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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday March 21 2017, @08:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the soylentils-minds-are-more-like-memory-gutters dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

There's been a long-standing debate about whether memory athletes are born with superior memories, or whether their abilities are due to their training regimens. These tend to include an ancient memorization strategy called the method of loci, which involves visualizing important pieces of information placed at key stops along a mental journey. This journey can be an imaginary walk through your house or a local park, or your drive to work. The important thing is that you can mentally move back through it to retrieve the pieces of information you stored. (The ancient Greeks are said to have used it to remember important texts.)

To find out what's going on in top-level rememberers' brains, Konrad teamed up with neuroscientist Martin Dresler at Radboud University in the Netherlands. They recruited 23 of the top 50 memory competitors in the world. All were between the ages of 20 and 36. Then, the scientists scanned the memory athletes' brains while they were just relaxing, and also while they memorized a list of 72 words.

The team, and their co-investigators at Stanford University, found that the memory athletes' brains don't appear to be built any differently from yours or mine, according to results they published in the journal Neuron. "That was quite surprising, since these are really the best memorizers in the world," Dresler says. "And still, they didn't show a single memory structure, any single region or collection of regions that was anatomically strikingly different from normal control subjects."

Even so, their brains don't work the way yours or mine does. The athletes were able to recall at least 70 of the 72 words they studied — compared to an average of only 39 words for the non-athletes they were compared to. What's more, while the professional rememberers' brains were structurally similar to the control group, the memory athletes' brain scans showed unique patterns of activity, where brain regions that are involved in memory and cognition were statistically more likely to fire together.

The method of loci is also known as the memory palace, and Konrad says the first step is to make up a set of locations. The place doesn't matter as much as your familiarity with it. Then you create a map in your mind with a series of stops. The first stop might be your front door. The second could be the table next to it where you put down your sunglasses. Then, when you're given a list of words to memorize, you visualize scenes that link the words with each stop.

[Editor's Note: there is a nice TED talk on the memory palace method and memory competitors here]

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Scrutinizer on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:04AM

    by Scrutinizer (6534) on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:04AM (#482485)

    My experience is in agreement with the article: linking important information to unrelated material in memory can produce astonishing results, even for "foam-rubber trap minds" like myself.

    For a modern example, I recommend The Memory Book [goodreads.com] (by authors Lorayne and Lucas), which has some excellent examples and guidance on how to put such a method to work. To make regular use of it, the technique does require practice to form habits, and yet the details of the associative-memory exercise used in the very first part of the book stayed with me for years afterwards.

    I'll have to remember to start making use of the process...

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