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The Memory Masters
Vaystrem writes "Wired's Article 'The Masters of Memory' details the outcome of the recent U.S. Memory Championship ,where 'three dozen people who had, in just five minutes, memorized the positions of 52 cards in a shuffled deck and were now happily organizing cards in a new deck into the same order as the pack they had memorized.'" The article includes details of "the mind numbing upcoming world championship. Could you in a half hour 'memorize a random string of thousands of 1s and 0s'?" I'm still working on the mnemonic alphabet.
I'm a geek, memory is what I use computers for so I don't have to. (besides HD mem storage dosent frag out after a hard weekend and a keg of beer)
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Crap, what was I going to post about?
(the quote is limited due to the size of the heading, but 10 is right out!)
... It really does seem to go something like 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,lots. We seem to have a distinction of the innate "three-ness" of a scene, for example, and don't need to count to know that the quantity of X is three.
:-) The thing is that we can do it recursively, with a bit of effort, so you remember group A is (21,63,37,78,39) and group B is (25,544,62,150,311). It's easier to recall both sets if you first subdivide into the largest quantum you can most-easily recall, and remember the sets individually. Normally you can do this for the number of sets in your personal quantum, so if you can easily remember 5 numbers in a set, this helps you remember 25. It's not "free" of effort, but it's a lot easier than remembering 25 numbers straight off..
The brain seems to actually have the sort of grasp of numbers that we sometimes ascribe to "Neanderthals"
Different people vary with the maximum innate value they just grok, with most people coming in about 5 or 6, rarely do you get 7, and vanishingly rarely do you get 8.
What has this to do with memory, you cry! Well, in the same fashion, we can innately recall small numbers of things, without doing an exhaustive search. This is useful for PIN numbers
Hack the system! exploit the underlying nature of your brain!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
But then I got high.
I feel obligated to reply to this story.
The Vegas Casino Consortium. All winners will receive lifetime bans in every casino in the world.
I'm not even going to bother to RTFA, I won't remember it anyway ;)
It's 42...
(Sorry I couldn't Resist)
If technology advanced enough that you could download memories from the brain of someone with extremely good memory, would the brain be an illegal recording device? I read once that your brain can recall almost everything. Some of the material merely needs coaxing out (like with hypnosis). Hmmm....
So I'm a pervert. Welcome to the Internet.
I'm would say I'm not so good at strings of numbers or names or anything I have to remember in a short period, but I remember the place of everything in my bedroom. We've done some tests where a friend would slightly move one cd case (out of hundreds) and I could pick out what had changed. I can also remember thousands of songs. Not just the lyrics, but I can replay them in my head like I was hearing them on the radio. I guess these are more natural (hunter-gatherer) than the list-based stuff I'm not so good at.
When they're not in competition they're memorizing 1's and 0's for me. I keep them in my basement as a backup in case my harddrives crash.
Any system admin would love these guys! Now we can safely create default passwords such as: fG2ajf(Ak&f235Afj!^pt3p%A$2 Without fear of the user writing them down!
He has stolen the Intellectual Property of my program.
open4free
Memorizing the positions of 52 cards? It's a good thing this event didn't happen in Las Vegas.
The parent was the first of the "forgetful" posters.
You just don't like that you're on my foes list, Mr Troll :)
Open source program for training mnemotechnic memory:
Mnemesis
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I suffer from CRS..
(cant remember shit).
-dirtbag
I guess the thinking is, "well they do very well on tests". Sure, that's because they memorized everything. But do they Understand? There's a difference between knowing something, and really understanding what it means. I really think schools should focus more in testing how well a student really understands a subject, perhaps demonstrate the ability to teach it to someone else.
In medical school we certainly benefited from mnemonics for all sorts of things from cranial nerves to biochemical enzymes, but these guys are on a different level. Of course it could be reasoned that they are able to make other associations that seem logical (perhaps) that enable recall much easier.
Colors, musical notes, mathematical formulas......whatever makes sense.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Anyone who disagrees with you gets on your foes list and is called a troll?
Lame.
These guys are remarkable, no doubt about that. But the main reason that they are able to have such phenomenal memories is that they can easily come up with quick and easy pheunomics so they can remember things like orders of cards, long poems, and so on; things they are basically familiar with. I would be interested to see how well they could look at a series of chineese characters and were told to memorize 100 of them and then write them down. I would presume that to anyone who doesn't know chineese, it would be like just looking at a picture and then trying to copy the lines, something that you really can't put a pneunomic too.
