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Published on January 20, 2008

In an age when power is measured in gigabytes, Eran Katz reminds us that electronic memories are useless if the gadgetry fails. "Did you ever see Bill Gates in the middle of a presentation when his Windows didn't work? When you have a technical failure, you're lost!"

Katz is a fan of technology, but he's a bigger fan of the human memory. The Israeli was in Bangkok last week en route to Hong Kong, where he was to conduct one of his memory-training workshops.

Back home, Katz holds the national record for remembering the most digits - he can store 500 and recover them anytime. He's trained half a million people in various organisations around the world - from IBM, Oracle and Coca-Cola to the Thai Chamber of Commerce - to use their memory more effectively.

His books, "Secrets of a Super Memory" and "Jerome becomes a Genius - The Jewish Way to Brain Power", are available in seven languages, with the latter just translated into Thai and currently a best-seller.

Katz, 42, is constantly hearing people say their memory has weakened as they've aged. It's a notion he scorns.

Memory isn't an innate ability we're born with and gradually wear out, he insists. It's a skill that can be trained, developed and fine-tuned.

Katz draws on the age-old Hebrew system, often found in religious texts, of ascribing numbers to individual letters. He also has a knack for turning numbers into words and weaving them into imaginative stories, making it easy to recall the component numerals.

He has his interviewers write down 40 numbers, and he thinks about them for a minute. He then repeats them in the correct order with his eyes closed, explaining that he's composed a scenario from the number series that he can visualise. Then he recites the numbers backward.

"For the numbers you wrote down I made up a story of a cow eating sesame seeds and potatoes, an imagined story. Imagination and association are the key factors in memory training."

The technique is useful in business, Katz says, especially when you're multitasking, such as juggling several phone numbers. Given a phone number, he doesn't write it down, he assigns each digit a letter in a word. The words representing different phone numbers become an easily remembered story.

Katz says you can be reading a newspaper in any foreign language in a month if you know just the 600 words most used in that language. If you learn 20 new words a day, you'll understand basic newspaper stories in a month.

He's taught his youngest daughter English with this approach.

"When I teach her a new word, like 'blue', I tell her to imagine a fish in a big blue ocean. For the word 'green' I ask her to visualise a lawn mower that's making a lot of noise cutting the grass. With the sound and picture, children will remember words and their meanings better.

"For difficult words like 'density', I told her to break it into two words - 'dense' and 'city'. She had no idea what 'dense' means, so I had her think of words that sounded like it. She came up with 'dance', and then combined that with 'city', and got 'dance city' - a place that's very crowded!"

A book on memory that Katz read when he was 15 soon had him showing off to classmates, but he admits the newfound skill made him a lazy student. He could memorise in a day what everyone else was spending a week on.

He decided to be a good student, but not the best.

"If you're the best student you're under a lot of pressure, either from your parents or your friends. The pressure reduces blood flow to the brain, so the brain isn't working efficiently."

Katz also benefited from the Jewish tradition of "artificial enthusiasm" - a matter of arguing aloud through a difficult issue by yourself, facing a wall.

"The gestures that you make while arguing with the wall somehow increase the blood flow to the brain, thus making it easier to remember less familiar subjects. I have always told students that enthusiasm and passion are very important in becoming a successful student. Memory by rote alone is a bad idea. You need to have thorough understanding - and passion."

Katz scoffs at the suggestion that Jews tend to be more intelligent, though the belief plays a role in "Jerome Becomes A Genius". Jews constitute 0.25 per cent of the world's population, yet 40 per cent of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. In 1950s America the most outstanding students in universities were Jewish.

This rise to prominence, says Katz, has more to do with "the need to survive".

"They have a bad and sad history. They have been subjected to persecution throughout their 2,000-year history. So they need to think smartly to survive.

"Yet for some reason, if you want to succeed, you have to be an outsider, to avoid going with the flow. Look at the best students in America now - they're either Chinese or Indian."

Manote Tripathi

The Nation