Kwik Brain Episode 24: Memorize Scripts & Lines Quickly (Hollywood Secrets Part 2)

Welcome to Kwik Brain, bite-sized brain hacks for busy people who want to learn faster and achieve more. I'm your coach, Jim Kwik.

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I know kung fu. Show me. Welcome back, Kwik Brain. How do actors memorize their lines quickly? Part 2. So if you haven't yet listened to part 1, make sure you do that first, because remember, this is not just a podcast. This is your step-by-step academy to better achievement. And I'm not your host. I'm more of your coach for a better brain. Now let's get back to how to memorize lines, scripts, or anything word for word.

The 7th R for remembering is called reform. Reform. What does reform mean? Reform means to change, right? You're going to change. So what are you doing? Once you go through and you have your script, you read your script, you've gone and reflected on it, you started to write it out, you started to role-play with individuals, what you're going to start doing after that, and you've used these apps and technologies and these great things, is you're going to start changing it a little bit, all right? Because this is how your brain and your memory works. It thrives on novelty. It thrives on novelty. Your nervous system lights up when it experiences something brand new. So what you're going to do as you're going through and you're rehearsing this information, I want you to change something or reform something, and that's the voice. You're not changing the words, just the voice that you're using as you're repeating it. All right, the voice. So what do I mean? Go through your script or your poetry, your poems, And what I want you to do is change the voice. What can you change about the voice? You could have different volumes, tempo, timbres, pitches, different accents. You could do it with a British accent, an Australian accent, a French accent. You could do it in the voice of your favorite animated characters like Mickey Mouse. So imagine you're going through and you're studying something brand new. Imagine what it would sound like and say it in another person's voice. Because the more novelty you add to something, the more memorable it becomes. That's why in the Kwik Recall and the masterclasses that we do and the retention that we do, we talk about, oh, how do you exaggerate it? How do you add emotion? How do you add action? How do you visualize it? It's all to make things novel. You're taking the ordinary and you're making it more extraordinary, more unforgettable in your mind. The 8th R for remembering your lines is rise. It means to rise up and get out of your chairs. Studies suggest that people who move around when they're studying and they gesture, they have emotion, remember much more than people who sit down and are stationary. Here's what you want to remember: as your body moves, your brain grooves. As your body moves, your brain grooves. So if you want to have people rise up and give you a standing ovation, you rise first. The 9th R for remembering your lines is recall. Recall. And these are the memory techniques. If you've gone through our quick recall class or our master class, these are the recall techniques that you've learned to be able to memorize things. So for example, rhyming, acrostics, visualization, you know, using the peg method, using the location method, using chain linking, using the alphanumeric code, all the different codes and systems that you learned, the 12 superpowers if you will, and all the lifestyle that you incorporated to be able to improve your memory. Things like your good diet and killing automatic negative thoughts and and exercise and brain nutrients and your positive peer group and keeping a clean environment and, you know, and sleep and rest. And on top of that, head protection and new learnings and stress management, all those things that you've learned in the system, apply your quick recall techniques. The 10th R for remembering your lines is ration.

Ration.

What does it mean? It means this: when you need to study an extensive amount of scripts Or poetry or word-for-word information, you want to break it down into chunks. You want to ration it, right? And so you want to be able to break it down into manageable bite-sized pieces. Don't try to take on too much in a short period of time. So what I do with this is I go through, and I'll go through X amount of lines that I want to remember over a period of time, and then I take a break. Remember, in psychology there's this phenomenon of, you know, your learning curve and your forgetting curve. But the 2 that stick out in my mind is something called primacy and recency. Primacy and recency. That means you tend to remember things in the beginning of something and you tend to remember things at the end of something. So for example, if you go into a room and you meet 20 strangers, you're more likely to remember the first few people you met at the party and then the last few people you met at the party. If I gave you a list of 20 words, let's say you didn't have history with all these You know, great techniques. You'd probably remember some of the first words and some of the last words. All right, now how do you use that when it comes to studying something and really rationing something? So let's say most people, they don't study for something, they cram, right? They cram. They don't study for 5 days or 5 weeks, and they just study for 5 straight hours. The challenge with that is, according to primacy, means they'll remember stuff in the beginning and then stuff at the end. But everything in between, they lose. Okay, primacy, recency. How do you pick up the information in between? You take breaks. So for number 10, make sure you break it down into manageable bite sizes and also ration your time so you create more primacy and more recency. The 11th R for remembering your lines is record.

