Investing in our minds

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. It’s a phrase I’m sure you’ve heard or read at some point; but only recently did I stumble across the fact that it’s actually a tagline for an ad. A campaign started in the US some 40-odd years ago by an organisation called the UNCF (then the United Negro College Fund) to raise money and fund higher education for young African Americans. The message, in essence, was that there were a lot of young, bright kids who wouldn’t get a shot at college, unfortunately wasting their potential, their minds and their lives.

 

Interesting fact of the day aside, our story today carries a similar message. Not about educating children, but about improving our minds—more specifically, our memories.

 

In the fourth part of our monthly series—now a subscriber-only series, The Simplicity Paradigm, Saurabh Mukherjea and Anupam Gupta take a long hard look at the fickleness of human memory. Our minds are all too prone to mixing together different memories, or filling in gaps with imagined happenings, they write. This mental distortion of our past, naturally, then colours just how we image the future.

 

All well and good, you might say, but what then? Saurabh and Anupam lay down a series of tips and suggestions on how we can set about strengthening our capacity to remember, drawing on formal research and their own experiences. Memory, they say, is one mental muscle, so to speak, that benefits greatly from extensive and deliberate practice. It would be a waste not to hit the mental gym.

 

That reminds me: apparently, the UNCF, in 2013, decided to update their slogan (it had remained unchanged since 1972). “A mind is a terrible thing to waste… but a wonderful thing to invest in.”

 

Here’s our story, enjoy: https://the-ken.com/story/step-into-the-memory-palace/