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Secrets of a Memory Champion
Hugh Pickens writes writes "We've all heard of people who claim to have 'photographic memories.' Now Joshua Foer writes in the NY Times magazine (reg. may be required) that a 'skilled memory' can be acquired and proves it by explaining how he trained his brain to became a world-class memory athlete winning first place in the speed cards competition last year at the USA Memory Championship by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute forty seconds. According to Foer, memory training is a lost art that dates from antiquity. 'Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn't so long ago that culture depended on individual memories,' writes Foer. 'It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics.' Foer says that the secret to supermemory is a system of training and discipline that works by creating 'memory palaces' on the fly filled with lavish images, painting a scene in the mind so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. 'Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average,' concludes Ed Cooke who recently invented a code that allows him to convert every number from 0 to 999,999,999 into a unique image that he can then deposit in a memory palace. 'What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly.'"
I think that the difference is that all the gurus are telling everybody to do what works for them, where these guys are actually writing up and studying different techniques and finding that different lists work for different people.
I guess a summary list of practical research you can read through would be really interesting if anyone knows a good one.... There was something recently that the only proven memorisation technique is to use some kind of exponential back off. Even a special program to do that. Unfortunately I can't remember where and when it was discussed :-) ..
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This makes sense - after all, we've had culture for far* longer than we've had writing, and it stands to reason that effective transmission of information across generational boundaries would be an evolutionarily beneficial trait.
People seem to forget that millions of years of evolution must have left a mark on us; the entirety of recorded history so far is nothing but a strange coda to an evolutionary record that spans an unimaginable depth of time, and for almost all of that deep time the only way to maintain knowledge (a gigantic evolutionary advantage!) was for someone to memorize it.
*by "far" I mean on the order of a hundred thousand years
This technique is useless for those like me who have no mind's eye. (Yes, I experience mental images in dreams, but I can't even summon up a circle when awake.) This affliction runs so much against the grain of modern theories of vision and thought (inter alia) that even the experts dispute its existence. See http://www.imagery-imagination.com/non-im.htm and the references. I've never met anyone else with the condition, but I should get out more. I'm guessing it occurs more often among IT people, but who knows? Any fellow Slashdotters with me on this?
True. Lots of stuff is trainable, but is inborn for some people. Strength, for example. Some people are naturally stronger than others, but you can make up for the difference by working out in the gym. Absolute hearing (recognizing the pitch of a note of music): my dad has always been able to do it and can't remember a time when he couldn't, nor did he understand why others couldn't. But many musicians need to train quite hard at it. To some it comes naturally after years of making music, to others it doesn't.
Sometimes it's nature, sometimes it's nurture, sometimes it's a bit of both.
In any case, it's good to know that memory can be trained too. My memory sucks. My wife has always had excellent memory (not quite photographic) without any kind of training (other than regular study, which is also trains your memory, I guess).
I can't comment on this dude having a normal memory or otherwise, but he certainly has a pretty closed mind. There's a big difference between a well trained mind and a true photographic memory. Some people just remember *everything*. It's not something they train themselves to do, or use a technique, it's something physically different about their brain that makes it work that way.
That you believe the myth doesn't make you more open minded.
*IF* there were true photographic memory, then the prizes at these world memory championships would be scooped up by people that have it. But they're not. They're won by ordinary people with pretty average memories who dedicate their spare time to mastering memory techniques.
"Photographic memory" is the stuff of magicians, hucksters and B movie thrillers.