Slashdot Mirror
Ancient Technique Can Dramatically Improve Memory, Research Suggests (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: After spending six weeks cultivating an internal "memory palace," people more than doubled the number of words they could retain in a short time period and their performance remained impressive four months later. The technique, which involves conjuring up vivid images of objects in a familiar setting, is credited to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, and is a favored method among so-called memory athletes. The study also revealed that after just 40 days of training, people's brain activity shifted to more closely resemble that seen in some of the world's highest ranked memory champions, suggesting that memory training can alter the brain's wiring in subtle but powerful ways. The study, published in the journal Neuron, recruited 23 of the 50 top-scoring memory athletes in an annual contest called the World Memory Championships. The athletes were given 20 minutes to recall a list of 72 random nouns and they scored, on average, nearly 71 of the 72 words. By contrast, an untrained control group recalled an average of 26 words. This group then followed a daily 30-minute training regime where they practiced walking through a chosen familiar environment, such as their own home, and placing objects in specific locations. After 40 days of 30-minute training sessions, the participants who had average memory skills at the start more than doubled their memory capacity, recalling 62 words on average -- and four months later, without continued training, they could remember 48 words from a list of 72.
If I want more decimal places, I can google it.
I really want to remember whats going on these days
just as described in the books about Hannibal ( Silence of the Lambs...).
Mnemonics at its purest, and hardly worthy of a post, except that many millenials need this.
1 weird ancient secret could get you a free gift card per year! Click my ass to find out how.
What if you don't remember your own home well enough to place the things to be remembered? Cities have lots of complexity and sensory input for which the people living in them adapt by filtering the non-essential information like places which are accessible and safe enough to not requiring to be remembered.
Seriously though, they taught us this in Dale Carnegie training. It's nothing new.
"The study also revealed that after just 40 days of training, people's brain activity shifted to more closely resemble that seen in some of the world's highest ranked memory champions, suggesting that memory training can alter the brain's wiring in subtle but powerful ways"
No, this study shows that once you really learn how to do this trick, you can remember how to do this trick 4 months later.
This one seems to circulate in popularity from time to time. It's a method of anchoring to existing memories that I remember from back in the 70's.
The two versions I remember was from a guy that was famous for his memory. He would visualize walking through the block he grew up on and placing information in specific spots. The second was a version that you train yourself to visualize playing cards on different parts of your body, then anchor the information to each of the cards.
I can write down 72 random nouns in far less than 20 minutes, and my computer can memorize every noun in every language in far less than 20 minutes.
If there's some ancient technique that, say, dramatically improves your ability to make logical correlations between events or data that a machine can't process, that might be worth several weeks of brain training.
Try Bing, it has less letters so there's more room to remember other important things like Brawndo is what plants crave. But seriously, you can earn points redeemable for things like Microsoft or Amazon gift cards.
They're practicing remembering things for 30 minutes every day for 40 days. It isn't some sort of "weird trick" like the headline might make you think.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
This was a comedy troupe that cut a bunch of VHS tapes on elementary technical subjects (high school and college). The actors would occasionally rattle off the kind of "points to remember" listed at the end of a textbook chapter, but interspersed with wacky Monte Python type stuff. I bet some attention-challenged college students still use it, but after you've learned how to study you don't need this kind of crutch any more.
I go to slashdot.org everyday for the last 40 days, I still can't remember what this article is about.
Someone taught me Giordano Bruno's "memory palace" technique when I was a freshman at uchicago, and it made everything about my academic career as student and teacher so much easier. If you don't know what that is, you really ought to look it up.
The story of Giordano Bruno is a ripping yarn, too. He was a mathematician, astronomer, poet, and theorist in the 16th century. He was also a Dominican friar. He was one of the guys who came up with the "infinite universe" theory and the notion that the Earth was not really stationary with the heavens moving around it. He was a brilliant dude, but had absolutely no patience for people not as smart as him. Even so, the Church tried to move him around, to Oxford, to Rome, to France, hoping he'd find a place where he couldn't upset too many people.
He's one of the few people in history to have been excommunicated from three different religions, including one that he wasn't even a member of. Yes, he was actually preemptively excommunicated.
His love of learning and his obsessive reading finally did him in. See, he liked to read while on the crapper,, like most of us, and he kept a well-worn copy of poems of Erasmus behind his toilet. So, when the Pope's men came for him, they found the Erasmus, and since it was "forbidden" by the Church, that pretty much was the end. Even then, they'd have let him go if he'd just have recanted his notion that Earth wasn't the only "world" in the universe. Not being able to abide stupid people, he told them to go fuck themselves. Then, they tried and convicted him of a host of thought-crimes, from heresy to occult practices to general mopery.
They burned him at the stake in 1600.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Then you have to remember where you put stuff.
