Here's a tutorial on how I've been using old video games to make my brain work gooder.
I've been doing a training program on a site called Memory League. The goal is to memorize the order of a set of 30 images in one minute.
Normally you can only really remember about nine or so things at a time, but the brain remembers places better than anything else, and that includes virtual places. The trick is to imagine the image onto a place you remember. A place I remember well is the first level of Doom.
Let's take the first five images from the session I did today. There's a river valley so let's stick that on to a pillar in the opening room of the level. Next is a lady in a field, she goes on the next pillar. Now there's a wooden decoration that doesn't immediately look like anything, but to me it sort of looks like a pair of fish monsters, they get to play in the pile of gore on the floor.
Now if you really want to make the images stick in your mind you create some sort of link between them. If your really really want to make the images stick you make that link a story. So "Once upon a time in a misty valley, a young maiden summoned her twin fish gods. Unfortunately in this economy the fish gods still had to go get an office job under a mean t-rex boss."
Repeat this process 6 more times, moving mentally around the environment, till you got all 30.
This may seem like a lot, but really it's a way to learn that takes advantage of how your brain wants to work. Again, this all took less than a minute.
My current project is to use this technique to memorize a book on drawing from memory.
