
Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion - prostoalex
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/smarter-living/train-your-brain-like-a-memory-champion.html
======
jakubp
There's a bigger story hidden behind the achievements of memory champions. The
groundbreaking result from the past few decades is not that there is a way for
a human to memorize a thousand numbers, or that a particular method of
memorization (say, memory palace) is the way to do it. It's nice, but not that
relevant for everyday life and not applicable to most life problems.

The true achievement is recognition and verification, across many disciplines,
that: 1) there are better and worse ways to improve skill 2) anyone can
improve any skill [if they do it the right way] 3) mental representations are
key to high performance. Some are better than others. 4) one should study how
to learn a given skill, or get someone who knows that to teach, e.g. to study
people who are best at something - to find out their training regimen, their
way of structuring the information/skill/work/memory/... - this is likely to
work _everywhere_ 5) If that doesn't help, i.e. little progress is made, one
can still figure out, discover, create their own ways of practice to advance.
6) the upper limit of skill is way way higher thank we think 7) Many fields
don't have clear criteria for success, so little feedback is available on low-
level performance details, which limits the progress of training methods.

If you're interested in all that, I recommend reading the book of a renowned
scientist who actually discovered a lot of this stuff and who worked with
early memory champions, provoking them to push the boundaries of what was
thought possible -- Anders Ericsson, "Peak: Secrets from New Science of
Expertise".

~~~
kordlessagain
> At your left, there’s a map of Minnesota, dangling precariously from the
> wall. You’re certain it wasn’t there this morning. Below it, you find a
> plush M&M candy.

> If none of this makes sense, stick with us; by the end of this piece you’ll
> be using the same techniques to memorize just about anything you’ve ever
> wanted to remember.

No, it won't ever make sense and it may continue to come as a surprise to many
that not all of us have the ability to form visual based imagery in our minds.
A common term for this is Aphantasia.

Not everyone thinks the same way. Any attempt at mass producing some means to
know something better/faster is probably not going to work on a subset of the
population.

I was able to use the Memory Book's number to letter technique a few years ago
to memorize short lists of objects, but my recall for that is pretty good
anyway so it's not worth the time taken to memorize stuff using the process
(which itself requires memorizing certain objects for the numbers). For those
who visualize, I would imagine such techniques could be quite useful.

~~~
yayana
I've had stronger and weaker Aphantasia at different points in my development
and in different learning/work situations.

Given that styles of learning has largely been debunked, I would suspect that
the vast majority of us actually have roughly the same capabilities and they
are just unexercised, exercized to fitness or from too much stimulus to
exhaustion by our specific environments, diets, motivation levels, etc.

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melling
After I read “Moonwalking With Einstein”, I pretty much think it’s a gimmick
and still a lot of work. Spaced repetition is probably a better technique.

The main idea that seemed to work is the visual association. The visual of
Moonwalking with Einstein, for example, was one of his mneumonics.

~~~
prostoalex
It seems hard to apply spaced repetition to numeric information or names of
people you've just met at a party.

~~~
jacobolus
> _It seems hard to apply spaced repetition to numeric information or names of
> people you 've just met at a party._

Spaced repetition is one of the only ways to learn names in my experience. If
I learn someone’s name and then don’t see them again for 2 weeks, chances are
I will have forgotten. Even if I see them once a month for a year, there’s a
good chance I will forget each time.

If I see them the next day after I learned their name I will remember. If I
see them a week after that I will still remember. If I see them a month after
that chances are I will still remember.

If I had first e.g. read the person’s academic paper or a few of their blog
posts or the like, there’s a good chance putting a face to the name once will
be sufficient.

* * *

If you can get a photo of the person, then you can work learning their name
into some kind of deliberate flash card routine, and that will be more
effective overall than relying on chance encounters and less embarrassing than
repeatedly asking.

I would recommend that teachers of lecture courses put a few minutes a day
into doing spaced repetition of students’ faces/names, starting before the
start of the term: teachers who can remember students’ names make a big
impression.

