The art of memory: Daniel Kilov at TEDxMacquarieUniversity
Hav­ing strug­gled with orga­ni­za­tional skills as a symp­tom of his poor mem­ory all through high school, Daniel sought out meth­ods to improve his mem­ory. It was then that he dis­cov­ered the “Art of Mem­ory”, a loosely asso­ci­ated group of mnemonic prin­ci­ples and tech­niques used to orga­nize mem­ory impres­sions, improve recall, and assist in the com­bi­na­tion and ‘inven­tion’ of ideas. These tech­niques are some­times referred to as mnemotech­nics, and are employed by mem­ory ath­letes to per­form remark­able feats of learning.

Shortly after­wards, Daniel sought out Australia’s most suc­cess­ful mem­ory ath­lete, Tansel Ali. Daniel was trained pri­vately by Tansel and at the 2011 Aus­tralian Mem­ory Cham­pi­onships Daniel man­aged to secure sec­ond place behind his coach and men­tor, and third place in the com­pe­ti­tion over­all. He also broke the Aus­tralian record for the abstract images event and is the offi­cial holder of that record, hav­ing mem­o­rized the order of 99 abstract shapes.

Daniel now espouses the value of mem­ory tech­niques as a poten­tial rev­o­lu­tion in edu­ca­tion, both in the tra­di­tional sense of the word and, because as a mat­ter of his­tor­i­cal fact, the art of mem­ory formed the cor­ner­stone of edu­ca­tion from the time of the Ancient Greeks, up until the renais­sance. When we use mem­ory tech­niques, we revolve back to the ancient and effec­tive art of learn­ing, mem­o­riz­ing and composition.

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