Waaah. He called you a TROLL. Cry home to mommy!
Where can I download the patch for the faulty entry in my long division tables?
In Schacter's memory book, an anecdote is presented about the 1999 National Memory Champion. She commented that she relied on post-its to get through the day.
It's not really ironic because memory competitions test how transient your memory focus is. Post-Its help those with attentional problems of memory.
In other words, these memory champions don't have all-around good memory skills.
I've often wondered how the professionals, or even people with more than an average ability to recall do it. I've heard of two different ways. One is to make up a rhyme or a "keyword" to jog your memory of some object, or some series of objects.. The other is to have a snapshot or a visualized picture of something in your head.
I seem to personally work along the snapshot method, as I suspect many others do. If I close my eyes, I can visualize a page in a text, or a license plate, or a face. Somewhat imperfectly, but it's possible. However, these seem to be for details that I've observed. If I didn't consciously "notice" some aspect of a car, for instance, I couldn't recall it later; it's not in my mental picture of the car.
Unfortunately, this method seems to suck for memorizing sequences of things, such as a deck of cards. I simply cannot remember more than 20-30 cards in sequence using this method.. For things like poetry, complete with punctuation and spelling as in the original, I'd assume that the "snapshot" method would prove more accurate. But card decks require a completely different method of memorization..?
I took heart from the "practice daily" advice though.. Admittedly, it's more than a bit frustrating when you can't even remember all of one card pack, but these people can just breeze through 22!! card packs and get 90% of their answers correct
An informal study of a single website for memory shows that if you are a world memory champion you have a good change of losing the basic ability to formulate English sentences:
"If you are a already memoriser..."
(from the front page of the linked website)
Who needs memory when you've got, uh, um, what was it? Dang.
Smokers
You are troll.
Take some poem, lyrics of a song, some text you know by heart.
Pick all first (last) letters of each word. Include all punctation marks when needed.
Convert to 31337 H4X0R speech.
On some specific pattern (i.e. first letter of every verse) add Shift.
Trivial to make up on the fly.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Just to save anyone else the time it took to check, in the current world ranking of top 129, 96 were male and 33 female. And, yes, I know that this isn't really statistically valid for a number of reasons as far as applications to the real world are concerned, but I still found it interesting.
A summary can be found here
"I wrote them down in my Diary so that I wouldn't have to remember!"
do you actually need to memorize random strings of numbers or letters or positions of cards in a deck or whatnot? Short of trying to memorize 150 digits of 'pi' in middle school for a contest (which was won by someone with "photographic" memory who didn't even look at the numbers until the night before) I can't recall a single time that truly random memorization has been neccessary or useful.
Instead, our brains are much better suited to recognizing patterns, which is why we can, as actors in play, for example, memorize hundreds of lines. Of course, I myself usually forget all the lines in a script/song/whatever within a couple weeks after the last performance, but the point is that seldom do we need to memorize anything that is not structured and patterned.
So, how 'smart' does this really make you? Sure, it's impressive, and I respect the people who can do it... but they don't make me feel stupid. It's like people who can juggle--hey, it's cool and all, I wish I could do it too... but if I can't, no biggie!
3.1415926535897932384626338327... that's all i can ever remember, and I probably messed up somewhere.
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
A good memory would help the /. editors: We wouldn't see any more dup articles!
Best Buy can have you arrested
His books Super Power Memory and other related books are just awesome. Yeah they are a little tough to get started if you are a totally lazy person, but if you are willing to put in a little effort, he shows you how you can have a great memory within a matter of days.
I wonder why there is not much scientific research in this exciting field. I wish there were lot of scientists figuring out how we can use our brain better and teaching us like Harry lorayne did.
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
A few weeks ago at school there was a competition to see who could memorize the most decimal places of pi. The winner memorized around 160 places I think.
We all live in a #FFFF00 submarine...
So you are?
010O 0O0O O010 O010 O100 010O O0O0 0010
O01O 0O0O O0O1 O110 O110 1O0O O0O0 01O0
O0O1 0O0O O0O0 1010 O101 0O0O O0O0 10O0
O0O0 1O0O O0O1 O010 O100 1O0O O0O1 0O00
O0O0 010O O010 O010 O100 010O O010 0O00
OO0O 0O1O O1O0 O010 O100 0O1O O1O0 0O00
0O0O 0O01 O1O1 O1O1 1O10 1O1O 10O0 0O00
open4free
I'm not a troll. However, the AC who criticized me for labelling the guy who criticized the other guy as a troll.... IS a troll.
