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I know a guy who competes and does well in memory sports. I'd say he's above average intelligence for sure, maybe in the top 5%, but not some sort of extreme f

I know a guy who competes and does well in memory sports. I'd say he's above average intelligence for sure, maybe in the top 5%, but not some sort of extreme freak of nature. He's spent thousands of hours drilling memory techniques though. "Moonwalking with Einstein" is a good book about memory sports and has an intro to some of the basic techniques. From what I've seen, it's really about deepening a set of specialized ruts in the road in the brain around remembering numbers and other things that memory sports athletes compete on. It's essentially building custom designed specialized neural networks in the brain through thousands of hours of drilling. One thing I told my nephew is that he can spend thousands of hours playing video games and then have his head full of video game trivia or he can spend thousands of hours learning to program or learning memory sports techniques and have almost as much fun, but instead wind up with something that he can actually use later in his life that doesn't involve working for a video game company.

phaus 7y ago
My passion for videogames led to a passion for computers in general. All kids spend thousands of hours playing.
agency 7y ago
Are memory sports techniques useful in general? I don't know much about them but they seem specialized for memorizing streams of rote information (like strings of numbers). Can they also be used to recall useful information?
majos 7y ago
> One thing I told my nephew is that he can spend thousands of hours playing video games and then have his head full of video game trivia or he can spend thousands of hours learning to program or learning memory sports techniques and have almost as much fun, but instead wind up with something that he can actually use later in his life that doesn't involve working for a video game company. I don't think there are so many people who find that learning to program or learning memory sports techniques is the same kind of fun as playing video games.

phaus 7y ago

My passion for videogames led to a passion for computers in general. All kids spend thousands of hours playing.

agency 7y ago

Are memory sports techniques useful in general? I don't know much about them but they seem specialized for memorizing streams of rote information (like strings of numbers). Can they also be used to recall useful information?

majos 7y ago

> One thing I told my nephew is that he can spend thousands of hours playing video games and then have his head full of video game trivia or he can spend thousands of hours learning to program or learning memory sports techniques and have almost as much fun, but instead wind up with something that he can actually use later in his life that doesn't involve working for a video game company. I don't think there are so many people who find that learning to program or learning memory sports techniques is the same kind of fun as playing video games.