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.'"

Comments

Shenanigans

[93 Escort Wagon]

... 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.

Hey, I can easily recognize and recall any one of those numbers even without the mental chicanery!

Having grown up with a guy who had a true photographic memory - I call shenanigans. I agree a person can train his memory to work remarkably better; but photographic memories are ... different. I don't know how to describe it, but It's pretty obviously not just a case of a well-trained brain.

That's great

[Daetrin]

I've heard all this before. You can make cute little memory associations that will let you easily remember a really long number, or a sequence of cards, or whatever.

That's great if you want to amaze your friends or count cards in Vegas, but i don't think that's going to be of much practical use in my day to day life. Certainly not compared to the effort required. What i really need is a way to remember how i solved a particular programming problem six months ago. Or what the best algorithm is for a particular task. Things that can't be summed up as a simple number. Some people get asked "do you know how to do X" and they say "Why yes! I dealt with that six months ago, and this is how you solve the problem!" When posed with the same question i usually say "Uh, i dealt with something like that six months ago, let me see if i wrote it down in my notes." If that fails (which it often does, since i can never be sure what i'll need to remember later at the time that it happens) i'll spend fifteen minutes (or more) searching through old code trying to remind myself how exactly i dealt with it.

So some people (namely me) have far worse than average memory (which definitely implies there are others with far better than average memory, despite what he says) but his method certainly isn't going to help me, and i can't think of any kind of simple training that would.

I read a similar story in a magazine recently

[toygeek]

It offered real techniques that simply work. I adapted some of it to help me remember names. For a friend named Carice, I imagined her careening down an icy road with a look of terror on her face. Car + Ice = Carice.

Another, Flo (real name!) I couldn't remember so I picked out that she has to use oxygen. The oxygen "flo's" into her nose.

Simple things like that really do work, it doesn't have to be elaborate.

Oh, another one. I kept mixing up the names of two brothers who looked very much alike, except that one was much taller than the other (about 6'6"). So, I looked at their names: Lewis and Drake. On an alphabet counted upwards from the bottom, Lewis is higher than Drake! Great, so the tall one is Lewis.

I would love to remember more things that aren't easy to remember automagically. Like, why do I remember that a MIG 25 used drone engines with a overhaul time of 100hrs and that mach 3 would kill the engines in short order, but can't remember the process for some stupid Windows thing that I do every other day? Seems like my head is full of useless trivia, but when I think about those things guess what pops into my head? Images.

Images + association = Memory.

Re:I read a similar story in a magazine recently

[ledow]

Those are "techniques"? In that case I've been using "techniques" since I was born. I have a notoriously terrible "memory" but actually I can remember just about anything people ask me to.

I remember my card PINs through their differences between successive digits (up 2, down 1, up 6, etc.). With that and simple PINs that I'm allocated, it's very difficult *NOT* to find an obscure but simple pattern that then sticks in my memory. I'm a mathematician, I can find a pattern in any list of numbers you happen to give me if I try hard enough.

More likely, my hand remembers the pattern to type on a ATM keypad (which is annoying when all you have is a numpad because they are upside-down to each other, and even worse when you have to close your eyes and "tap out" the numbers in order to remember what they actually were)

I'm currently learning Italian. When a word doesn't come from a Latin base, linking it to its English analogue is tricky so it's simpler to make up some association than it is to remember the word. The Italian for "where" is "dove" (which is pronounced a little like "duvet"). Where's the dove? Under the duvet. I can't forget it or get it confused with when, why, how or who. When an Italian wants me to say "Where", I link dove, duvet and the image/sound of my girlfriend saying that word on the phone one day. (Still doesn't mean I can pronounce it properly, though!)

But this "memorise tons by associating with a bizarre image" thing is DECADES old. It doesn't work for me, and I've tried many times. I honestly have zero problems memorising huge strings of digits, or facts, or words, or images, or faces, or even sounds if I need to.

I can recite the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I can say pi to 32 decimal places without even blinking an eyelid, entirely from memory and the last time I *committed* them to memory was when I was 14/15 (yeah, I was a geeky kid). I could probably read out every line from the largest AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS that I ever had, too.

I can do the balcony scene because we were told to memorise it for English class and we would be performing it in front of the class the next day. I still know every word. I can remember pi because I went through a phase of writing computer programs to calculate it and it was simpler to have it stuck in my mind to see how fast they converged. I can do the AUTOEXEC.BAT because I wrote the thing and changed it every day for a year in order to get *anything* to run and ended up with a set of "perfect" configs. I can still remember whole conversations from primary school, and weird things like what my dad said to me on a trip I took when I was 8 and things like that.

It just matters more which type of learner you are - teachers have been teaching to a certain number of learning styles for DECADES - visual (has to see / imagine something to learn it), tactile (has to play / touch something to learn a principle), auditory (has to hear something to learn it), etc. and any decent teacher knows which of their kids are which style and how best to explain new problems to them.

The problem I have is that on every "learning styles" quiz that I've ever done I come out as every learning style evenly. So does my brother, who also went to university. That means that mere exposure to something is enough for me to learn it which means I pick up lots of useless information and my memory doesn't get any "special" exercise - it just does it's job and doesn't have to struggle for *anything* that I'm interested in. If I'm not interested in it, though, it struggles because I have to physically commit it to memory, but then it's there forever.

The problem with random memorisation is that I just don't care enough about it to memorise it specifically, and thus often miss the entire opportunity when the information is exposed to me of committing it to memory (e.g. people's face - I work in schools so I see thousands of unique faces every day and it's not worth me memorising even 1% of them, so I don't re

Re:Palaces?

[MozeeToby]

Most of the truly powerful memory systems relying on visual imagination; sadly, not everyone has a powerful visual imagination/memory. Some people can imagine a whole room filled with intricate details, other people have trouble picturing their wife's face after 20 years of being together. The reason people don't understand this is because everyone assumes that they're normal. People with visual imaginations assume that everyone has one, that people who can't use memory places must just be doing it wrong. People without visual imagination assume that no one does, that memory places are an elaborate metaphor or something. I myself have an excellent memory and a powerful imagination, but struggle to retrieve detailed images from memories. I tried for months to apply memory places without making any progress because my brain simply isn't wired that way.