Working in trivia as much as I do, I find it interesting how easy it is to convince people that they know something that in fact isn't true.
One example: They'll read a question too quickly, recall a question they've seen earlier, and then give the answer to the earlier question, not the one that's actually in front of them. They'll then be befuddled why they missed the new question for a while until the actually reread all the words slow enough to see the change.
I think the blurb is wrong...the Wired article is actually titled "The Idiot-Savants" and the competition is called "Useless Party Tricks".
I feel compelled to correct you:
5 10 58209
... memorize some useful stuff NOW so that you'll have it for your whole life. I recommend the periodic table.
3.141592653589793238462643387950288419716939937
I memorized this when I was about 12 years old. Interestingly, many of the memory traces that I laid down then are still good, but stuff that I memorized at age 22 is not as permanent.
So if you're lucky enough to be reading this before the age of 18
The AC is not a troll
No, the AC is.
Seems like you could make memorizing a long binary string into a much simpler task. Just break the string into groups of four and translate each group to hex and you've already reduced the number of characters you need to remember to 250. Another option would be to apply some simple compression routine.
However, you are.
... here at /. need to take some cues. After all how hard is it to remember that its a DUPE!!!
I remember an episode of Connections that touched on the subject of memory. Specifically the now mostly lost ability to memorize, for example, a lengthy tale or song in one listening and then being able to recite it mostly verbatim. Similarly, the people building the great cathedrals and castles of the past had no blueprints as we know them. The shape and placement of every stone was in the master builder's head. This tends to be supported by the story I heard of the man responsible for building a stronghold at the entrance of the Silk Road into China. He was asked how many bricks he would need, gave a very specific answer, and the response was that he couldn't possibly know that accurately, surely you want a few for margin. He asked for ONE additional brick which rests to this day on a ledge above the main gateway. Amazing.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
Do not post following message either
That one is, most definitely, a troll.
Photographic memory. Some people have that, like the british guy on television who flew in a helicopter over London and then did a "quick" sketch over the whole city. He even got the window count right on the buildings.
I feel the biggest brain fart EVER coming on right about .a;ksdj;fakj;lkjad
Well, here we have some people people who won't have any trouble remembering their ip addresses when we start using ipv6.
"Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin."
-John Von Neumann
Any decimal number has approximately 3/10 the number of characters of it's binary equivalent. There is no exponential change in the shear number of characters to process.
[e.g. 2^10=1024, 2^20=1M etc]
Thus If I encode my data from binary to HEX, I get better "compression" of information.
Note: IIRC, according to Algorithmic Information Theory, if I were trying to encode "all the data of the universe", then the fact that my compression scheme only reduces the amount of information by a constant and the computation for conversion would probably be so incredibly expensive, there exists no computational gain from Mnemonics.
However, if I'm given a piece of paper and allowed to use a clever encoding scheme than might be able to "memorize" anything. I only need to memorize a smaller number and the program, which encodes it. Thus deriving my result. Remember, by the rules of this competition I have more time than memory here. Frankly, I think an encoding competition would be more interesting.
I'm curious as to how this philosophy relates to AIT, Wolfram's Principle of Computational Equivalence, and foundational mathematics.
"There are two kinds of science -- physics and stamp collecting"
-Ernest Rutherford
(Or has he quoted similarly, if I wanted to memorize science, I would have studied botany)
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
Does anyone remember that Happy Days where the Fonz helps Richie and Potsie study for a Biology test by turning it into a rock song that they play in class? Was that just a weird dream I had? I swear it actually happenned. Well, ever since then I turn things into songs in my head to remember them -- and it works really well. I mean, I added a tune to the Constitution and remembered the entire first two articles. It's kinda scary.
I'm pretty sure this how those guys memorize a string of 100 random 1's and 0's - by memorizing a string of 13 numbers between 0 and 255 (it helps if you can count in binary)
YAWN...
Do not follow the posted message with anything.
After reading the examples in the article & on the memory champ's WWW site, the obvious question how well do they retain the memory over time?
In the competitions, there is a time component. They have a very limited amount of time to commit the information to memory. Then, they must regurgitate it within a short period of time. If they were asked a {day, week, month, year} later, what percentage would be retained?
Can their techniques be used to retain multiple unrelated data sets simultaneously?
Basically, the question is: Is this merely a good parlor trick, or a useful mechanism for real-world use?
At least some people will be able to memorize their IPv6 addresses!
