i've seen the
cartoon hobbit i remember them in my kitchen and on top of that i feel like this is my first memory so because of this whenever someone asks me what my first memory is i bring up the cold sleepless nights of 2008. repetition like this ensures any memory can stay in your mind no matter how bad you want those trolls to leave part two the memory system when the german sociologist nicholas lumen became a professor he was asked what his main research project would be in these three decades he published 70 books and 400 academic articles
on a huge variety of subjects from science to art to history to philosophy and progressed a multitude of fields to new heights this german lad is important to our story because he popularized method of expanding your memory called the zettelkasten method now this method isn't at all what this video is about but to put it simply the method consists of writing notes on small pieces of paper with a numbering system to be able to link new notes to other notes since lumen's focus was on writing books this makes sense he said books would write themselves
and if you had 90 000 notes of various subjects all linked together i'm sure that entire books were just swimming around the millions of words strung together on his desk however the zettlecast method failed to see a large opportunity here is where my memory system comes in see lumen and zedel caston both missed out on half a century of research in your cognitive memory that i talked about in the first part of this piece what i realized over a year ago was that if you take the science behind why we remember what we do and
our memory biases into account then a new method can be created one that works with the natural functions of the brain this method is the xettlecast method taken to a new height one that isn't just writing interconnected notes but instead one that makes its way back into our brain allowing us to remember everything that we want to and here's how it works the three rules are simplicity personal connection and to benefit from human specific memory biases the three key concepts are information translation and representation information goes in your head you translate it to the real
world on paper then you represent that information in a new way let me explain step one grab an index card step two title it with what you want to remember step three fill the card with information about the subject make it sound personal and very informal now this is crucial if the card sounds like a wikipedia article you failed step four write your own personal connection to the information this is huge once your brain recognizes what you wrote is important it just sticks it really is amazing how well this small step works step five draw
a picture this is the final step to being able to remember literally anything you write down by drawing the subject of this note it can't remain abstract the idea is able to be visualized and the representation of the information can now stay in your brain now this might sound simple after all it doesn't seem to be too different from jotting down a note like normal well i didn't experiment to validate this over the last year while building my collection of siriani notes i've also been making notes on my phone after a year of doing this
it's remarkable the difference of what i remember from typing a note versus doing this process of the memory system i will literally read a note on my phone and not even be able to remember how it ends that's how little of it remains in my brain for the siriani notes on the other hand i can't believe how much i remember after a bit less than a year the stack of notes has grown pretty substantially in the past year i've read books that i remember basically nothing from but i've also read books i took siriani notes
on and i could literally answer any question about it it's gotten to the point where anything important enters my head i immediately take a note on and so far they've all remained in my head memory based on intention now last part of this video talks about the mindset shift that comes with this memory system but before that i explained value in relation within the system but i haven't talked about the third concept which if you remember was repetition now this is a really cool benefit of having this whole system be physical see the stack of
the notes is always sitting on my desk when i'm bored i'll flip through the cards if i need to find one i'll end up reading dozens along the way because of how short they are you don't get this if the system is digital which is why i think that cards are the way to go the expansion of my memory that i can't even begin to describe has made it certain that i'm never going back to the normal lame version of memory but along with the literal benefits of this year-long experiment something else surprising started to
happen a substantial mindset shift towards new information this channel is about continuous learning and expanding your awareness what this new memory system has done for me is created this strange drive to learn more for the first time in my life i can literally quantify the knowledge in my brain which is like super trippy to think about the size of the stack is the amount of intentional information i've added to my mind the bigger the stack gets i just get to see how much more i'm learning and i get more driven to grow it this memory
system has literally gamified the expansion of knowledge which again i just can't reiterate is like crazy my progress within film photography engineering and cgi isn't just measured by deadlines and goals now now i can measure it by stacks of memory chunks sitting on my desk it really feels like it makes learning the goal of a project even before starting this youtube i've made probably over 30 cards on storytelling editing channel growth thumbnails how to relate complex ideas and so on to try and grow this channel my goal with this system is to just keep growing
it in some ways it's changed too over the last year i recently started writing examples instead of connections because i realized an example that relates to my life could hold even more value for how my brain interprets the information so to wrap things up i wasn't exaggerating when i said that this was the most important video i've released the system has transformed how i retain information and everything i'm able to do because of that if any of you try out or implement this method in your own lives let me know i'd be happy to answer
any questions uh the channel is still like really small so i'll see every comment um with that being said i've learned a lot over this last year and i attribute a hundred percent of that to this method so give it a shot i think it could change your life too i'll see you next time you
