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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.
(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!
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.
The Vegas Casino Consortium. All winners will receive lifetime bans in every casino in the world.
Only at blackjack tables. That's the only common casino game where memory of what's happened before matters.
Some roulette tables actually have displays that show what has happened on previous spins, because any patern you might detect in that data only gives you a false confidence that might motivate you to play, in reality that information is totally useless in helping you predict what will happen on the next spin.
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.
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
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
A summary can be found here
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.
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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...
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.
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.
I prefer passwords written down on stuff. :P
Typing this from a Toshiba laptop, with sticker "Contains: Nickel-Cadmium, Nickel-Metal Hybride, and/or Lithium Ion battery" on the bottom.
The root password is
c:n-c,n-mh
Yeah, find my IP and get through NAT.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
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.
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...
But... that IS what they do!
They encode the data into easily rememberable kind they don't compress it, but rather expand - creating stories, images, pictures, sentences, through the "mnemotechnic memory" technique. Then they decode it just the same way.
Say, you have a memory medium that can remember arbitrary values from 0 to 256, it has a plenty of room, but it tends to float lightly, i.e. 128 may become 120 or 140 or 100, but not 20 or 210. So for your purpose instead recording byte values, you recode them to binary and record every "1" as two 255's and every "0" as two 0's, then record them. You need 16 bytes of your diskspace to store 1 byte, but it will NOT get lost - only really strong corruption could change the results...
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Some casinos welcome "card counters." I have a friend who lives in Santa Fe and is an extemely good card-counter -- he can memorize cards dealt from a 3-deck shoe. Having a player sitting at a blackjack table raking in chips is a draw...no one wants to play at a "losing" table. So my buddy, he makes money on the side playing blackjack, and even thought the casinos lose on him, they make money on the ones that come over to play at the "hot" table.
The idea that card counters are not welcome at blackjack tables is a myth. Instead of fighting the problem, they now have figured out a way to make money on it.
As an aside, this guy is an air traffic controller (I used to be one as well). Most air traffic controllers develop an incredible short-term memory, being able to memorize 3-D positions of several aircraft at once in conjunction with an in-memory 3-D representation of the surrounding airspace, available for immediate recall. All of this takes place while listening to a steady stream of aircraft identify themselves with 4- or 5-character callsigns, which are queued up for responses in the order they were received, while also monitoring landlines to various other air traffic control facilities. Not to mention being able to monitor the D-side working next to you talking about his hot night out, as well as the supervisor ranting over your shoulder about bullshit you could care less about.
The amount of information retained in short-term memory for a moderate to heavy session of air traffic easily exceeds the 104 discrete pieces of static information memorized from a deck of cards.
Short-term memory only works if it's exercised on a continuous basis. I've been out of that field for several years, and I'm lucky enough to remember a single telephone number at a time.
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.
Not necessarily with roulette. The roulette table can have a slighty variation which can show up statistically. However, you'd need to keep track of thousands of spins to get any meaningful information. It's just like flipping a coin that showed up heads 9 times out of the last 10 -- I'd bet heads the next 100 times.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
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).
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?
Sorry, but your friend is either lying to you or not a very good card counter. His concept of a "losing" table is riduculous.
Since the odds are only about 3% in the house's favor with basic blackjack rules, there will be "winners" at almost every table, just not as many winners as losers over time. In addition, successful card counters try to play at tables with fewer players so that they have more hands to maximize their return when the count is in their favor.
Good card counters can only tip an average game in their favor by about 1-2%, depending on the game's rules. That return is only realized over 1000s of hands, not a single 3-4 hour session where fluctuations occur all the time.
If you don't believe me and still think casinos like card counters, go into a casino and vary your bets based on a simple counting system. Within an hour you will either be asked to flat bet or leave the casino, even if you're losing.
Better yet, talk to the pit boss and just ask him if he minds that you count. Tell him you know about the myth and you're going to be the "winner" - so where does he wants the "hot" table?
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.
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.
the AC Above is completely wrong.
in basic blackjack, rules can vary from giving the house no advantage (~0%), to negative advantage (positive for the player) to about 1% under some of the worst rules.
There are different kinds of counting (basically, wonging (hi/lo) and things like omega 2 count, but there are a tremendous amount more - like side counting aces, etc.) and they each apply to different games (most specifically to the number of decks in the shoe. omega is only good for single deck, whereas hi/lo is good for 6+ decks with a good penetration in the shoe).
The advantage a counter gets again depends on the number of decks and the system used, as well as the count. A +20 count near the end of a six deck shoe is definately a "hot table/shoe" for the players. A negative count could easily be interpreted as a "losing table".
To finish up though, it really depends on the casino and the quality of their pit critters (PCs). Some casinos wouldn't know a card counter from a hole in their ground. Others would definately ask them to leave.
Now, a bad card counter gives the house even MORE of an advantage than a normal player who sticks to basic strategy. So in that case, the casino would definately welcome that player because they know he's ultimately going to give them his money.
I used to use this scheme for web sites (e.g. commerce). I would basically take the url (for example amazon.com) and transpose letters on the keyboard in some way. Then one day one of my passwords didn't work. Turns out the company had been aquired by another company (or vice versa maybe?) and so the company name no longer matched my password.
Now I just use the Keychain (OS X). I can just hit keys randomly and never see the password, then copy to the clipboard and paste into the browser when I'm ready to log on.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
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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