On one hand we talk about PDA's, cellphones and mobile computing which serve as reminders (or are sposed to) with their alarms, calendars etc and on the other hand we have a bunch of people trying to memorize the weirdest things. :-)
These things things only numb your memory more than anything else and id love to have a nice memory lesson once in a while.
Imagine carrying your HI TECH cellphone and having your whole phonebook memorized!
Lord of the Binges.
1) Toss in the two jokers and you just might see a human buffer-overrun error.
2) Is note-taking completely illegal or can they say it's their pagefile?
3) Will narcotics be allowed as HIMEM.SYS?
4) For a two-deck challenge, will they have to modify their autoexec.bat the way I had to tweak it to run Doom II on 4MB of RAM?
5) Sabotaging the contest involves the RAMBUS method -- where one causes a hardware failure by striking the shuttle service used by the contestants with a larger vehicle. (Inspiration, GTA -- max SysReq 8MB Memory Card)
The human brain has a limited space for memory, so if you try to remeber too much you will end up forgetting other important stuff. That guy that memorized the 3000 long binary number probably can't remember his mother maiden's name now, or where he parked his car.
One of my psychology books told the story of a world champion mnemonics person who did hack his grasp of numbers and alphabets. He quite sadly recounted the story of how he cannot now read a book without every letter bringing up some string that he has remembered in the past.
After I read that I desperatly avoided mnemonics.
"It has always been this way and it won't change, god bless the fucked up USA" The Briefs
Remembering a sequence of 52 cards is actually not that hard. Well, okay, it's hard, but it's doable. I used to be able to do it with relative success, but I haven't practised in over 3 years.
:)
There are several techniques, and most of them use grouping and storylining. For example, this is the one I used:
Every card gets three possible meanings -- a subject, an object, and an action. Then you draw the cards in threes and make up a story on the spot. E.g. say you drew a two-hearts, jack-spades, and six-diamonds. In your designation chart, these cards have the following meanings:
two-hearts: subject: Madonna; action: seduce; object: boobies
jack-spades: subject: drug dealer; action: wave above one's head menacingly; object: bling-bling
six-diamonds: subject: bank attendant; action: pay; object: a wrapped packet of dollars.
So your combination becomes: Madonna menacingly waving a wad of dollars above her head. The key here is to visualize these things and make up a continuous story, as if describing what happened to you on the way to work. (Out of the door, I saw Madonna waving menacingly a wad of dollars above her head. I came to talk to her, and apparently she was angry because a drug dealer shot her car (jack-spades/three-spades/four-diamonds). I offered her a ride, and on the way to her house we saw from the windows of our car Saddam Hussein trying to hump a church building (king-spades/four-hearts/ten-crosses).). It's important to tie the previous action to the next (saw through the windows of our car), so you don't lose the sequence of events.
The cards are grouped by subjects -- all hearts have to do with sex, all diamonds have to do with money, all spades have to do with criminal element, and all crosses have to do with cults and religion. Usually just three possible meanings per card is not enough, because it can always be that you just CAN'T make something meaningful out of a combination ("Bank teller seducing an electric chair" takes... a lot of imagination to visualise, though if you manage, you'll never forget a six-diamonds/two-hearts/five-spades. Ever).
Sometimes you sure make up very amusing combinations. E.g. among the ones I recall is Saddam Hussein licking a cash register (king-spades/ace-hearts/ten-diamonds), Marylin Monroe wearing a punctured car tire on her neck (queen-hearts/queen-diamonds/three-spades), and Bill Gates seducing a bill fold (king-diamonds/two-hearts/two-diamonds), though this one could have actually happened for all I know.
The weirder you make your combination, and the more vividly it stands out in your imagination, the higher is the chance that you will remember it.
Mnemonics is quite amusing. It helped me make it through college without ever taking notes and learn three foreign languages. Definitely a very useful skill to learn and master.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Being a geek with no friday evening social life to speak of, I got drunk and took the IQ test and ended up with 129 on it. LOL! And this while I couldn't stand/walk/think straight...had problems during the Memory section though ;)
According to the website 130 is considered "genius" level :) Wish I hadn't been drunk while taking it :)
The website has pretty interesting statistics, btw...IQ of blondes vs students vs teachers vs doctors etc.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Though binary is the best way for a computer to organize information maybe a person doing it would be better off trying to convert to a decimal number or hex of shorter length and memorize that? Or even base 26 (guess why)... or mentaly create an image with a white vs black pixel by pixel interface. Hmmm. Well my memory is too short to deal wtih this problem...
I do this trick for friends all the time. It is fun with cards...
