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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.
Silly mods, the joke is his user name...think it through......YES, that's it!!
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.
Funny, I have no trouble memorizing PINs, IDs, SSNs, license plates, phone numbers (despite the fact that I hate phones) etc. Only a few of these are actually random (most people change their PIN to a number they'll remember, and even in the case that they don't, that's only a few numbers). Phone numbers are most decidedly not random--they are hierarchical in nature (country code, area code, exchange, and, surprise, only 4 numbers are left to simply memorize)--we have mandatory 10-digit-dialing in my area (you have to dial the area code on all phone numbers including local ones) and it's no more trouble remembering numbers than with 7-digit dialing, or 5-digit dialing used for on-campus numbers at my university. Also, I did RTFA, and my point is unrelated to how they memorize these sequences (for the most part). Most things we must memorize are pre-structured, unlike the random strings of numbers/whatever these people are memorizing. My point is simply that it is, for the most part, entirely unnecessary for us to have to assign patterns to random series to memorize them, because almost /everything/ worth memorizing already has a structure and a pattern that we're familiar with.
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"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."
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:)
INACS(I'm Not A Cognitive Scientist) but
I'm not so sure this is a good quantification of your memorization abilities. For example, you may simply have remembered that all your cd's were "perfectly" lined up - that's only a small bit to remember. Using that tiny amount of information, you could have spotted the change. Of course, I can't be exactly sure, as you did not give specific details of your experiment. I also do not mean to say you don't have a good memory, are stupid, or anything else.
As an aside: I myself feel that I'm not so good at memorizing large orderings of some objects... Unless I can remember some pattern. Infact, I make an effort to use patterns (algorithms) to remember things.
Consider having to remember 5000 randomly choosen integers. Now consider having to remember 500000 integers in order. The latter is far easier, because, you're not actually going to memorize the integers, you simply remember the starting number N, the end P, and that all the numbers in between is simply the previous number plus 1.
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?
The brain would make a very poor recording device for several reasons. Firstly, the quality of the information stored isn't very good, and deteriorates with time. Watching a movie that you downloaded from some guy who saw it earlier instead of actually going to the theatres would be like listening to a 24kbps mp3 that someone "shared" with you instead of buying the orginal CD. Secondly, and more importantly, you can sometimes generate false memories. See this article and this article . This is why it's such a bad idea to base a justice system on eye-witnesses. Through the power of suggestion, and your subconscious biases, your memories can be altered. I don't know where you read that "your brain can recall almost everything." Maybe you were thinking of recognition, not recall. That wouldn't really help someone running a "brain cam" website.
That won't help you win, not by much.
Every good poker player already does that.. knows which cards he has seen that game, at least, any that matter (remember not all cards visible are always important).
The game of poker is ultimately a game of bluffing and one man -vs- the next.. a computer would not necessarily beat human players at poker.
Remember, the object is not to win each hand, but to win the other player's money.. and that COULD mean only winning one hand out of an entire sitting.
This is a typical anonymous slashdot troll. The poster is trying to put down someone else's post where that person discovers that his abilities are not unique, as he'd long suspected, but rather are a deep and complex portion of the human experience. I know that the AC was expecting some kind of epiphany to result from this, but basically, he's just putting someone else down because he had no intelligent comment whatsoever to make and nothing to add to the discussion.
Sorry. Mod me flamebait for responding to an Anonymous Coward.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
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.
"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.
Who was whoring for karma? He was being a sarcastic ass and I threw it back in his face. Whoever modded me up did so on their own.
Look at my posting history and tell me I really care all that much about karma.
Dingwit.
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.