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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]
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:07AM (3 children)
There’s been a long-standing debate about whether sports athletes are born with superior physical abilities, or whether their abilities are due to their training regimens. NOT. It’s both in both cases I imagine. Just like sports athletes generally have better than average physical ability, these memory athletes likely also have better than average memories to begin with, and both are honed by their training regimens. In both cases, even people with lesser innate ability (either physical or mental) can likely benefit from such training regimens as well.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday March 22 2017, @03:59AM (2 children)
While I agree there's likely some innate component to it, I also think the vast, vast majority of people in modern societies don't bother developing memory skills anymore. The widespread dissemination of cheap books and paper a few centuries ago essentially made the old arts of memory obsolete, so very few people bothered with memorization on a large scale after that. But there was still some value in smaller skills of memory, kept alive in "recitations" that educated folks used to do in school. But that too faded as the "classical education" model died off in the mid-20th century or so.
And now we're undergoing yet another memory transition. My experience teaching younger folks now is that "knowing things" is seen as pretty irrelevant in the age of Google. More information than any reference librarian ever dreamed of a couple generations ago is now available with a few search terms. I myself have noticed changes in my memory patterns that I need to fight these days. For example, I can still rattle off the phone numbers of a couple dozen friends I had when I was growing up, but I barely can remember a handful of current numbers, because I never have to actually dial them.
The loss of phone number memory may seem a trivial thing (until your cell phone dies in an unexpected situation and you need to call someone you know to let people know where you are), but it's part of a much broader shift in the use of memory today.
My broader point: memorization truly used to be a trained skill, and most of the scholars of the past could probably "run circles" around us today in terms of memory capability. So while there may be some innate factor, the fact that most people don't have significantly better memory skills is also due to our shifting cultural priorities.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:28AM (1 child)
Is there anything that memory athletes can do in life other than circus tricks on obscure TV channels? I mean, reciting texts might be valuable in some backward religious circles but not in general.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @12:23AM
You don't want to know.