Bryan's Brain Bits

Memory Training Journals
1

Hello!

I feel stupid! I will try to become less so! Yes, my premise was stolen from Meepster the Unstupid. Or rather I should say I was inspired by her to finally stop lurking and try to commune.

I imagine it’s fine to create a journal as my first post?

I’m primarily interested in how the memory (and sport-adjacent) training might affect my day to day and areas of interest.

I’m starting with setting 30 minutes aside everyday to:

  1. Build a PAO system (just the P for now).
  2. Reading Benjamin’s Secrets of Mental Math.

This is in addition to my usual reading and studying so I expect that my usual inclinations will serve as enough practice for what I gain from the above. If they turn out not to be, I’ll revise.

And that’s it!

I hope to become more useful to the forum as I learn, but maybe to not leave this first post too empty, here’s something cool I figured out independently a few days ago:

It’s pretty easy to square two-digit numbers in your head if you use a few rules of algebra:

34^2 = (30 + 4)^2 = 30^2 + 2(30 \times 4) + 4^2

Try it! It’s really obvious in hindsight, but not something I ever tried with mental arithmetic until a couple days ago.

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2

I love tricks like that, thanks for sharing!

The distributive property of multiplication over addition strikes again!!

Keep posting. A journal is a great first post.

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