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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.
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.
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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.'"
That just takes two things, practice and obsession.
People often ask me how to "get into" computers, as in getting into IT. My answer is that if you're not already "into" computers, then it's too late. Oh you might take a class and get a help desk job, but if you really want to do computers and haven't been dumpster diving for them, well then you just don't have it.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
And if you are genuinely "into" computers, you will find there aren't any jobs out there. Absolutely none. Because employers don't want enthusiasm. Employers want mediocrity, and the stupider the better.
I went on a job interview for a network engineering job where I explained my passion for computer networking by describing how I built my own IPX router out of spare parts and wrote the routing software from scratch for fun. The interviewer's response? Nobody uses IPX anymore, tell me something else. I didn't get the job.
Obsession will get you nowhere except living in the dumpster.
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
>They burned him at the stake in 1600.
And yet we still have to deal with those idiots.