I have a hard enough time remembering where I put real things.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd like to know how to learn a new codebase quickly. I want to easily learn that the function to do a certain task is in this file, which is in this folder.
Also I want to know how to easily learn Ruby on Rails. I want to easily learn that in order to change your web page in a certain way, you have to make this change to this RoR file, and also that change to that RoR file.
How many words did the control group get right by the end? 20 hours of memorising for 72 words ... and they only remembered 36 more than they started out with?? Surely that abstract is wrong. I have a bad memory but, really?
FWIW I tried memory-palacing and couldn't remember any of the items that were supposed to help me recall the data. I could remember some of the data though. Clearly not for me.
Most people simply don't need photographic memory in their daily tasks, and the brain in most of us, as the sophisticated piece of evolution it is, will just rewire itself dynamically with the environment.
I'm not very savvy on the internals of the brain, but my calculated guess is that brain cells and links mold themselves (chemically? electrically?) either for short-term storage (like nand memory), long-term (flash, optical, magnetic...) or, and here's the kicker, for multi-field optimization/performance. Maybe even some more exotic things like keeping themselves transient, volatile, so they can be used for general purpose on demand, ad hoc (a task commonly required for astronauts, for instance, who need to be prepared to MacGyver the shit out when shit hits the... water recycler fan?).
Now given this opinion, maybe training yourself for memory isn't such a bad thing regardless of your personal or professional goals. It is a known fact most of us have an easily distracted mind, especially in current times. Surrounded by information and "drives", we can't really decide over the most interesting "blobs" of data to pursue, to store, or to decode. It's like a chronic form of ADD, induced by the rapid evolution of communication and societal patterns, one that was once largely specific and even documented in Japanese urban areas even causing psychological disturbs, but now very common across the developed world due to entertainment, the internet and smart device ubiquity.
We were once forced to read books as no alternative was present, now we can learn ALL educational subjects in the same place we watch videos, listen to music, make, share and experience most art, virtually travel, and of course play games (what I call the "combined experience"; what actually is the least prone to raise your IQ, especially with the cesspool that plagues most multiplayer games). And guess what: from all those things we can do with a connected smart device, the human psyche is largely biased towards all but the first one, the only one that really mattered for anything relevant in society. Unless you're a movie critic, game tester, DJ or a professional traveler of course.
We can't really change our physiological drives, but we can certainly fool them and improve something we need but can't reach sporadically with that guidance. Making ourselves a little more prepared for memorization, especially if you have a job that benefits from it, like most here probably do. Fast and efficient programming does require a certain amount of recollection: most people will reach a better sorting algorithm, and/or will get to it faster if they remember the "basic moves" (like chess or rubik cube openings and strategies).
But I believe the jury is still out on "the perfect human mind". And that is, by association, the reason we must also not dwell into A(s)I yet. If anything, I believe perfection for the human species comes in collective form and not individual, so there's nothing wrong to have different ways of thinking, we just need to make sure we have enough diversity (and of course, VALUE that diversity). Maybe these last two should really be the foundations for AI development. Unless you voted for the Dolan.
My ad blocker must not be working properly.
Required reading for internet skeptics
oh! i support you ideas. holiday palace
You see, there is nothing I want to remember.
What techniques can manage that?
Having been afflicted by a couple of particularly severe episodes of the so-called "Beer Goggles" phenomenon, I would rather learn a method that would help me forget.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I tried a very similar technique in 1971; it was a short shopping list. I still remember all thirteen items!
Real world, it is quicker and simpler to write a list. However, none of my shopping lists still exist 46 years later.
It probably works because our memories deal with objects real or imagined differently than with words.
So they're like penalty points that you can redeem for stuff you don't want?
It seems to work well for Benedict Cumberbatch on Sherlock. Somehow it seems cooler on TV, though.
You're not Jonesy...
...is good for your memory.
Fewer.
Maybe it works, tell me about it when the control group is spending half an hour a day for 40 days trying to remember lists of words and doing something with them.
In my youth I provisioned phone service in a CO. I would take a batch of orders, memorize the numbers on them and then thread the cores and run jumpers to provision the service. I'm no savant, everyone in the office that had been there long enough could do just as well or better.
I could remember quite a few of them at a go. It took a couple of weeks to develop the capacity to do it and I have long since lost the ability through lack of practice.
There was no memory palace involved though, when I started the job it seemed impossible, but the facility came quickly with practice.
Nullius in verba
Subject says it all. Sure, if you want to be able to recite the Iliad around a campfire just like Homer, then spend hours a day practicing this technique and eventually you'll be able to do it. But you still need to put in the work for every additional item you want to remember, and that just isn't worth it for a lot of things. It's more of a curiosity than a widely applicable skill.
