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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.
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Oh ya, google. I spent all day trying to remember that name of the search engine I wanted to use..
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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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.'"
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.
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Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
You see, there is nothing I want to remember. What techniques can manage that?
a) Drink vodka until death by liver failure
b) Tequila works too
c) JATO + Pontiac
d) JATO + Pontiac in an enclosed garage (not as fun)
e) Hey y'all, watch this! (Might require a few tries)
f) Long walk on a short pier with Doc Martins
g) Know something that Putin doesn't want you to know
h) P&T's Bullet trick without understanding how it's done
i) Ya know how on your first day of prison you're suppose to pick a fight with the meanest guy? Yeah, that will work.
j) Get a help desk job with supplied binder
k) If you have remembered the techniques then you have already failed
l) Sure I can replace this outlet without turning off the breaker, I'll just be careful
m) That looks like the right type of mushroom
n) When in Mosul telling ISIS that it's okay, you're an atheist
o) Just keep walking downtown with the headphones on while posting to Facebook
p) See if you can make it across the lake on your snowmobile in November
q) Spring break
r) Driving while black
s) Trying to reenact the D.B.Cooper hijacking
t) Quaaludes
u) Kick Chuck Norris in the ass
v) Piss off the Clintons
w) Speak directly to Barbara Bush
x) Go hunting with Dick Cheney
y) Ignore red tide warnings when clamming
z) 72 hour pornhub marathon
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
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