Writer Joshua Foer 7 years ago attended the USA Memory Championship as a journalist, and a year later he already became his winner. He presented his study of memory in detail in the book "Walking on the Moon with Einstein". T&P publish a transcript of Foer's lecture, in which he claims, that anyone can remember the order of the cards in the deck.
close your eyes. Imagine, that you are standing at the front door of your house. Pay special attention to the color of this door, its texture. Now imagine a group of fat nudists on bicycles. They compete in nudist cycling competitions and race straight to your door.. I need, so you can really see it. They pedal hard, drenched in sweat, swaying from side to side. And they crash right into your front door. Bicycles fly apart, the wheels are rolling by, knitting needles everywhere. Now step over the threshold, go into the hallway and pay attention to the lighting. The light falls right on Captain Cook. He waves to you from the saddle, sitting on a bay horse. This is a talking horse. Walk past him and go into the living room. There with all the power of imagination imagine Britney Spears. Half naked, she dances on your coffee table and sings Hit Me Baby One More Time. Then follow me to the kitchen. Here your floor is paved with yellow brick road, and out of the oven, hand in hand, Dorothy walks, Tin Woodman, The Scarecrow and the Lion from the Wizard of Oz.
Good, now open your eyes.
I want to tell you about a very strange competition, held every spring in New York. It's the USA Memory Championship. A few years ago, I entered this competition as a science journalist., expecting to see something like a world championship among scientists. It was attended by a group of guys and a few girls, differing in age and appearance. They memorize hundreds of random numbers at a glance.. They memorized the names of dozens of strangers and entire poems in just a few minutes.. They competed in, to memorize decks of shuffled playing cards as quickly as possible. That was incredible. I thought, that these people are geniuses.
I started talking to some of the competitors. Ed Cook came from England, where he is famous for the most trained memory. I asked him: “Ed, you understand, that you are a genius?», and he answered: "It's not like that at all. In reality, I have a normal memory. Anyone in this competition will say, that he has ordinary abilities. We just practiced, learned these amazing memory tricks, using ancient techniques, invented two and a half thousand years ago in Greece - the same, which Cicero used to memorize his speeches, which medieval scholars used to memorize whole books ". I could only say: "Wow! Why have I never heard of them before??»
"One boy, whom I met, suffered from amnesia and, quite possibly, had the worst memory in the world. She was so bad, that he didn't even remember his memory problems. This is an extremely tragic character., who demonstrates by example, how much memories define our personality ".
We stood outside the competition hall, and Ed, a great, talented, but a slightly eccentric Englishman, asked me: “Josh, Are you an American journalist?. Do you know Britney Spears??». I replied: "What? Not! Why do you ask?». "Because I want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize a deck of playing cards on national television.. I will prove to the world, that anyone can do it ". I said: "Well., I'm not Britney Spears, but you could try to teach me. Gotta start somewhere, right?». And for me it was the beginning of a very strange adventure..
Over the next year, I didn't just train my memory, but explored it, trying to figure out, how it works, why sometimes it fails and what is its potential. I met a lot of really interesting people. One boy, whom I met, suffered from amnesia and, quite possibly, had the worst memory in the world. She is so bad, that he doesn't even remember, that he has some memory problems! This is an extremely tragic character., who demonstrates by example, how memories define our personality. There is also an absolutely opposite example - Kim Peak, character prototype, played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. We spent the day at the Salt Lake City Public Library, memorizing telephone directories, which was extremely exciting.
I read a bunch of treatises on memory, written more than two thousand years ago in Latin during the period of Antiquity and then later - in the Middle Ages. I learned a lot of interesting things: for example, that long ago trained, disciplined and developed memory was not such a rarity, like now. Once upon a time, people invested efforts in the development of memory, in the laborious work of the mind.
Over the past few millennia, we have created many technologies: alphabet, the lists, codes, printing presses, photographs, Computers, smartphones - all this gradually facilitated the work of memory, began to perform its functions. These technologies created the modern world, and they have changed us both culturally, as well as in the cognitive plane. We don't need to remember anymore, And, seem to be, we forget, how to do it. One of the last places on earth, where will you find people, obsessed with a trained memory, are the aforementioned competitions. Or rather, they are not the only ones - similar championships are held all over the world. I was just amazed and wanted to know, how do participants manage to achieve such results.
A few years ago, a group of researchers at University College London held a memorization competition in the lab.. They wanted to find out: whether the brains of the participants of the competition are somehow different anatomically? The answer turned out to be negative. Are they smarter than the rest? They ran some tests, and the answer was again no. However, there was an interesting and telling difference between the, what areas of the brain were involved in the competition. They were scanned on a CT scanner., while they memorized the numbers, faces, snowflake images. Was, that memory champions activate other parts of the brain, than the rest. They tapped those honors, which are responsible for spatial memory and movement. Why? Can this information be useful to us??
Memory competition is a bit like an arms race.: every year someone comes up with a new way to remember more information in a shorter amount of time. Then the rest of the participants have to catch up. My friend Ben Pridmore, three-time memory champion, could remember within an hour 36 shuffled decks of playing cards. He did it with the help of the technique he invented., used, to commit to memory the exact order 4140 binary numbers.
