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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.
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.
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Required reading for internet skeptics