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DarthMader
So the main tool that memory champions rely on is essentially
'visualizing/picturing' fake situations. Now, I have a solid memory outside of
this. But when I picture things, it's pretty hard for me even for most
familiar places like my home. Any memory experts with actual advice to see
more vibrantly? I feel like I'm always fighting against the natural tendency
to see black (as is natural with eyes closed) versus trying to focus on what
I'm picturing.

~~~
mrmyers
'visualizing' isn't just 'seeing'. Try to think back in your mind to the house
in you grew up in. Do you remember where the kitchen, bedrooms, and/or
bathrooms were? Do you remember which way the beds/furniture were facing in
most of the rooms, which side the sinks and counters were in the bathrooms and
kitchens? Do you remember where in the house any other furniture, such as a
desk, couch, television, or coat rack was? Most people can remember these
things, even if they can't conjure forth before their mind's eye a vivid
mental picture of their house.

Try answering all of those questions about, say, any of your neighbors houses
growing up which you may have been in once or twice. About a recent home,
building or room in which you may have only been in once, sometime within the
past 6 months to a year.

While it's not perfect, and some particular facts might elude you, most people
will find it surprisingly easy to answer most of these questions, even about
buildings they may have only been in once or twice a decade or more prior.
Yet, if they were to try to, say, answer detailed questions about a painting
they may have seen around the same time, most will struggle.

We seem to have a certain kind architectural/location memory which is used for
remembering the relative layouts of places we've been, and this sort of memory
seems to have some different properties compared to just visual imagery. It
seems to be retained long-term fairly effortlessly, with very little time
actually spent 'memorizing' it.

This is the basis of a lot of the tricks used by memory champions:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci)

~~~
krackers
> even if they can't conjure forth before their mind's eye a vivid mental
> picture of their house

It should be noted that there's also a small percentage of people who
physically don't have a "mind's eye":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia)

------
grnde
If you want to run through some pre-built memory palaces to get a sense of how
they work, I recommend you check out
[https://www.memorypalace.com](https://www.memorypalace.com). They have a
platform where you can build them and post them for public viewing. I use
memory palaces all the time and it really does take some practice, but they
help me store things into long term memory. Part of the trick I feel is that
you can review frequently in your head without accessing a book or digital,
and so you can repeat it often to yourself so you can make that jump from
short term to long term memory.

~~~
drieddust
Thanks that seems interesting. What kind of information you are learning with
this method and how exactly you go about doing it? I feel brute force learning
is very important before diving deep.

I am trying to evolve my personal framework and I feel us starting with "Why"
type questions is counterproductive and frustruating. Trying to ask why is
something before even asking what is something is poor use of time.

To understand the complex system, I feel going from what to how to why makes
much more sense than asking why questions and just getting overwhelmed.

\- What Phase Once we know how things work on mechanical level. Asking what
each component is build of and what are its parts.

\- How Phase This phase is like taking a leap of faith and comitting the steps
to memory. At the end of this phase a big picture of how various components
work and hang together.

\- Why Phase This phase should be reserved for things we want to deeply
understand.

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paulpauper
Despite all the media attention about memory training, there's actually little
evidence this stuff works.

[https://greyenlightenment.com/bullshitting-with-
einstein/](https://greyenlightenment.com/bullshitting-with-einstein/) Either
memory is a direct function or IQ or due to 'savant abilities' and not
something that an be replicated. There are no reputable studies controlling
for IQ that replicate this.

~~~
EForEndeavour
The author started losing me pretty early in the post, starting from where he
implies that IQ is an "innate, biological trait." Notably, he (intentionally?)
completely misses the point of a memory palace:

"Using a mnemonic device (such as a ‘memory palace’) still requires one
memorize the mnemonic. If I ask you to memorize ten historical dates, a trick
may be to associate these dates with a mental visualization, but you must
still remember ten associations, which is still not easy."

