Thyme.
The Lost Art of Memory: Moonwalking
with Einstein
Dominic O’Brien failed his O levels and
left school aged 16.
Not long after, he saw someone memorise
a pack of cards in under three minutes.
With discipline, effort and bucketloads
of practice, he beat the record
and became the first and eight-times
World Memory Champion.
‘Memory comes down to desire and
2,500 year-old techniques.’
Ben Pridmore can permanently remember
what happened on 96 historical dates in 5 minutes.
‘It’s all about understanding how
memory works.’
Ed Cooke can remember 99 names and
faces in 15 minutes. ’My memory is quite average.
But even average memories are
remarkably powerful if used properly.’
Joshua Foer covered the World Memory
Championships in 2005 as a journalist.
Fascinated, he decided to enter in
2006: ‘I didn’t have a clue how my own memory worked.
Perhaps the best way to understand
human memory would be to try very hard to optimise it.’
His book about it is called Moonwalking
with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering.
This blogpost is about what he learned.
Memory, marginalised
‘Once upon a time, memory was at the
root of all culture: remembering was everything.
Only through memorizing could ideas be
truly incorporated into the mind.
Techniques existed to etch into the
brain foundational texts and ideas.
Athenian Themistocles could remember
the names of all 20,000 Athenians.
Roman orators like Cicero argued that
the art of memory and an inventory of knowledge was a vital instrument for the
invention of new ideas. Orthodox Jews memorized all 5,422 pages of the Talmud
so that when a pin was stuck through it, they could tell which words it passed
through on every page. Memory training was considered a centerpiece of
classical education on par with grammar,
logic and rhetoric. Students were not
just taught what to remember, but how to remember it.
In a world with few books, memory was
sacrosanct. King Cyrus could name all the soldiers
in his army. Scipio knew all the names
of the Roman people. The Greek scholar Charmadas
recited the contents of any volume in
libraries that people asked him to recite. Seneca could repeat two thousand
names in the order they were given to him. Ad Herrenium calls memory the
*treasure house of inventions*
with two components: images and places. Images represent
the contents of what one wishes to
remember, places, where those images are stored.
‘A trained memory was the key to
cultivating judgement and citizenship. What one memorised shaped one’s
character. Memory training was seen as a form of character building. Oral
poetry
was a massive repository of useful
knowledge, a sort of encyclopaedia of ethics, politics, history
and technology which each citizen was
required to learn as the core of his educational equipment.
‘Over the last millennia, we’ve
gradually accumulated a vast superstructure of external memory
that has sped up exponentially in
recent years. Literature, music, law, politics, history, science, maths: our
culture is an edifice built of externalized memories. There’s more to remember
than ever before.
‘How did memory end up so marginalised?
Why did these techniques disappear?
How did our culture end up forgetting
how to remember?
‘Once upon a time, with no alphabet or
paper, anything that had to be preserved
had to be preserved in memory. Any
story, idea or insight had to be remembered.
‘Today, it often seems we remember very
little. Books and the internet store information;
calendars remembers our schedules; GPS
supplants our spatial memory; phones displant numbers
of friends and family. Gadgets have
eliminated the need to remember such things any more. Amnesiacs, we don’t
remember what we read – or sometimes, whether we’ve read it.
Our everyday memories have atrophied
and we’ve become estranged from disciplined memory.’
Turbo Charged Reading can
address long term memory of what you’ve read.
By 2006, Josh Foer had delved deep into
the lost art of memory, expended enormous effort
in training his mind, dived into the
scientific literature, and had himself neuroscientifically tested
by the world expert on experts, K.
Anders Ericsson. He entered the US Memory Championship.
This involved:
15 minutes to remember 99 names and
faces;
15 minutes to remember a 100-line poem;
5 minutes to memorise as many events
and their dates as possible
5 minutes to memorise the order of 99
2-digit numbers;
3 minutes to memorise the order of a
pack of playing cards;
5 minutes to remember 10 pieces of
information from 5 strangers,
including names, hobbies, favourite
foods and birthdays.