:)
You can use it for any serialization of numbers, and cards are very simple. You can also do this with binary (but be good at converting two digit decimal to binary and back).
Develop a set of references for most two digit numbers that have meaning to you.
Some I use for example are: 07 - think of James Bond, 22 think of 22 caliber pistol, 13 think of unlucky. It also helps to have a set for single digits, 7 think of lucky for example.
Then when you look at a series of numbers, all you do is make a story to fit the numbers together.
For example:
1307877299220713442
The story I would make up to remember this:
Unluckily, James Bond found a RX7 to get away back when I was born. During the getaway, agent 99 shot a 22 pistol at Bond but she was unlucky, and got shot with a 44 magnum twice.
(The story is often shorter in your head, but I wanted to make it readable for you guys)
In essence instead of remember numbers, you are remembering the plot to a story.
Without looking above here is the number set: 1307877299220713442
13 - Unlucky
07 - Bond
87 - Year of RX7 I had a long time ago
72 - Year I was born
99 - Agent 99 (from Get Smart)
22 - 22 pistol
07 - Bond again
13 - Unlucky
44 - 44 Magnum
2 - Twice
If you get your associations down for the number pairs you can create little stories and easily remember 100 digit or more sequences of numbers.
For card tricks, just add color to the story, I use blue and green to denote the difference between hearts and clubs, or sometimes will mix in the heart or spade or club reference into the story (i.e. the Queen took her Spade, etc)
Most people are impressed if you can just remember the number sequence of a deck of cards and not even bother with the suit, so if the extra colors for the suits throw you, just do the number order of the cards.
Start with a deck of cards, and I will guarantee you in a few hours or day, you can easily do this.
Just make up the story as you look through the deck, the faster you know your associations for a story, the faster you can remember the cards. You should be able to remember an entire deck by literally flipping through them as fast as you can read them.
Happy memorizing...
...Then thou shalt count to 3, no more, no less 3 shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be 3. 4 shalt thou not count, neither count thou 2, excepting that thou then proceed to 3. 5 is right out... dont kill monty python by quoting it wrong :S
If at first you DON'T succeed, Skydiving is NOT for YOU!!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-06 -18&res=l 0 -29&res=l 2 -26 6 -12&res=l 8 -20&res=l 9 -13&res=l 9 -15&res=l 0 -25&res=l 2 -18&res=l 2 -25&res=l 3 -16&res=l 5 -25&res=l 6 -27&res=l 7 -02&res=l
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=1999-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2000-1
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-0
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2001-0
Yeah, unfortunately, the brain is better than '3' for just about everyone, holy hand grenades notwithstanding...
Simon
Perhaps the most famous, certainly one of the most cited, papers in cognitive psychology is George Miller's 1956 paper "The magic number seven plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information." The 7+/-2 rule is one of the few, true "laws" in psychology. It describes the number of items that can be held online in working memory by the average individual. I won't even begin to touch here the myriad theories that proposes mechanisms for this limited capacity.
The technique you talk about regarding the grouping of multiple memoranda into a single unit is called "chunking" and was studied by another great in psychology, the late Herb Simon of CMU. He and Bill Chase found that chunking was basically what set chess masters apart from novices. They saw entire board configurations at once, rather than the relation of individual pieces.
The ability to appreciate the numerosity of multiple items without counting is called subitizing. I know less about this, but the average person can subitize up to about five items.
Anway, just wanted to give credit where it's due for what has become pop psychology fodder.
Fascinating.
:) especially if you have methods that allow speed and accuracy and you grok computers.) It's not a conscious process - more like a overlaid visual on my sight field that mentally 'marks' the objects as they're counted. Hard to describe but very real to me.
:) Heh. My circulation manager when I was a paperboy a bazillion years ago always thought I was weird because I could count the rolled papers in the bundle in just a few seconds... well, he can bite me :)
How does that relate to visually counting items? I'm not a savant, but where I work I've had/developed an ability to count large numbers of items by what I could call the "two sets of five" method; if I'm doing inventory I can count items, without actually sorting them, by the ten - I 'see' two sets of five, the next two sets of five, etc - brain processes 10 10 10 10 5 1 = 46 - enter it in the Telzon and next batch (yes, I do inventory control, but it pays well
As long as I can remember I've tended to mentally sort numbers, objects, etc that way. It's different with counting letters in a sentence (there I do it in groups of four, almost like a chanted cadence in my head); numbers I tend to do like you describe but in groups of five. Now as I sit here and type this I see the process of sorting my sentences out in groups the same way before they're typed.