Record.

You're recording yourself rehearsing on audio. So you could record it on your phone, you could record it onto an app, and then you're listening throughout the day. You're listening to it. And this is another one of your senses, right? We talk about kinesthetic learning through writing and through movements. We talked about visualization and location method and visualizing your speech. The auditory learning, for those people who love to learn through auditory and sounds, this is very powerful. So you're recording your presentation as you like it, and so it's perfect, and then you're listening it throughout the day. As you're driving, as you're working out, as you're going for a walk, as you're doing your laundry. You know, the best time for actually listening to it is right when you're in that, that state of relaxed awareness. Like when you're about to go to bed, listen to yourself when you're totally relaxed and you're in these alpha and theta states, which we're going to talk about. Information just comes in and you're owning that information because you're relaxed. So to remember your lines faster, make sure you record. The 12th R for remembering your lines is rouse. Rouse, like arouse. You're triggering something worth remembering. So here's how it works. Lots of our memories are triggered by our external environment. So they'll take people and they'll submerge them underwater with oxygen tanks, and they'll give them a list of words to remember. They'll take them out of the water to see how many of the words they actually recall. Then they'll put them back underwater and test them to see how many words they recall. Underwater. Which situation do you think people remember the most? Of course, underwater. Now why? What the researchers found was that the environment helped to anchor the information into their recall. So we know that the information and the memories get anchored to the environment. So how can you use this to help you to remember your lines? Well, this is how. They find that the people who study in the environment where they need to perform will recall more of the information. So for example, if you could study the place where you're performing, like on stage or in that boardroom or on that set, you're more likely to remember it. But what if it's not practical to rehearse or study in the place that you're going to perform? Well, here's what you could do. You could bring the environment with you.

How do I mean?

