

Forget Me Not - How to win the U.S. memory championship. - senthil_rajasek
http://www.slate.com/id/2114925/

======
gregdetre
FYI, Ed's my co-founder at Memrise, and you can read his blog here:

<http://edcooke.memrise.com>

~~~
swanson
Wow! I really liked Moonwalking with Einstein and thought Ed sounded awesome.

He seemed like a great hustler in the book so I bet he is a fun co-founder to
be around.

~~~
gregdetre
Hah! Yep, never a dull day. You can get a glimmer of things from here:

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/memrise/3966430619/in/photostre...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/memrise/3966430619/in/photostream)

and facebook.com/memrise has a few photos as well :)

If there's any interest, I can try and persuade him to do an 'I am a
Grandmaster of Memory, AMA' on Reddit.

~~~
losvedir
I'd like to see that!

------
da5e
The main reason that American times in memory events has improved over the
past few years (besides more people spending more time and effort) is that we
have started using the more advanced techniques of the Europeans. We have gone
from one two-digit image per location to the 3 two-digit numbers per location
PAO method of Dominic O'Brien to the 4 two-digits per location of Ben
Pridmore.

~~~
aquarin
Really interesting. Can you give some reference links about such methods. I am
currently learning Chinese and trying to learn and remember 2200 Chinese
Characters.

~~~
gregdetre
Apologies for shilling, but give us a try - this is exactly the problem we're
trying to help people with:

[http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-getting-
easie...](http://blog.memrise.com/2011/03/why-chinese-is-getting-easier-
and.html)

~~~
aquarin
How many people have learned Chinese using you method?

~~~
gregdetre
We're still young, so we've only had a few thousand people try us out for
Chinese. Of those, a good number have learned hundreds of characters or more.

One caveat - until recently, we've only really tackled the problem of reading
characters. We've just started to introduce approaches for learning the pinyin
and pronunciation, but they're not as polished yet.

It's going to be a little while before we tackle writing - I'd try Skritter
for that.

------
swanson
_Moonwalking with Einstein_ (the book by the article's author) is a really
interesting read. I recommend anyone who liked the article to check it out.

There are some interesting ideas related to Joshua's 'deliberate practice'
that can be applied to software engineering as well.

[http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-
Rememberi...](http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-
Everything/dp/159420229X)

------
sayemm
Here's an excellent blog on some of these techniques and training by Nelson
Dellis, the current US Memory champ: <http://climbformemory.com/blog/>

His older posts go into a lot of interesting detail.

------
biot
Are competitions for these fair game for anyone? I would think there are
people[0] who naturally have Rainman-like recall abilities which occurs
subconsciously. The rest of us would have to employ an ever-expanding bag of
tricks just to try and keep up.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek>

~~~
sayemm
Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking with Einstein", actually met Kim Peek and
makes a lot of interesting observations about him. Regarding these
competitions, what's incredibly interesting is that all the memory champs have
always been trained... people with naturally strong memories have never been
able to compete with them. The same holds true for the world mental
calculation championships too.

------
da5e
This previous Hacker News thread might be helpful for language learning.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1603562>

------
MichaelGG
I wonder if contestants use amphetamines or methylphenidate before
competitions.