Wow. I've wondered about this for years but never did any actual research on it. For me I find that the way I'm memorizing depends on what I'm memorizing - like I said above, it's different for different applications, but they all share the same core process.
Neat to see that I'm not insane
Does this qualify as reverse engineering of the brain, and can I be sued by God under the DMCA for it? *grin*
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
I more than doubled the previous first-trial correct score during memory trials at my undergrad, and these were nonsense sentence-pairs (not even normal grammatical structure), where key words of either sentence would be stated, and I'd have to repeat the key words (or the whole sentence) from the other. Two wrong first trial, zero second, zero third (thus, done). Ok, take the morning off!
The "secret"? Association. For every sentence, I matched words to visual images as they might appear in an episode of Cheers. (this was awhile ago) The two I had trouble with -- these were the two I had trouble making "episodes" out of in my head.
Were I doing a deck of cards, I'd tell a running mental story with the cards as characters, in order to keep their order straight. I don't actually think this would be that big a deal, unless the time constraints were severe.
I also, as an aside, have a terrible memory day-to-day, which I blame on simply not putting the effort in (conspicuously, some will note, "people facts" -- birthdays, names, and the like).
The story you are referring to is the true account of one the most famous subjects in psychology--"S" studied by the Russian neurologist AR Luria. He authored a book called "The Mind of A Mnemonist: A Litte Book About a Vast Memory." The man could not forget anything and was tortured his whole life by it. Highly recommended reading.
The cranial nerves are Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear, Trigeminal, Abducens, Facial, Auditory, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus, Accessory, Hypoglossal.
Now the lame-o PhDs like to remember this with On Old Olympus's Tall Top, A Finn And German Viewed All High or something like that.
Med students have this classic:
Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel A Girl's V*****, Ah Heaven!
I was checking out the rules for memorizing binary numbers and stumbled over something odd.
You get 30 min to memorize it, but 60 min to recall it.
You would think that it would take more time to memorize it, than to recall it. But maybe the speed of recalling is tampered by the speed of writing down 1's and 0's?
Based on own 'research' i concluded that with normal speed you can write 90-110 1's 0's per minute. The world champion of 2003 had scribbled down 3009 1's and 0's. So that would've taken him between 27-33 minutes. He memorized them in 30 (or less) minutes, meaning this guy can memorize binary numbers faster than i can write them down! But then again, why did he get 60 min to write them down? Do they use special recalling techniques in which you don't continuesly write those numbers?
It is in violation of United States copyrighted law to read the following message unless you have been licensed to do so
I have a hard enough time just remembering my name! That's why mom always writes it on my underwear. :D
I suffer from CRS you insensitive clod!
Can't Remember Shit
http://www.kubuntu.org/
...
First, the set up.
You have to hype up your memory abilities, subtly
then you start flipping cards over.
you remeber the first eight and the last 5.
you bluff the rest.
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This is a typical slashdot post. The poster is trying to prove how "special," or better he is, than you. Obviously, this is to make up for the fact that he himself does not think so. I know you want some sort of reaffirming "yes, you're special" and a pat on the head, but it's not the case. Basically, you're just chunking stuff, which is a natural and essential function of human memory. Sorry.
I just remember
1307877299220713443 - 1
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was just thinking that for the "thousands of 1s and 0s" it would be a lot easier to convert the string into it's 8 bit ASCII equivalent and memorize that, and then decode it back when its time to perform.
Sorry, but it just is. I mean, the way my own memory works just makes no sense. People can tell me things to remember and I just can't. It's not that I don't pay attention when they tell me, it's just after they tell me, it's gone.
On the other hand, I remember things vividly from as early as 2 years old (events, dreams, etc). I remember phone numbers and lock combinations from childhood (I'm 35 now). Numbers have always been easy for me, though. I see patterns in them and tend to remember the patterns. I have an almost inexhaustable reserve of useless trivial knowledge and God knows why I remember it all. I excel at Jeapordy and Wheel of Fortune. I can understand (read and spoken) 9 languages, but I can only speak 2 of them.
But ask me to remind you of something in 20 minutes, or tomorrow, or next week, and there's about a 95% chance I'll forget. Ask me what I did 3 days ago and I'm more likely to get it confused with something I did 2 or 4 days ago.
I consider my memory excellent... For some things. For others, it's just atrocious.
The number is not seven, it is seven plus or minus two. The originator is George Miller. The theory is information processing. The reference is: Miller, G.A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
[Available at http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html]
The concept of putting more things together in groups to remember more than seven plus or minus two is called "chunking". The telcos paid close attention to this work. When it became obvious people would need more than 7 numbers for phones worldwide, they came up with "chunks" such as area codes and prefixes.
