#Do goldfish have bad memories how to

In writing the book, I’ve drawn on both my own real-world experiences as an actor using these strategies for myself, as well as my many years coaching and training other actors. You too could build a mind palace like Sherlock Holmes (image from Sherlock © BBC)

#Do goldfish have bad memories how to

You’ll discover how to harness these tools to strengthen your memory, and develop a personalised line-learning strategy that works for you and your acting process – one that is easier, faster and more enjoyable. It includes dozens of tips, tricks and techniques such as Memory Palaces (yes, like in Sherlock), Mental Maps, Creative Memorisation, Visual Cues and many more, along with exercises and examples to illustrate how they work in practice. For actors, the compelling reasons are usually the big rewards you’ll earn: increased confidence, a strategy to learn lines rapidly, the ability to make lines stick, and the chance to have more freedom in auditions and performance.īut what habits and routines should you be using? This is where my book, Learning Your Lines, comes in. Once these are in place, anyone can improve their memory. The good news, though, is that improving your memory is a skill, therefore it’s something you can learn! All you need is a set of compelling reasons and some good habits and routines. The bad news is that there is no magic bullet improving your memory is a skill, and like any skill, it will require time, effort and commitment. With regards to improving your memory, there is bad news and good news. ‘The truth is we all have fantastic memories but we tend to focus on the moments where it didn’t work so well’ But these are only a few of the jobs our memory performs, and like any set of challenges, they can be overcome with the right strategy indeed, if you were to think about all the memories you have stored throughout your entire life, you would start to realise that your memory is, in fact, phenomenal. The truth is we all have fantastic memories but we tend to focus on the moments where it didn’t work so well: the name you didn’t remember the fact that slipped your mind the location of your keys. However, when you approach any type of memorisation or learning with this type of belief, it’s going to increase your levels of anxiety and impact on your performance. You may even have past experiences to back both of these statements up.

Let’s say you have an audition tomorrow and you believe you have a poor memory this will make you believe perhaps that you ‘can’t do it’, or that your ‘memory isn’t good enough to learn lines quickly’. How good we believe our memory to be can have an impact on how we approach a situation. When I ask this question to a room of a hundred people, around twenty per cent believe they have poor memories (ranking themselves 1–3), seventy per cent believe they are average (4–7), and only a small percentage, usually around ten per cent, believe they have excellent memories (8–10). If you were to score your memory between one to ten, how good would you say it is, where ten is the best possible version and one is the memory of a goldfish?

Here, Mark Channon – performance coach, ‘Grand Master of Memory’, and author of Learning Your Lines – explains how to go about improving your memory, and creating a personalised line-learning approach you’ll come back to again and again. With practice, experimentation and patience, it’s possible to strengthen your memory, reduce that pressure, and find a memorisation strategy that fits into your own process as a performer. The pressures of line-learning can cause anxiety, and the fear of forgetting them can hit your confidence, your focus, and ultimately your performance – but it doesn’t have to be this way. Whether it’s a script for a play, scenes for next day’s shooting, or sides sent over shortly in advance of an audition, every actor will be familiar with the process of trying to get their lines off the page and into their brain.