It sounds like the author has not even once run a self-experiment to test the
efficacy of mnemonic devices. It's patently easier to memorize these
"associations" that he criticizes than it is to directly memorize an equal
number of bland, meaningless digits, for example. Memorizing the mnemonic is a
one-time, up-front investment of effort. Once you've written the mnemonic
(encoder-decoder machinery) into long-term memory and become fluent in its
use, you can fire it up at any time and encode meaningless sequences into
highly meaningful and memorable equivalents.

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formatkaka
Check out Alex Mullen's site where he explains this in more detail -
[https://mullenmemory.com/](https://mullenmemory.com/)

------
fastbmk
There's a great app to train your memory:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doggoapps....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doggoapps.smart&hl=en)

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iambateman
Having read Moonwalking with Einstein (which is fascinating and worth the
read), I think of these skills as similar to studying chess - effective for
the discipline but probably not generally helpful.

Memory experts sold their discipline as if it would radically transform an
average person’s daily life, which has not been my experience.

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budadre75
I want to know if these champs can do like 20-back or higher(the n-back
trainer) with three or more different types of inputs. If they can achieve 80%
success rate, that will be super impressive.

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1024core
Do such techniques work for mathematical stuff, like equations or formulae?

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Sure; you just need a mapping of math symbols to memorable
objects/colors/verbs/whatever. Mnemonics are just symbol mapping.

~~~
1024core
So say I want to remember what Tallagrand's Inequality was
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talagrand%27s_concentration_in...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talagrand%27s_concentration_inequality)
. How would one go about it?

~~~
probably_wrong
Unfortunately, no one can give you a way that would work for you, because
that's kind of the point: you adjust your internal representation to your
strengths. But here's an example of how I'd map it to a memory palace, based
on what I did for my driver's license test.

In my case, I'd walk into the living room of my old house and I "see" that
someone wrote "ct24" on the floor. That's all I need to remember that I'm
trying to reconstruct that pr[A].pr[A^c_t]<=e-(t^2)/4, because I know I'm
reconstructing an inequality, exponents of e are often negative, and I know
that I need to parse that text as [][ct][t24] (which are the exponents and
sub-indices I need).

I then picture that a guy comes to me and says "Hi, I'm Paxton", and he's
wearing a t-shirt with an Omega symbol. With that, I can reconstruct A_t={x in
Omega|p(A,x)<=t} (in case you didn't catch it, I map p(A,x)<=t to "Paxton").

And so on. Note that I can take some shortcuts here because I'm playing to my
strengths of being used to equations, and therefore I don't need to memorize
that the second step defines A_t because it comes naturally.

For a completely different approach, you can picture a kid trying to say
"Practice", but he mumbles instead "Pra... Pract...et... 24!", which you can
map back to the equation ("Pract" = Pr[a^c_t]). The fact that the "24!" at the
end comes out of nowhere only makes the scene more memorable, and therefore
easier to remember.

~~~
1024core
Thank you! I just wanted an example so I could conceptualize what this system
was talking about.

------
jamisteven
"Others may contain misspellings and factual errors. It doesn’t matter. This
system is designed to create rich imagery, not accurate representations."
Wait, what?!

~~~
sowbug
That's right. The system isn't a lossless compression algorithm. It's designed
to give your brain a bunch of hooks to hang interesting snippets onto, which
you can use to reconstruct the short story that unravels into a phone number
or whatever. For this reason a misspelling or impossibility is just as a good
as any other notable attribute, because it makes the story element more
memorable.

Taking the article's examples, you might construct a story like "toilet paper
is used as socks in Minnesota." It doesn't matter whether that's true. It only
matters that it makes it incredibly easy to reconstruct the number 190732.

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anotheryou
Does it work for less well structured Data?

Digits of pi you can translate to characters and twine a story, but loosely
associated facts are more tricky.