Years ago I was gifted a book by some very nice people after I gave a talk. The book was How to Develop a Super Power Memory by Harry Lorayne. It was full of practical mnemonics and methods to remember numbers, peoples' names etc. etc. It also delved into the history of the use of memory. The take away? The brain is like a muscle. Use it or lose it. I never became obsessed on the subject, but twenty years later I still use many of the tools outlined in the book to remember things. Mindfullness is a big fad these days. But really it is just watching what you are doing, paying attention, remembering what you need to remember. Like anything else it is a skill that can be sharpened using a set of tried and true tools.
Now permit me to digress onto a related topic. A lot of sturm und drang these days about the dangers of AI. I for one am not too panicked by the prospect of Skynet and its ilk. But to my mind one of the very real downsides of AI is the offloading of memory tasks and degradation of important human abilities. The brain is energy efficient (read: lazy ass) if it knows something is recorded elsewhere or readily available elsewhere it will be more likely to forget it. Look at how our geographic sense deteriorates with GPS.
These days I make an effort not to always Google something the moment I can't summon it into memory. I will give it time and the name of the actress or politician or writer will often percolate up. And if I am returning to a place for a second time I try to visualize my route beforehand and leave my navigation system out of it. Sure. If I am tormented endlessly, or in a heated conversation, or lost, or pressed for time, it makes sense to resort to the computational oxygen around me. But I try to avoid over dependency on it all.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Never search with Bing, not even ironically.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There isn't a black person alive who isn't better than you in every conceivable way. I mean look at you. I know. It's hideous. If you were worth shit, you'd have that job and you wouldn't be whinging about Sanjay.
Thats how I learned how to do speed cards in a short time for the memrise contest. I was just about able to break the USA record at the time after only 2 months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ikv1dkn3VY
Science in the news with old news. Beware students, its all about your money now..
I thought everyone knows this already because of this new Sherlock Holmes TV-show where Voldemort uses this mind palace stuff.
Mind palace stuff is really easy, and does not take 40 days to master. My 10 year old daughter had to learn a kind of poem to school. So I taught her this technique and she learned the poem + the technique in 15 minutes.
I have never found real life use for this technique. It is already known, that things learnt with this method disappear from the memory the same way everything else.
After reading about some guy who could memorize the order of several decks of cards, I decided to learn the technique myself.
I learnt my first deck of cards after practicing for an afternoon. I linked every card in the deck to somebody I knew and wrote it down. Remembering the link between each person and their card was the hardest part.
Then I thought about my walk into town, a journey I made frequently. I imagined that the person linked to card number 1 was stood next to my front door, person linked to card 2 was next to my gate, person number 3 was stood at the light outside my house .... you get the idea.
It worked fine, and I have a lousy memory in general. I could even remember a deck of cards after going to sleep. But it took me 5-10 seconds to give me enough time to remember each card. That would be useless if you were trying to memorize the letters of an email address, or the digits of a phone number.
I also tended to forget the link between the cards and the people after a month or 2, so it's a skill you need to maintain in order to use. It's fun, but not very helpful to me.
DJ Shadow + Little Dragon “Scale It Back” https://vimeo.com/31908447
By the time you finish reading this sentence will end.
It's 'fewer', as in less meat, but few letters.
just reading good classic novels and poetry? BTW, lots of Indian tantric and Tibetan "meditative" techniques are based on visualizations, and some of them has been studied and considered useless by scientific consensus
Maybe even less as well, if we're talking amount of letter in terms of ink/pixels.
Google
Bing
Big "B" is approx. 2 o's worth of letter, i and l are pretty close, so...
Google
oolng
Subtract the common letters to get:
Ge
n
Yep, looks like fewer and less letters to me.
So why haven't you synced your contact list with your PC?
iPhone does it easily through iTunes
Android does it easily if you sync to a Gmail account
Pretty much everything else has some sort of PC program available that will talk to your phone and extract contacts as vCards or a CSV (comma-separated values) text file.
You can go the CSV/vCard route with iPhone and Android as well, but it's a bit more complicated.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
We've had lots of stories arriving late on Slashdot, but this might be a record. Considering that memory palaces were known to ancient Greece, and the knowledge never has been lost, this story is millennia late.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
...there's nothing that is sold on Amazon by any of the vendors that you could ever possibly want?
Your ideas intrigue me. Do you have a newsletter I can subscribe to?
I still have the McDonalds Menu Song memorized from back in the 80s. I know my phone number from first grade, but not from college. I can remember the Quadratic Equation but not my kid's teacher's name. Why do some things stick around for decades, but others you can't remember a week (or less) later? Do people who play these memory games have a method for wiping the slate clean? I'd hate to accidentally remember the location of the 6 of clubs a year later.
"Fewer" has been replaced by "Less". This was done several years ago by an otherwise undocumented change pushed to all users of the English language. Apparently you are using an obsolete version of the language that has been hacked to avoid mandatory updates. No more English language support for you, mate.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey