7 ms·

"Memory athletes" and the techniques they use [audio]

111 points by open-source-ux 5y ago

romanhn 5y ago
"Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer is an interesting book on the subject of memory athletes. The author is a journalist who sets out to write the book and in parallel practices alongside his research subjects. In the end, he winds up winning the USA Memory Championship and setting a US record. Really drives home the point that it's all about the techniques and the time one is willing to put into them.
- bilal4hmed 5y ago
  Highly recommend the book, its a great read.
- ftio 5y ago
  I read it in 2011 when it came out, and I still have a vague memory of the memory palace he teaches you to build. I used my childhood home to remember: - Garlic in the driveway - Six bottles of wine playing catch with three pairs of socks - A scuba diver in the kitchen sink - A smoke machine in the living room I have no idea what it was that I was supposed to be remembering or whether those are even the right things, but memory palaces are apparently a powerful tool.
  - romanhn 5y ago
    It's funny, the memory palace idea always seemed like such an odd concept to me, until I realized I have aphantasia and lack the "normal" visualization capabilities.
    - totetsu 5y ago
      I have heard people who lack strong visualization are still able to get some utility out of it by verbally elaboratively encoding the thing rather than visually encoding it.
      - romanhn 5y ago
        Totally. I did something along those lines as a kid to memorize the first 30 digits of pi. Basically coming up with an elaborate story and committing it to memory.
        IndySun 5y ago
        >coming up with an elaborate story and committing it to memory I've tried a few of these, including the one in Derren's book. I have to say, none of it worked. Over the course of trying to remember 20 places of pi by various methods, I ended up committing it to memory too, but, and here's the important part, I do not remember them now. I think remembering different things benefit from using different techniques, and we just use the right one unconsciously, there's not a single method you can impose on all memory tasks.
  - raffraffraff 5y ago
    The problem I've had with memory palaces is that I find it hard to keep multiple versions of a scene separate from each other. I also find it tedious to come up with the scenes themselves. Mnemonics are the difficult part. Derren Browne explains as way to memorize a deck of playing cards by assigning mnemonics to cards and creating a story with them. I found it somewhat ease. Memorising the cards by themselves is tedious. "Jack of diamonds... wait, no, was it hearts?" There are too many similar cards. So you turn each card into a 100% unique mnemonic using a reversible method. He used a combination of the peg numerical system (1=l, 2=n, 3=m etc) and the first letter of the suit (h=heart, s=spade etc) to come up with a single meme for each card. For picture cards, use characters or people who match up. Queen of hearts might be your wife. King of clubs might be a famous MC or rapper. This gives you 52 items like: Queen Latifa: queen of clubs Ham: 3 of hearts Elon Musk: Jack of diamonds Car: 4 of clubs Dog: 9 of diamonds All you need to do, as you're memorising the order of the deck, is to create a narrative around the individual cards. "Queen Latifa is eating ham with Elon Musk in her car. Her dog is on her lap begging". There's no way you're going to get the cards wrong, or the order. The first time I ever tried it, it took me about 30 minutes to invent or memorise existing card pictures. Once I tried to use it I successfully remembered 25 cards in a row. Surprisingly, I could recite them backwards or name any card that came before or after any card chosen from the deck. Our brains are very good at remembering stories.
  - waaaaaaat 5y ago
    same. I remember the bottles of wine, scuba diver and claudia schiffer swimming in cottage cheese or something like that. Socks on the living room couch?
- paulpauper 5y ago
  it is a great story and probably even a better book, but the sciences is really lacking https://greyenlightenment.com/2018/08/14/bullshitting-with-einstein/ https://greyenlightenment.com/2018/08/14/bullshitting-with-e... There are no peer-reviewed studies that corroborate the claims of the book, and research shows memory champions all have Mensa-level IQs. This is not surprising. Short-term memory is g-loaded and is a component of IQ test (it is called digit span or digit recall), so it is logical to assume that the best at memory would also have high IQs.
  - augustk 5y ago
    On the other hand we have the Savant syndrome which is typically not associated with high IQ.
    - Syzygies 5y ago
      That, and I'm glad I didn't read "Mensa-level IQs" while drinking coffee, I would have spit all over my keyboard. Mensa? A low threshold, yet smart enough to be in the game if you can find something that really interests you. But you choose a club? Huh... It's actually heartening that various people famous for their IQs have accomplished zilch in their lives other than being famous for their IQs. This tells you that the test is flawed, and that other factors determine revolutionary levels of success. The magician/mathematician Persi Diaconis long ago explained to me about "memory palaces" and their effectiveness in competition. This can be generalized: The mountaineer Conrad Anker relays how European skiers can spot an American skier from far off: They waste effort. Many people had Michael Jordan's physique, but Michael Jordan spent a decade developing his physique into a world class athlete. One is the architect of one's intelligence. The most poisonous aspect of IQ tests is that people believe them, and conclude that intelligence is innate, not malleable.
      - paulpauper 5y ago
        If you think Mensa people accomplish little, wait until you see the general population
    - 5y ago
hinkley 5y ago
Eidetic memory is one of those things only pre-pubescent kids are supposed to have, and mine survived into high school. I can still recall a couple history tests where I could not remember the answer but I knew for sure I wrote it in the margin on a page of my notes. When I finished the rest of the test I ran the clock down racking my brain trying to tease out the exact text. Because of this I always thought of myself as a visual thinker. Until the last time we were discussing Aphantasia here and I realized to my horror that I hardly ever picture anything in my head anymore. Which is super confusing considering that while I'm awful with names, I will remember your face pretty much forever. We've met before, I'm sure of it. I am so assured of this, that on the rare occasion someone recognizes me but I don't know them, it's so unsettling that it borders on traumatic. Like the guy in the movie who discovers he's been spied upon. What I've worked out is that I'm a spatial thinker, which goes to explain why I get very particular about the 'shapes' of code the way some craftsman get snippy about someone moving their tools. Once I teased that out I then discovered that a lot of my ways of processing complex data are functionally indistinguishable from a Mind Palace, but the decor doesn't matter, just the shapes. Like navigating your house at night without turning all the lights on. Careful, there's a chair there, and the dog bowl is over here. And at the store, this couch is great but it won't quite fit in our living room. Yes, I'm sure honey.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  john von neumann had it his whole life
  - Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
    I like to think such people are actually normal, and we all suffer from some kind of brain damage that we could fix somehow.
- driftlogic 5y ago
  I think you just described my brain. Are there resources around spatial thinking you find insightful?
  - 5y ago
RobertRoberts 5y ago
I took a "memory course" in college and it was like a muscle based exercise. If I used it and practiced it, it worked. But after I stopped practicing/using it for a while, eventually it became atrophied and I could remember things as well as I could when I was working hard it. Is this how it works for everyone that "develops" a good memory?
- sigg3 5y ago
  Can't remember.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  For storing random key value definitions, mine seems to work that way. But it kind of helps me to think of memory as a network of interconnected bits. One random point will be hard to get back to, but if you have a dozen related bits of information that all link to one bit, it will be easy to find your way back to it and recall it. Building a solid base of knowledge and understanding of a subject helps to build these interconnected networks.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  I think this is one of the main points in moonwalking with Einstein, discussed in a sister thread. By the end of the book, the author wins the American memory championship and the following day he forgot where he parked his car. These memory techniques are like a notebook. They won’t make you remember stuff any better, but if you wrote something down (in your memory palace or notebook) you can look it up.
Graziano_M 5y ago
The most important thing I learned about this sort of memorizing is that it is not useful to me, and that let me stop worrying about it. Sure, there might be some cases where it could be, but for the most part this technique overfits to the competition and doesn't transfer to my day-to-day. For things I want to memorize day to day I don't have to memorize a long list of things and recall it directly, I might have to build up a list of things I can recall, but I have time to build up that list, and I can use spaced repetition (Anki) for that.
foooobaba 5y ago
For those interested https://artofmemory.com/ https://artofmemory.com/ is a forum where lots of memory athletes share strategies and tactics. Additionally it also has some software you can practice to improve your skills.
open-source-ux 5y ago
This is an excellent 30 minute radio programme/podcast. Since most people I suspect won't have 30 minutes to listen to it all, the programme finishes on an interesting note. There is a cultural stereotype that Chinese schooling places a higher value on memorisation of facts, compared to liberal Western education systems which prioritise understanding over rote learning. So these memorisation techniques and competitions are painted as a difference in education values. But as one of the "memory athletes" says, the techniques of memory training are not rote learning, but inherently creative. He goes on to explain why. There's much more in the programme including how to create a "memory palace".
aomml 5y ago
If you want to watch top memory athletes compete in real time, check out https://memoryleague.com/ https://memoryleague.com/ You can also watch the ongoing championships on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/memorysportstv https://www.twitch.tv/memorysportstv
whymauri 5y ago
I once met Jim Karol who uses recursive associative mnemonics to form a n-dimensional associative memory matrix. Most people have a 1-D or 2-D associative matrix, but Jim Karol can basically store associative memory with log(n) associative lookups.
- austinjp 5y ago
  Nice. Can you explain the recursive aspect? A quick Google reveals only teaser articles and ads for books. I'm interested because years ago I started developing a "nested" system, although I never got it adequately fleshed out. For the curious, mine was about dates. 31 words for days in the month, 12 for months. The secret sauce, though, is practice. I never did the practice, so I remain limited to the first three dates I tried to commit to memory with my system. But: I can still remember them! :)
- totetsu 5y ago
  I kind of do that sometimes with little framed vignettes leading to other memory palaces inside stations of memory palaces.
thoughtstheseus 5y ago
One of my pandemic hobbies was learning all the days of the week for a few years. Actually pretty doable.
- poopypoopington 5y ago
  what does that mean?
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Presumably, given a particular date in the future, telling you what day of the week it would be. However, there's also a method you can learn to help you accomplish the same thing, without the need for committing a great deal of facts to memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

"Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer is an interesting book on the subject of memory athletes. The author is a journalist who sets out to write the book and in parallel practices alongside his research subjects. In the end, he winds up winning the USA Memory Championship and setting a US record. Really drives home the point that it's all about the techniques and the time one is willing to put into them.

bilal4hmed 5y ago
Highly recommend the book, its a great read.
ftio 5y ago
I read it in 2011 when it came out, and I still have a vague memory of the memory palace he teaches you to build. I used my childhood home to remember: - Garlic in the driveway - Six bottles of wine playing catch with three pairs of socks - A scuba diver in the kitchen sink - A smoke machine in the living room I have no idea what it was that I was supposed to be remembering or whether those are even the right things, but memory palaces are apparently a powerful tool.
- romanhn 5y ago
  It's funny, the memory palace idea always seemed like such an odd concept to me, until I realized I have aphantasia and lack the "normal" visualization capabilities.
  - totetsu 5y ago
    I have heard people who lack strong visualization are still able to get some utility out of it by verbally elaboratively encoding the thing rather than visually encoding it.
    - romanhn 5y ago
      Totally. I did something along those lines as a kid to memorize the first 30 digits of pi. Basically coming up with an elaborate story and committing it to memory.
      - IndySun 5y ago
        >coming up with an elaborate story and committing it to memory I've tried a few of these, including the one in Derren's book. I have to say, none of it worked. Over the course of trying to remember 20 places of pi by various methods, I ended up committing it to memory too, but, and here's the important part, I do not remember them now. I think remembering different things benefit from using different techniques, and we just use the right one unconsciously, there's not a single method you can impose on all memory tasks.
- raffraffraff 5y ago
  The problem I've had with memory palaces is that I find it hard to keep multiple versions of a scene separate from each other. I also find it tedious to come up with the scenes themselves. Mnemonics are the difficult part. Derren Browne explains as way to memorize a deck of playing cards by assigning mnemonics to cards and creating a story with them. I found it somewhat ease. Memorising the cards by themselves is tedious. "Jack of diamonds... wait, no, was it hearts?" There are too many similar cards. So you turn each card into a 100% unique mnemonic using a reversible method. He used a combination of the peg numerical system (1=l, 2=n, 3=m etc) and the first letter of the suit (h=heart, s=spade etc) to come up with a single meme for each card. For picture cards, use characters or people who match up. Queen of hearts might be your wife. King of clubs might be a famous MC or rapper. This gives you 52 items like: Queen Latifa: queen of clubs Ham: 3 of hearts Elon Musk: Jack of diamonds Car: 4 of clubs Dog: 9 of diamonds All you need to do, as you're memorising the order of the deck, is to create a narrative around the individual cards. "Queen Latifa is eating ham with Elon Musk in her car. Her dog is on her lap begging". There's no way you're going to get the cards wrong, or the order. The first time I ever tried it, it took me about 30 minutes to invent or memorise existing card pictures. Once I tried to use it I successfully remembered 25 cards in a row. Surprisingly, I could recite them backwards or name any card that came before or after any card chosen from the deck. Our brains are very good at remembering stories.
- waaaaaaat 5y ago
  same. I remember the bottles of wine, scuba diver and claudia schiffer swimming in cottage cheese or something like that. Socks on the living room couch?
paulpauper 5y ago
it is a great story and probably even a better book, but the sciences is really lacking https://greyenlightenment.com/2018/08/14/bullshitting-with-einstein/ https://greyenlightenment.com/2018/08/14/bullshitting-with-e... There are no peer-reviewed studies that corroborate the claims of the book, and research shows memory champions all have Mensa-level IQs. This is not surprising. Short-term memory is g-loaded and is a component of IQ test (it is called digit span or digit recall), so it is logical to assume that the best at memory would also have high IQs.
- augustk 5y ago
  On the other hand we have the Savant syndrome which is typically not associated with high IQ.
  - Syzygies 5y ago
    That, and I'm glad I didn't read "Mensa-level IQs" while drinking coffee, I would have spit all over my keyboard. Mensa? A low threshold, yet smart enough to be in the game if you can find something that really interests you. But you choose a club? Huh... It's actually heartening that various people famous for their IQs have accomplished zilch in their lives other than being famous for their IQs. This tells you that the test is flawed, and that other factors determine revolutionary levels of success. The magician/mathematician Persi Diaconis long ago explained to me about "memory palaces" and their effectiveness in competition. This can be generalized: The mountaineer Conrad Anker relays how European skiers can spot an American skier from far off: They waste effort. Many people had Michael Jordan's physique, but Michael Jordan spent a decade developing his physique into a world class athlete. One is the architect of one's intelligence. The most poisonous aspect of IQ tests is that people believe them, and conclude that intelligence is innate, not malleable.
    - paulpauper 5y ago
      If you think Mensa people accomplish little, wait until you see the general population
  - 5y ago

hinkley 5y ago

Eidetic memory is one of those things only pre-pubescent kids are supposed to have, and mine survived into high school. I can still recall a couple history tests where I could not remember the answer but I knew for sure I wrote it in the margin on a page of my notes. When I finished the rest of the test I ran the clock down racking my brain trying to tease out the exact text. Because of this I always thought of myself as a visual thinker. Until the last time we were discussing Aphantasia here and I realized to my horror that I hardly ever picture anything in my head anymore. Which is super confusing considering that while I'm awful with names, I will remember your face pretty much forever. We've met before, I'm sure of it. I am so assured of this, that on the rare occasion someone recognizes me but I don't know them, it's so unsettling that it borders on traumatic. Like the guy in the movie who discovers he's been spied upon. What I've worked out is that I'm a spatial thinker, which goes to explain why I get very particular about the 'shapes' of code the way some craftsman get snippy about someone moving their tools. Once I teased that out I then discovered that a lot of my ways of processing complex data are functionally indistinguishable from a Mind Palace, but the decor doesn't matter, just the shapes. Like navigating your house at night without turning all the lights on. Careful, there's a chair there, and the dog bowl is over here. And at the store, this couch is great but it won't quite fit in our living room. Yes, I'm sure honey.

