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Feb. 25th, 2013
The $10K Memory Competition...
Feb. 25th, 2013 08:14 pmTim Ferriss (author of, among other books, The Four-Hour Chef) is offering a $10,000 prize to the first person to demonstrate the ability to memorize a deck of cards in under a minute at Memrise.
I've since participated in the festivities, and while I still have quite a way to go before attempting a full deck, I did manage to recall the order of 26 cards correctly today in just under a minute. My expectations going into this exercise were to be able to memorize a deck in under 5 minutes, which appears do-able.
The technique starts with the rather standard creation of links between familiar images—those of personalities are typically used for this—and rather sterile values of the pasteboards that normally evoke no response. (This event has moved me to modify a TamperMonkey script to allow me to use my own set of "celebrities," so that rather than, say, representing the King of Hearts with Barack Obama, my King of Hearts is Penn Jillette.)
The next step in the technique is to have these personalities appear along a route of places, so that in "my" system, if the King of Hearts is the first card, then Penn Jillette is playing handball in the yard at my junior high school.
What I've found is that after about two or three trials, it's difficult for me to create sufficiently vivid images of people in the same series of places, because their "ghosts" survive in other places, the result of having recently placed the same person in a different place along the same journey. (In fact, my sub-minute performance with 26 cards took place when I dreamed up a completely new "journey" through some childhood haunts.)
While I was able to create some journeys based on my long-ago childhood, I found it difficult to create journeys based on more recent living, and I'm not quite sure why. It occurrs to me that it's probably more difficult to create contemporary "journeys" because of the combined effects of rapid change (which makes it difficult to go back and reinforce what's in the mind's eye with on-the-scene eyeballing of what's there) and the tendency for a lot of things toward homogeneity, i.e., to look as if they've come out of a cookie-cutter (it's hard to distinguish between items that look the same).
Or maybe I'm just "getting old"... but I would not bet on it.
Excelsior!
I've since participated in the festivities, and while I still have quite a way to go before attempting a full deck, I did manage to recall the order of 26 cards correctly today in just under a minute. My expectations going into this exercise were to be able to memorize a deck in under 5 minutes, which appears do-able.
The technique starts with the rather standard creation of links between familiar images—those of personalities are typically used for this—and rather sterile values of the pasteboards that normally evoke no response. (This event has moved me to modify a TamperMonkey script to allow me to use my own set of "celebrities," so that rather than, say, representing the King of Hearts with Barack Obama, my King of Hearts is Penn Jillette.)
The next step in the technique is to have these personalities appear along a route of places, so that in "my" system, if the King of Hearts is the first card, then Penn Jillette is playing handball in the yard at my junior high school.
What I've found is that after about two or three trials, it's difficult for me to create sufficiently vivid images of people in the same series of places, because their "ghosts" survive in other places, the result of having recently placed the same person in a different place along the same journey. (In fact, my sub-minute performance with 26 cards took place when I dreamed up a completely new "journey" through some childhood haunts.)
While I was able to create some journeys based on my long-ago childhood, I found it difficult to create journeys based on more recent living, and I'm not quite sure why. It occurrs to me that it's probably more difficult to create contemporary "journeys" because of the combined effects of rapid change (which makes it difficult to go back and reinforce what's in the mind's eye with on-the-scene eyeballing of what's there) and the tendency for a lot of things toward homogeneity, i.e., to look as if they've come out of a cookie-cutter (it's hard to distinguish between items that look the same).
Or maybe I'm just "getting old"... but I would not bet on it.
Excelsior!