Although there are a huge number of different techniques in the world, they all boil down to the concept, which psychologists call deliberate coding. This process is well illustrated by one interesting paradox.. Suppose, I will ask two people to remember the same word - tailor. I will tell one: "Remember, this guy is Alexander Konditersky, this is his last name ". I will say yes to the second: "Remember, this guy Alexander is a confectioner, this is his profession ". When later I ask them about the word, which I called some time ago, that, who was the surname, less likely to remember, than that, to whom I told about the profession. One and the same word, but remembered differently. Strange, isn't it true?
“Suppose, you were invited to the stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory - as if Cicero spoke at TEDxRome two thousand years ago. You are just visualizing images, that are connected with the paragraphs of your speech and they instantly appear in your memory".
Actually, surname Confectionery does not mean anything to you. It has nothing to do with other memories., with which your head is filled. But another thing is the confectioner, we know them: pastry chefs wear funny white caps, their hands are in flour, they smell delicious after work. Maybe, we even know some pastry chef. When we first hear this word, we have associative clues, with the help of which it is then easier to extract the desired word. The whole art of memory is, to come up with, how to turn these patisserie into confectioners, so that information, lacking context and meaning, transform into something significant in the light of your other memories.
One of the most skillful techniques was invented 2500 years ago in ancient Greece. It's called the Palace of Memory. Her story is as follows: once a poet named Simonides took part in a celebration. He was hired, to entertain guests - in those days, if you wanted to have a really amazing holiday, didn't hire a dj, and the poet. When the holiday began, the poet began to tell his odes, who learned everything by heart. When Simonides left the feast, the roof of the hall fell and crushed the host and his guests. Everything, who were inside, perished, and their bodies were mangled beyond recognition. Nobody could tell, who participated in the celebration, who was sitting where. In this way, their bodies could not be buried properly. Misfortune, multiplied by misfortune. Thanks to his memory, Simonides, standing outside, sole survivor among the ruins, closed my eyes and could see, Where exactly did each of the guests sit?. He took people by the hands and took them to the bodies of their relatives..
At that moment, the ancient poet understood something, what, I think, we all subconsciously know: although we do not remember names well, phone numbers and verbatim instructions from colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memory. If I ask you to restore the first 10 words of the story of Simonides, probably, you will have a hard time. But I'm willing to bet, what if I ask you to remember, who sits astride a talking bay horse in your hall, you can easily remember. The purpose of this mnemonic technique is to, to create an imaginary construction in your head with images of those things, which you want to remember - the stranger, crazier, funnier, more obscene, nasty picture, the more unforgettable it is. This is two thousand years old advice from early Latin treatises on memory..
So how does it work? Suppose, you were invited to the stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory - as if Cicero spoke at TEDxRome two thousand years ago. Then you visualize the images again, which I described at the very beginning: you can imagine yourself at the front door of your house. Crowd of nudists on bicycles reminds you, what did you want to tell about this very strange competition - the memorization championship. Captain Cook will remind you of buddy Ed Cook, and Britney Spears - about a joke, which you want to tell. You enter the kitchen, and the yellow brick road will remind you of the next topic, you were about to discuss is a strange journey, where you went a year ago.
This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches.: not verbatim, why do you only get more confused, and from topic to topic. Even the concept of an introductory sentence - topic sentence - comes from the Greek word topos, which means "place". This is a trace, leftover from that time, when people thought of oratory and rhetoric in the category of space.
I was so excited about it, that I was seriously carried away. I went to a few more memory competitions and realized, what can I write more about the subculture of the participants in these contests. But there was one problem., and she was, that such competitions are pathologically boring. Truth, it looks the same, like passing a school test. The most dramatic moment is when someone starts massaging the temples.. And I'm a journalist, i need to write about something. I know, that incredible things are happening in the minds of these people, but I don't have access to them.
Then I realized: to talk about them, I need to be in their shoes. After that every morning, before you sit down for the New York Times, I started spending 15-20 minutes to remember something. It could be anything - a poem, names from an old school album, which I bought at a flea market, or a tracklist from your favorite DJ's set. It turned out to be surprisingly fun., which I didn't expect at all. It's fun, because you are not just training your memory, you try to imagine these ridiculous, sloppy, funny and unforgettable pictures. I got really into it.
It all ended with, that I took part in the competition, which I covered a year earlier. It was like a journalistic experiment.. I thought, this will be a beautiful epilogue to my research. However, the experiment took an unexpected turn.. I won the championship, even though it couldn't happen.
“I have experienced first hand, that the incredible possibilities of memory are hidden in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, gotta be human, who remembers, what you need to remember "
It's great to memorize speeches, phone numbers and shopping lists, but that's not the point. These are all just tricks, who work, because they are based on the basic principles of the brain. And it is not necessary to erect memory palaces or memorize packs of playing cards, to understand, how our mind works. We often talk about people with great memories., like it's some kind of innate gift, But it's not that. A brilliant memory can be developed. Simply put, we remember, when we pay attention, when we are deeply involved, when can we understand, why is some information or experience important to us, why are they significant, bright, when we can transform them into something meaningful in the context of the rest of our thoughts.
Memory palace, all these memorization techniques are just methods. Actually, they only work because, what do you make them work. They force us to think deeply, strive for awareness, what most of us don't usually do. But, virtually, no tricks. It's just a way to make some things memorable..
I would like, so you remember that guy, amnesiac, who doesn't even remember memory problems, which made me think, that our life is the sum of our memories. How much longer are we going to waste our short lives sitting in iPhones, ignoring that, What is the person in front talking about?, being lazy and not wanting to think seriously? I have seen from my own experience, that the incredible possibilities of memory are hidden in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, gotta be human, who remembers, what to remember.
