Eran Katz gives a talk on boosting memory power in Hanoi

Eran Katz can remember a number with 500 digits after one look at it.

The leading speaker on memory and intelligence stunned Vietnamese people in Hanoi Monday with what he called simple performances.

To name 20 objects back and forth, starting with any position asked by the audience, was part of the demonstration in the Israeli memory wizard’s talk about techniques to boost memory power.

The talk will be followed with a conversation with students of the Vietnam National University - Hanoi today.

Katz raised a VND100,000 note and asked people to say what the images on both sides were. No one could remember what exactly they’d seen.

It is normal that people don’t remember things they use every day as those things are too familiar for them to pay attention to, Katz noted.

He used the computer to stress the point further, saying if people don’t click “Save,” everything’s gone.

The holder of the Israeli Guinness Book of World Records title in memory stunts says he was born without any gift for memory.

His books: “Secrets of a Super Memory”; and “Jerome Becomes a Genius – The Jewish Way to Brain Power,” have been translated into Japanese, Thai, South Korean and have been on bestseller lists in those countries.

He advises people to spend more time listening rather than hearing, looking rather than seeing and to associate everything they sense to other strange and impressive objects or incidents.

The talk Monday also mentioned learning foreign languages. Katz said many Japanese and Korean people that he’d met hesitated to learn English as they were afraid that they’d get it wrong.

Katz said the learners should live in the language and consider it a kind of music.

When asked how to memorize faces and names of people, Katz said people tend to remember the things they like and are concerned about, and so, learning to be more concerned about things will improve memory.

Children hardly remember their lessons but they’re so good at memorizing names of football players, sports teams, actors or mange characters, Katz noted.

According to Katz, one of the worst things that people receive from modern life is laziness, both physically and spiritually.

People cannot remember the phone numbers of family members or friends as they have their cell phones to do that, for instance.

He left the audience with the message that people should really live and love every second of life, and learn to be surprised by everything like children, then they would see how lovely and memorable life is and they wouldn’t forget anything.

Katz will end his six-day visit to Vietnam tomorrow.

Reported by Huong Giang