paulpauper 5y ago
john von neumann had it his whole life
- Gauge_Irrahphe 5y ago
  I like to think such people are actually normal, and we all suffer from some kind of brain damage that we could fix somehow.
driftlogic 5y ago
I think you just described my brain. Are there resources around spatial thinking you find insightful?
- 5y ago

RobertRoberts 5y ago

I took a "memory course" in college and it was like a muscle based exercise. If I used it and practiced it, it worked. But after I stopped practicing/using it for a while, eventually it became atrophied and I could remember things as well as I could when I was working hard it. Is this how it works for everyone that "develops" a good memory?

sigg3 5y ago
Can't remember.
bostonsre 5y ago
For storing random key value definitions, mine seems to work that way. But it kind of helps me to think of memory as a network of interconnected bits. One random point will be hard to get back to, but if you have a dozen related bits of information that all link to one bit, it will be easy to find your way back to it and recall it. Building a solid base of knowledge and understanding of a subject helps to build these interconnected networks.
wodenokoto 5y ago
I think this is one of the main points in moonwalking with Einstein, discussed in a sister thread. By the end of the book, the author wins the American memory championship and the following day he forgot where he parked his car. These memory techniques are like a notebook. They won’t make you remember stuff any better, but if you wrote something down (in your memory palace or notebook) you can look it up.

Graziano_M 5y ago

The most important thing I learned about this sort of memorizing is that it is not useful to me, and that let me stop worrying about it. Sure, there might be some cases where it could be, but for the most part this technique overfits to the competition and doesn't transfer to my day-to-day. For things I want to memorize day to day I don't have to memorize a long list of things and recall it directly, I might have to build up a list of things I can recall, but I have time to build up that list, and I can use spaced repetition (Anki) for that.

foooobaba 5y ago

For those interested https://artofmemory.com/ https://artofmemory.com/ is a forum where lots of memory athletes share strategies and tactics. Additionally it also has some software you can practice to improve your skills.

open-source-ux 5y ago

This is an excellent 30 minute radio programme/podcast. Since most people I suspect won't have 30 minutes to listen to it all, the programme finishes on an interesting note. There is a cultural stereotype that Chinese schooling places a higher value on memorisation of facts, compared to liberal Western education systems which prioritise understanding over rote learning. So these memorisation techniques and competitions are painted as a difference in education values. But as one of the "memory athletes" says, the techniques of memory training are not rote learning, but inherently creative. He goes on to explain why. There's much more in the programme including how to create a "memory palace".

aomml 5y ago

If you want to watch top memory athletes compete in real time, check out https://memoryleague.com/ https://memoryleague.com/ You can also watch the ongoing championships on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/memorysportstv https://www.twitch.tv/memorysportstv

whymauri 5y ago

I once met Jim Karol who uses recursive associative mnemonics to form a n-dimensional associative memory matrix. Most people have a 1-D or 2-D associative matrix, but Jim Karol can basically store associative memory with log(n) associative lookups.

austinjp 5y ago
Nice. Can you explain the recursive aspect? A quick Google reveals only teaser articles and ads for books. I'm interested because years ago I started developing a "nested" system, although I never got it adequately fleshed out. For the curious, mine was about dates. 31 words for days in the month, 12 for months. The secret sauce, though, is practice. I never did the practice, so I remain limited to the first three dates I tried to commit to memory with my system. But: I can still remember them! :)
totetsu 5y ago
I kind of do that sometimes with little framed vignettes leading to other memory palaces inside stations of memory palaces.

thoughtstheseus 5y ago

One of my pandemic hobbies was learning all the days of the week for a few years. Actually pretty doable.

poopypoopington 5y ago
what does that mean?
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Presumably, given a particular date in the future, telling you what day of the week it would be. However, there's also a method you can learn to help you accomplish the same thing, without the need for committing a great deal of facts to memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_rule.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]