Joshua Foer

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“Most Store The Studied Material In A So-Called Memory Palace”

May 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a New York Times report by Benedict Carey about lessons learned at the inaugural Extreme Memory Tournament, which was held recently in San Diego, the upshot is not that some have remarkably elastic recall, but that they thrive at visualization and focus. I would still think, however, that such abilities are more pronounced in some brains than others. An excerpt:

“‘We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us,’ said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, ‘is in a cognitive ability that’s not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention.’

The technique the competitors use is no mystery.

People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line.

The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with first describing the method, in the fifth century B.C., and it has been vividly described in popular books, most recently Moonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer.

Each competitor has his or her own variation. ‘When I see the eight of diamonds and the queen of spades, I picture a toilet, and my friend Guy Plowman,’ said Ben Pridmore, 37, an accountant in Derby, England, and a former champion. ‘Then I put those pictures on High Street in Cambridge, which is a street I know very well.’

As these images accumulate during memorization, they tell an increasingly bizarre but memorable story. ‘I often use movie scenes as locations,’ said James Paterson, 32, a high school psychology teacher in Ascot, near London, who competes in world events. ‘In the movie Gladiator, which I use, there’s a scene where Russell Crowe is in a field, passing soldiers, inspecting weapons.'”

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“Instead Of Studying Caves, You Ended Up Studying Time”

January 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just read psychologist Adam Alter’s 2013 book, Drunk Tank Pink, which I really enjoyed even if some of the historical material he presents is well-worn. (Oh, and even though I think the connection the author draws between Usain Bolt’s surname and his career success is overstated. Jamaican steering committees responded to those fast-twitch leg muscles and stop-watch times, not his thunderous “title.”) A brief passage in the section about social isolation discusses the experience of French speleologist Michel Siffre who insinuated himself into the Space Race in the 1960s by conducting extreme self-deprivation experiments, in an attempt to anticipate how such conditions would effect astronauts. In 1962, Siffre lived within the solitude of an underground glacier to test the effect on his mental faculties. The following decade, he spent 205 days alone in a Texas cave. A Cousteau who does not get wet, Siffre has dived so deep inside of himself that time has seemed to cease.

Alter’s writing reminded me of a 2008 Cabinet interview that Joshua Foer, that memory enthusiast, conducted with the time-isolation explorer. The opening:

“Joshua Foer:

In 1962, you were just twenty-three years old. What made you decide to live underground in complete isolation for sixty-three days?

Michel Siffre:

You have to understand, I was a geologist by training. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition, and to spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I said to myself, “Well, fifteen days is not enough. I shall see nothing.” So, I decided to stay two months. And then this idea came to me—this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.

Joshua Foer:

Instead of studying caves, you ended up studying time.

Michel Siffre:

Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn’t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn’t have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology. Long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, have a body clock as well.”

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“If You Can Link The Sound Of A Word To A Picture Representing Its Meaning, It’ll Be Far More Memorable”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve always assumed there’s been a connection between my lack of musical ability and difficulty learning foreign languages–I just don’t have the ear for it. Joshua Foer, who is obsessed with memory, claims to not be very good at languages, either. Yet he was able to converse in an obscure tongue after a very short course of study thanks to a particular method of mnemonics. From his new article in the Guardian:

“I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I’m ashamed to admit that I still can’t read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came only after five years of intense classroom study and more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still, I was determined to master Lingala before leaving for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it would be possible to learn an entire language in such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise, his response was matter-of-fact: ‘It’ll be a cinch.’

Memrise takes advantage of a couple of basic, well-established principles. The first is what’s known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you’ll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind’s eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it’ll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“He Ultimately Couldn’t Make A Living As Anything Other Than A Stage Performer — A Memory Freak”

October 23, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve just cracked open The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, a book I’ve always wanted to read and just never got around to. Another book that falls into that category of neglected reading matter: Neuropsychologist A.R. Luria’s The Mind of a Mnemonist. Luria was the forerunner to Oliver Sacks and other scientist’s sharing unusual case studies of the mind. The book, as you might gather from the title, is a portrait of a man with an incredibly elastic memory. In an excellent Five Books interview at the Browser, Joshua Foer discusses this work. An excerpt:

“Question:

Finally, let’s turn to The Mind of a Mnemonist, a monograph by a renowned Russian neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria. He subtitles it ‘a little book about a vast memory.’ Tell us about Luria’s subject.

Joshua Foer:

This book created the entire genre of humanistic clinical histories. Without Luria, there could be no Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist who wrote Awakenings. For 30 years, Luria studied a journalist called Solomon Shereshevsky or simply ‘S’. Supposedly, S had a vacuum cleaner memory. He could remember anything.

Luria is a terrific writer, but he didn’t document S’s skills with the kind of detail that is required to compare S with people who live today. Luria is so concerned with telling a good story that he doesn’t rigorously describe S’s abilities. We don’t have any other records of S, this seemingly singular character in the history of psychology. As a result it’s hard to draw too many conclusions from this book.

Question:

What does Luria’s study of S teach us about the human condition?

Joshua Foer:

S seemed to remember too well. He was ineffectual as a journalist and ultimately couldn’t make a living as anything other than a stage performer — a memory freak. I think that points to something profound. Forgetting is an important part of learning, it teaches us to abstract. Because S remembered too much, he couldn’t process what he witnessed, and as a result he couldn’t make his way in the world.”

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“My Memory Flows Like A Movie—Nonstop And Uncontrollable”

May 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “Remember This,” Joshua Foer’s excellent 2007 National Geographic piece about people with extreme memories and those of us with more average neural connections governing the data and images we retain:

“There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as ‘AJ,’ who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called ‘EP,’ who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

‘My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable,’ says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She’s not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). ‘S,’ a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he’d first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP’s memory.”

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Oliver Sacks discussing his pen pal Alexander Luria, the neuropsychologist who authored The Mind of a Mnemonist:

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