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The Memory Masters

Posted by timothy on from the hat-hen-ham dept.

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.

2 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmm by Smitedogg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Silly mods, the joke is his user name...think it through......YES, that's it!!

  2. Correlation between memory and intelligence? by Fiz+Ocelot · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The article gives the impression that memory = intelligence. But I would beg to differ. So what if you can memorize a long binary string. You may not even know it is binary, nor what the string translates to.

    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.