You Must Remember This

Joshua Foer has a fascinating article in the Times about how he transformed himself from a reporter doing a story on memory experts into a champion memory expert himself.

The unlikely story of how I ended up in the finals of the U.S.A. Memory Championship, stock-still and sweating profusely, began a year earlier in the same auditorium, on the 19th floor of the Con Edison building near Union Square in Manhattan. I was there to write a short article about what I imagined would be the Super Bowl of savants.

The scene I stumbled upon, however, was something less than a clash of titans: a bunch of guys (and a few women), varying widely in age and personal grooming habits, poring over pages of random numbers and long lists of words. They referred to themselves as mental athletes, or M.A.’s for short. The best among them could memorize the first and last names of dozens of strangers in just a few minutes, thousands of random digits in under an hour and — to impress those with a more humanistic bent — any poem you handed them.

I asked Ed Cooke, a competitor from England — he was 24 at the time and was attending the U.S. event to train for that summer’s World Memory Championships — when he first realized he was a savant.

“Oh, I’m not a savant,” he said, chuckling.

“Photographic memory?” I asked.

He chuckled again. “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.”

And as demonstration of that "average memories" proposition, the author trained for a year, with record-setting results.

 

 

Comments

[Charlie (Colorado)]

Sadly, memory's the second thing to go.

[Army of Davids]

Public sector unions need to go.

And Obama needs to butt the F out of Wisconsin state affairs. it's none of his business.

[Strawman Cometh]

Reminds me that an armed society is a polite society

[peter]

very eerie, Mr. Maguire, as just before I went on vacation, I had saved this article on my delicious account to read later. I have a terrible time remembering people's names.

[Threadkiller]

">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daFb3J-cwLg"> “In all this excitement” memory test.

[clarice feldman]

peter, I do, too.

[Captain Hate]

I'll never forget ol' what's his name.

[Porchlight]

My good friend uses the loci method for memorization, where you construct a house in your mind and place the things you want to memorize in it. When we went to our pub quiz "Geek Bowl" in January (where we tied for 7th out of 129 teams!) she memorized the Presidents in order beforehand, which took her about 20 minutes. There ended up being a relevant question - who did Schuyler Colfax, the 17th Vice President, serve under? Sadly, we misheard the question and answered Andrew Johnson (the 17th President), when it was in fact Grant (the 18th President). But she knew the names and numbers cold.

[Ignatz]

I can see wanting to improve ones memory a bit.
However the word I'd use for someone who spends his life memorizing thousands of digits is nerd not savant.

[narciso]

It would seem pointless to memorize random word and numbers, what would be the point, they have to be some relation to each other.

My dear departed grandfather, an autodidact,
said he had forgotten a fair amount due to the trauma of exile, however what was left
was quite prodigious in a number of subjects

[bgates]

I don't have much of a memory anymore; outsourced most of it to the internet. I did remember that "Foer" was the name of the editor of the New Republic during the Beauchamp "Apocalypse (Not)" controversy; wiki tells me that's this kid's brother.

Google tells me that this kid wrote this article once already, in 2005. Presumably he's getting paid to write it again for the Times to drum up publicity for his new book on the same subject, which (per wiki) he sold for $1.2M.

The scene I stumbled upon, however, was something less than a clash of titans

Bear in mind, he went to Yale, so his standard for "titans" is going to be pretty high.

[clarice feldman]

narciso, I am sure you inherited his skills.

[narciso]

Probably clarice, what happens if you forget
the password bgates.

[bgates]

What password?

[PaulL]

Not enough credit is given to forgetting. If you remembered everything, surely you'd go mad. What if you remembered every slight and every injustice done to you? Or all the stupid mistakes you've made. Et cetera.

[MarkO]

What was the name of that basketball player that wrote that book on memory?

[J...something]

Not enough credit is given to forgetting.

That's what I'm counting on.

[glasater]

I have a terrible time remembering people's names.

So do I.
Once went to a very nice social event and the hostess couldn't remember her d-i-l's name!

And I used to be able to answer most of the questions on Jeopardy.
Can't do it any more...

[Rick Ballard]

What's Jeopardy?

[J...something]

I find that the word 'thing' comes in handy. Wouldn't have helped in the d-i-l situation though.

[Captain Hate]

What was the name of that basketball player that wrote that book on memory?

Ejrry Aclsu; or Jerry Lucas when you put the letters of his name in non-alphabetic order (he used to like to do that trick).

[Danube of Thought]

I'll go to the scaffold remembering that Habib Bourguiba was president of Tunisia, and of course Syngman Rhee in South Korea. No idea why.

And if I could remember Shakespeare the way I remember songs by Little Richard or Buddy Holly (or Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers) I would be thought of as a scholar.

[Ignatz]

--Or all the stupid mistakes you've made.--

I had no idea it was possible to forget those.
Now there's a skill I'd like to acquire.

[DrJ]

Agreed, Iggy.

[MarkO]

"And if I could remember Shakespeare the way I remember songs by Little Richard"

I find it hard to sing Macbeth, but if I could I would remember it well, like all the words to "A Lover's Question."

[cathyf]

Not enough credit is given to forgetting. If you remembered everything, surely you'd go mad.

There is a theory that autism is the physical lack of the mechanism for pruning neurons. So, not exactly mad, but sitting drooling, rhythmically banging your head against the wall...

[glasater]

What's Jeopardy?

I don't remember, Rick:)

[Frau Werkschaft]

DoT- A close college friend had attended school in Grenoble, France and knew Habib Bourguiba, Jr. He visited her here in CA while we were in college together, and I met him. I've forgotten why I have a photograph of him and not her.

[Dean Martin]

Folks, I don't know what the brouhaha is all about. I've been trying to tell you all these years...

One girl, one boy
Some grief, some joy
Memories are made of this.

Now where the hell are my car keys?

[daddy]

You guys may find this interesting>

">http://www.neatorama.com/2008/09/05/10-most-fascinating-savants-in-the-world/"> 10-most-fascinating-savants-in-the-world.

Scroll down to savant number 7, Orlando Serrell.

"Orlando Serrell wasn't born autistic - indeed, his savant skills only came about after a brain injury. In 1979, then ten-year-old Orlando was playing baseball when the ball struck him hard on the left side of his head. He fell to the ground but eventually got up to continue playing. For a while, Orlando had headaches. When they went away, he realized he had new abilities: he could perform complex calendar calculations and remember the weather every day from the day of the accident."

And from his website: "Could this mean once a key hemisphere in the brain is stimulated, we can all attain the level of genius Orlando possesses and beyond?"

Baseball anyone?

[David, infamous sockpuppet]

There is a woman who remembers everything. A professor at UC Irvine did not believe her when she was talking about it. He asked her what she was doing on a particular day, and she told him, then she mentioned that he had been in Berlin that day, because she remembered reading it in the paper. He laughed, saying he had never been in Berlin in his life.

He was wrong.

(Link underneath)