Thread: Memory: the Forgotten Fundamental

If you want scientific this is a great place to go, they are very long discussions between a lot of scientists and monks:

Dialogues with the Dalai Lama - Mind and Life Institute

It was a while ago that I watched some of these but I think "2009 Mind and Life XVIII — Attention, Memory, and the Mind" was the one that touched on meditation, mindfulness and how it relates to memory quite a bit.

To sum it up; one of the things meditation does is build the Sati* faculty of the mind and it is inherently linked to memory. You can't remember something if you aren't aware of it in the first place, you also can't remember it if you don't find it significant somehow (which I talked a lot about in my MILD Mnemonics thread, basically lack of focus) and you also can't recall it if your mind is "blocked" (which can be from a lot of things), just to name a few issues.

A friend of mine once mentioned that he knows someone who sits in single pointed meditation while studying for exams and that is how he manages to memorise the large amount of content.

I suppose some people might not want to hear this (or sick of hearing it) but meditation is your "wonder drug" that builds all the basic skills needed for LDing. Mindfulness of the breath is a genius method of cultivation, you learn how to calm down, how to concentrate, how to return after distraction, builds your memory and task-switching and you can do it anywhere, at any time and in any state as long as you're still breathing.

Of course you can also substitute the breath for other things at your leisure, for example if you're doing sports if you don't keep your mind on the ball it might hit you in the face to remind you, but if you're doing seated meditation then every time you feel "oh, right, I was focusing on my breath, breath in... breath out... breath in... ooo butterfly, oh wait I was focusing on my breath..."** you've built your memory a little bit, so 5 minutes of meditation is 5 minutes of memory building, 20 minutes is 20 minutes of memory building, an hour is an hour of memory building (a bit simplified but basically).



* I don't know Pali but from my understanding this word describes everything you're talking about related to memory and LDing.

Sati (Buddhism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

** Sleep, sleep, sleep, dream, dream, dream, oh wait I was going to LD, LD, LD, LD.