That year, at the dizzying speed of 1
minute 40 seconds for 52 cards,
Josh won the US memory contest.
So what?
Over the year and in his book, he
recorded what he’d learned.
1. Memory is domain-specific
Chess masters still forget names,
and memory champions still lose their keys:
‘I could recall more lines of poetry,
speeches, more people’s names.
The paradox was, I was still stuck with
the same old shoddy memory that misplaced my car keys.
My working memory was still as limited
by the same constraints as everyone else.
We tend to think of memory as
monolithic; it’s actually a collection of independent modules.
Some people have good memories for
names, but not numbers.
Memory is not an all-purpose skill, but
linked to content via schemata.
As teachers, we need to carefully
select what we want students to remember –
and it’s not 52 cards in 5 minutes or
random sequences of digits – it’s meaningful subject content.
2. Deliberate practice is the only
route to improvement
‘My experience had validated that practice
makes perfect,
but only if it’s the
right kind of concentrated, deliberate practice.’
‘Amateur musicians are more likely to
spend more of their time playing music,
whereas pros are more likely to spend
time on exercises and drills and focus on specific,
difficult parts of pieces. *How
you spend your time practicing is far more important
than the amount of time you spend*. The
single best predictor of an individual’s chess skill
is not the amount of chess he’s played,
but the amount of time he’s spent alone working through
old games. Surgeons don’t plateau
because they get instant feedback on operations.’
Practice can be made more deliberate by
setting goals, getting feedback and tracking scores.
3. Cues make things memorable
‘Our minds seem built to remember
spaces and images. The point of memory techniques
is to take the kinds of memories that
our brains aren’t good at holding on to and change them
into the kinds of memories our brains
were built for. Take something unmemorable and convert it
to a series of visual images mentally
arranged within an imagined space,
and suddenly forgettable items become
unforgettable.’
‘Make it visual, concrete, outlandish,
animate, dynamic, anthropormorphised, vivid, unusual, unexpected, unique,
distinct, bizarre, striking, detailed, attention-grabbing,
sensory (smell & taste) – make it
durable’.
In teaching…
Cognitive scientist Gregory Yates and evidence-based educationalist John Hattie review Moonwalking With Einstein in their book The Science of Learning and come to this conclusion:
There are two implications I see for
teachers.
The first is to ask, what
exactly do we want pupils to remember?
The second is to ask, how do we
help them remember it?
In English, I want my students to
remember quotations and who said them;
events and the dates they happened; as
well as how to analyse complex texts and connect them
to their contexts. I’d like to help
them remember poems and Shakespearian speeches off by heart. I’d like them to
remember their own speeches without notes.
Just as Cicero and Shakespeare were
expected at school to memorise sententiae (wise sayings),
I’d like them to remember aphorisms and
words of wisdom from the ages.
How do I become a high-mnemonic
teacher? I could teach my pupils how memory works,
and help them understand how to
remember better than before. I could embed revisiting so that we’re always
reviewing material they’ve memorised, not just in revision season but
throughout the year.
I could teach them how to create their own striking, vivid,
unusual cues for subject content.
As Josh, Ed, Ben and Dominic reveal,
you can remember anything you set your mind to.
https://pragmaticreform.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/moonwalking-with-einstein/
You can TCR software and engineering manuals for spontaneously recall – or pass that exam.
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7 times faster and remember what
I’ve read.
I can TCR an instructional/academic book around 20 times faster and remember what I’ve
read.
Introduction to Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
A
practical overview of
Turbo Charged Reading YouTube
How to choose a
book. A Turbo Charged
Reading YouTube
Advanced Reading Skills Perhaps you’d like
to join my FaceBook group ?
Perhaps you’d like to check
out my sister blogs:
www.innermindworking.blogspot.com
gives many ways for you to work with the stresses of
life
www.ourinnerminds.blogspot.com
take advantage of business experience and expertise.
www.happyartaccidents.blogspot.com
just for fun.
To quote the Dr Seuss
himself, “The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn; the
more places you'll go.”
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