Although less famous, the work of Miller's to have more impact was the "test-operate-test-exit" processing theory developed with Galantner and (my teacher) Pribram. It was designed to directly replace the outmoded "stimulus-response" concept. They derived it from figuring out how their new PDP (a 3, I believe) calculated. Parallel neural processing was part of that theory. http://tip.psychology.org/miller.html
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Forming the subject matter into a song can help in remembering all kinds of stuff, I remember on a german course for beginners during the first lesson our teacher taught the class this song ryming to "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes", excuse the spelling:
Ich bin auslander und spreche nicht gut deutsch
Ich bin auslander und spreche nicht gut deutsch
Bitte langsam, bitte langsam
Bitte spechen Sie gangs langsam
Ich bin auslander und spreche nicht gut deutsch (yee haa!)
Thanks Goethe Institute, these lines are burnt into my synapses forever.
Of course I can't remember the teacher's name something like Frau Von Studdel
Back in the days of the dot com boom in Silicon Valley, you practically had to remember the locations where the doors of the Caltrain carriages were likely to open. This wasn't as difficult as it seems though, since there was a sign indicating to the train driver where he should stop the cab (if not just the train). However, sometimes the train would overshoot, so people would have to frantically run along the platform. In Summertime, parents and schools would reserve the last carriage for children's parties. So people would have to run even further.
Eventually, we turned this into a casino game: Caltrain Casino
Each turn was represented by two or three throws of the die/dice.
The first throw represents which carriage of the train you have chosen. The second throw represents which event has happened. The scoring is as follows:
[1] Train is completely full and doesn't stop - you lose.
[2] Last two carriages are reserved for school trip - if you threw a one or two, you lose, otherwise you win.
[3] The carriage you chose was completely full - If your first throw was three or higher, you lose, otherwise you win.
[4] Train overshoots. If your first throw was three or less, you lose, otherwise you win.
[5] Train overshoots by half a carriage. Take another throw. If evens you win, odds you lose.
[6] Train arrives normally. You win.
The odds are 50/50 that you will win or lose.
Could there _be_ a cognitive function of humans that is rendered any more obsolete by technology than edetic memory? Not even arithmetic is as 'rote'.
Seastead this.
There's nothing challenging about memorizing a sequence of playing cards. It's really easy if you use a simple trick. Ummmmm... Unfortunately I ahhhhh... forgot what the trick is.
I can memorize that... but only up and down the driveway... uh oh! wapner...
e.
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You refer of course to Millers magic 6 (plus or minus a bit).
There are many forms of memory. Fodors 'modularity of mind' which is actually pretty unreadable was my text in cog sci for this and I think there were at least 5 distinct 'types' depending on function.
Many of us can master great feats of long term sequential encoding, for example I know the first page of pi and can recite it as a party trick, but if interrupted I have to start from the beginning. That is not the same as visual memory where I could just look at the number in my head, yet some people are adept at this form of encoding. I tend to also a good memory for what is said (aural) and can often quote people literally without much distortion, much to their annoyance. Miller is very much about short term (temporary buffer) memory and how many concurrent processes the mind can attend to. Men are believed to worse at this than women, and it is no suprise that 6 or 7 is about the maximum number of children in a large family. Of course we are much worse than this than the 2.6 kernel which can attend to 4 billion concurrent problems.
At an old school, I had a crazy latin teacher who would give me a quiz every day and a test every week. Because We got assigned so much work seperate to the daily quizzes I would just pick up the things we had to know and try to memorize 15-20 things. After awhile I could ace the quizzes. Quite useful in other classes too....
"Guns don't kill people, bullets do."
Anything that might get me killed/injured i have near perfect memory about. For instance, i have never forgotten the name of a redhead. Pure survival instinct, i tell ya.
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and you thought poker on TV was boring. How about this!
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my brain is a little whack, and facing an upcoming anthropology final I did everything I could think of, including running my tongue over my teeth to remember the dentition of primates (remembering, of course, that my wisdom teeth were extracted).
But what probably helped me most was something I got from a comp sci class, I tried drawing a tree that mimicked the way the coursework had been laid out over the semester, and then I "treed" out each node from the parent.
Drawing from an earlier psych class, where I had learned that short-term memory can be boosted by strong repitition, I then spent several hours before the exam drawing out the various nodes, etc.
