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.

Comments

7 is the number, and the number is 7, not 8 nor 9

[Space cowboy]

(the quote is limited due to the size of the heading, but 10 is right out!)

The brain seems to actually have the sort of grasp of numbers that we sometimes ascribe to "Neanderthals" ... 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.

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 :-) 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..

Hack the system! exploit the underlying nature of your brain!

Simon

Brain as a recording device

[anonymous cowfart]

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....

Re:Sponsored by...

[LostCluster]

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.

Not all types of memory.

[Gyan]

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.

Easy.

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:Easy.

[haystor]

I play "music" on my keyboard. I take some piece of piano music that I have in muscle memory and play it to bang out my password. The passwords are quite good and since it's a slight variation of something I already know, I can memorize it quite quickly. Another key benefit is that it is always easy to type.

Scientific American Frontiers Video

[asavage]

I saw a video from the US memory championships from a few years ago. A university professer took a number of fairly average highschool students and trained them using mnemonics for only a few months. These students took 2nd to 10th position only being defeated by a previous champion.

A summary can be found here

Re:Passwords Anyone?

[SharpFang]

I prefer passwords written down on stuff.
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. :P

re: exploit the underlying nature of your brain!

[gr3g]

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's doable.

[Mr_Icon]

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.

This is actually very simple...

[TheNetAvenger]

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... :)

Re:just find a clever encoding scheme

[SharpFang]

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...

Re:Sponsored by...

[pongo000]

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.

The number is 7+/-2

[NoData]

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.

Re:The number is 7+/-2

[DJStealth]

A good way of chunking 'a string of thousands of 1s and 0s' would be simply to convert it to Hexidecimal. A string of 1024 bits can easily be compacted into 64 hexadecimal characters. Maybe if you're lucky you'll have it spelling things like DADA D00D F00D 1234

Chances are it won't be that easy, but you get the idea..

Similarly, most people thing their fingers are only capable of counting to 10. But how many of us think to use our fingers to count in binary to reach 1024 (2^10) possible values?

recall time longer than memorizing time

[Dikeman]

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?

Remembering Caltrain..

[SmackCrackandPot]

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.

Celtic Druids were masters of memory

[farrellj]

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