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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!
I feel obligated to reply to this story.
The Vegas Casino Consortium. All winners will receive lifetime bans in every casino in the world.
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
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.
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.
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
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
"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
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.
"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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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?
...
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I just remember
1307877299220713443 - 1
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
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.
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.
All of the contestants have already memorized the parent's URL's on sight, and will contribute to the Slashdotting by typing them in manually.
wbs.
Huh?
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
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
"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
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.