We were allowed one sheet of paper in the exam. As soon as I sat down, I drew the tree-of-nodes on one side of the exam, which took about a fourth of the exam time. The next 3/4 of the exam were spent referring to the tree and doing calculations on the front of the sheet.
Who would have guessed it? A compsci major got the highest final exam score out of all the up-and-comers in the bio department. That was me, of course.
I'm actually a dumbass IRL but I have my moments.
My favorite animal is the Bonobo, from long before the Gnome people popularized them.
I ommitted two digits at the "33832", and you added back just one ...
3 75 1058209
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399
I've heard that different people break pi into different chunks. These are my chunks:
3.14159 265 3589 79 3238462 64 33832 79 50 288 41971 693 99 375 1058 209
And no one noticed. Well done, sir. Well done.
Easy.
Convert the 1's and O's into a string of hex bytes.
Convert the hex bytes into a block.
Encode the block with a One Time Pad that happens to convert it to a string of all-0's (or all-FF's, if you prefer).
Then all you need to do to recall the original bits is use the same One Time Pad to decode the bytes and concatenate them.
... then some idiot savants can memorize a few megs of data... just encode all of those 0's and 1's into base64. ;)
One of the specialties of Druids was the Brehons, the judges and law-speakers of Celtic society. They would memorize the entire Canon of Celtic Laws, plus all the precidents that had been decided since the codification of said Laws. Much as the Brits would like us to believe that they invented precident based law and circuit judges, The Celts had such a system in operation over 4,000 years ago. The fact that the British occupied Ireland and tried to destroy Celtic Irish culture is the reason why we don't commonly know the truth of the matter, as the winners tend to write the history books. But some information still exists that allows us to reconize the contribution of the Celtis to both memory, and law.
Similarly, the Bardic class of Druids memorized their entire songlist, both music and lyrics.
In fact, because of this memory skill of the Druids, we know little of their rituals and depth of knowledge remain since they memorized it all. And as they were gradually hunted down and killed by the British, Romans and later Christianity, the extent of their knowledge has mostly been lost. We only know what others say about them, for the most part, and one thing that they all agree is that nothing was written down and all was memorized.
ttyl
Farrell
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The notion that the brain remembers everything was put forward because of early work with Hypnosis where people seemed to have an incredible recall of details. Of course, it was later shown that hypnosis had caused them to fabricate huge portions of their story.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Attention -> Intention -> Retention
What's apparently missed here is that mnemonic methodology can be used to sharpen attention and therefore retention to a remarkable degree. I've used it to memorize dates, then equations, then multiple decks of cards. Not only does it work, but it takes what would otherwise seem to be an impossible task and makes it entirely plausible, and therefore my mind no longer automatically filters out some challenges I'd usually shrink from.
The one caveat is that you have to have some degree of interest in retaining the information. But clearly most of these methods can easily be used by anyone with a normal IQ to achieve relatively astounding results.
*disapproving murmur*
"Nope, intelligence is memory." You've made a false tautology from a valid description of the brain. Intelligence is memory, just as mind is brain. Biologically, I agree with you but I'll continue to use those words differently, because they have different meanings. You might just as well claim all our experience is memory, because we only percive things after they are mediated by our sensory organs and conveyed to our mind, brain, and memory. The argument is valid in a descriptive sense, but not definitive.
Since you mention declarative and implicit memory, the wikipedia article on memory contains this illustration of types of memory from which I will draw a further analogy:
"For example, some patients are repeatedly trained in a task and remember previous training, but don't improve in a task (functioning declarative memory, damaged procedural memory.) Other patients put through the same training can't recall having been through the experiment, but their performance in the task improves over time (functioning procedural memory, damaged declarative memory). "
Within that context, intelligence could be described as the ability to spontaneously simplify, streamline, or improve the task.
You can change the definition of memory, but then you'll need a new word for what everyone but you (including Eric Kandel ) calls memory.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
He probably remembered the algorithm for gzip, compressed that number down to a 2000 long binary number in his head, and stored that in his memory. Then when he needed the 3000 digit number, he could just unzip the old one
I have Learn To Remember, but I don't recommend it. I haven't succeded in learning the memory tools - maybe that's just me, but I don't see a reason for learning these things.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
I turn things into songs in my head to remember them -- and it works really well. I mean, I added a tune to the Constitution and remembered the entire first two articles. It's kinda scary.
....
Oral cultures often use epic poetry as a mnemonic device -- it's a hell of a lot easier to memorize ten thousands lines of text, if the text rhymes
-kgj
-kgj