Out of the 5 senses that you have, which one is the strongest when it comes to your memory? It's your sense of smell, your olfactory, because your sense of smell, through survival, you had to be able to smell a poison to be able to remember if this is something that's good or bad for you, right? It goes right up to the brain. Now, here's what you want to do. When you're studying, you're preparing, you're memorizing your lines, you're studying your lines, you're doing all the other techniques, I want you to take a unique smell. Now, this could be a bubble gum, it could be a lip balm, it could be a cologne, it could be an essential oil, it could be a perfume. But here's the key: it has to be unique. It has to be, as we talked about before, novel. And what you're doing is you're studying the information and you're smelling this unique smell. And then when you need to be able to perform— let's say you're on set, you're at the wedding to give the toast, you're on stage, you're in front of a camera— and you want to be able to pull that script word for word for word, make sure you have that smell available. Use that same lip balm, use that same essential oil, use that same Cologne or that perfume, and it'll bring that information back like it was there. So there you have it, the 12 Rs for remembering your lines. And because we're abundant here together, I want to give you 2 more bonus Rs right now. The next R, the bonus R, is you want to relax. You want to relax and have fun with this because the biggest obstacle for your memory is ourselves. It's our own stress. When you're stressed, you create cortisol and adrenaline, and it's really great if you need to fight or flight, But it's not really good if you need to think. It's not really good if you need to study. It's not really good if you need to be able to memorize new information. So make sure you do what you need to, to relax and manage your stress. Deep breathing, meditation. I'm a big advocate for meditation. I've been meditating for years and years. Meditate for 20 minutes a day to help be able to manage your perspective, manage your physiology. Now when we're talking about relaxation, you have different brainwave states and there's one state I want you to be able to get into that's going to dramatically help you with your abilities to remember your So you have a beta state where you're most awake, and you have a delta state where you're fast asleep. The 2 states in between, the theta state is the state you're in right before you go to sleep or right when you wake up. That's the state they call creativity. All right, that's where Einstein came up with a lot of his formulas and his thought experiments, was that creative state right before or after you wake up. Now the alpha state is the state between beta and theta. The alpha state, they call it the state of a relaxed awareness. Remember, relaxation is the key. Now, why do you want to get into that alpha state when you're learning your script? Here's why. It's because according to science, you know, adult learning theory studies done at Harvard with Howard Gardner, you can only consciously pay attention to 7 plus or minus 2 bits of information. 7 minus 2 is 5. 7 plus 2 is 9. 5 to 9 bits of information. But your unconscious mind could process millions of bits of information, and that's your real genius. So getting in that alpha state is where your conscious mind is kind of set aside and your unconscious mind is just processing. Now, what puts you in alpha state? First of all, some television programs will do it. You ever see somebody watch sports or something that they're really into and you try to talk to them, but they're in a trance? They're just consciously not there. They're unconscious and information's just going in. And And they're like that trance state. If you have children, you know exactly what I'm talking about. But besides television, you could do it proactively. Here are 3 things that put you into alpha state to help you memorize your lines better. Visualization will put you into an alpha state. When you close your eyes and you visualize, you use your imagination, helps put you into an alpha state. The second thing that'll put you in alpha state, deep breathing. Deep diaphragmatic breathing will help put you into, into an alpha state. And finally, number 3. is certain music. Certain music will actually put you into an alpha state. Now I'm not talking about heavy metal or rap music. I'm talking about certain classical music, certain nature music. If you're looking at classical music, you want to look at the Baroque era, the Baroque era, because the music there tends to be about 60 beats per minute, which also harmonizes to the resting heart rate. All right. So music, specifically Baroque classical music, will help put you into alpha state. So when you're studying your scripts, And you're rehearsing, when you're reading it, have that music in the background. And also build in to relax is this thing called rest, because rest is where their memories are really consolidated. You know, they say like you don't build muscles when you're working out, you're actually building muscles when you're sleeping, right? You're tearing down your muscles and you're breaking them down when you're working out at the gym, but you're actually building them back up when you're sleeping. It's similar to your mental muscle that you could learn something throughout the day, but when you're actually resting, that's why you're consolidating the information. from your short-term to your long-term memory. It's also when you're sleeping that a lot of your imagination, your memories really flourish. You know, they say that a lot of the big inventions and creative arts actually came from people who are sleeping in their dreams. It is said that Mary Shelley actually came up with Frankenstein in a dream. You know, that Yesterday from the Beatles came from a dream, that the sewing machine by Elias Howe was actually created in a dream. So here's the lesson: make sure you rest and make sure you relax. So finally, the last bonus R for remembering your lines is reward.

Reward.

And here's what you want to do. If you're going to take the time to study something and if you're going to go through and practice something, you want to make sure that you give yourself positive reward because the opposite is also damaging. That if you go through and you actually punish yourself and you're hard on yourself, it won't make it better. They've done studies with procrastinators. They found out those procrastinators that were hard on themselves Actually procrastinating even more. So similar to your memory, don't punish yourself, but reward yourself when you make progress. Because here's the thing, when you're practicing and you're dedicated and you're disciplined to studying your art and, you know, and this script that's in front of you, make sure you reward your practice because practice makes progress. So think about something that you could reward yourself either externally or internally that you're going to give to yourself and allow yourself If you do this correctly, if you do this right, if you do this well, if you do the practice, because practice makes progress.

Okay, here's my question to you. Which of these Rs resonate with you the most? I want you to let me know and follow and tag me on social media @JimKwik, K-W-I-K, and tell us, how are you going to apply what you just learned today to activate more of your quick brain? Want to double your brain speed and memory power? If you'd like to learn rapidly and get ahead faster, I'd like to give you my brand new Quick Brain Accelerator program. You will discover exactly what I teach my clients to learn, read, and remember anything in half the time.

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