In one year’s time, Joshua Foer went from being a guy with an average memory to being the holder of the US record for speed-memorization of a deck of cards. Along the way he learned that great memory feats are routinely performed by people with average memories, and that such feats have less to do with keen intelligence than they do with developing one’s spatial memory and, interestingly, creativity.
His new book, Secrets of a Mind-Gamer was recently excerpted in the New York Times. Here are a few tidbits:
Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual memories. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and, by extension, ethics. Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed.
—
To our memorybound predecessors, the goal of training your memory was not to become a “living book” but rather a “living concordance,” writes the historian Mary Carruthers, a walking index of everything read or learned that was considered worthwhile. And this required building an organizational scheme for accessing that information.
—
What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity. For example, one of the most popular techniques used to memorize playing cards involves associating every card with an image of a celebrity performing some sort of a ludicrous — and therefore memorable — action on a mundane object.
In a week which has seen so much (I think entirely justified) celebration of the mental accomplishments of a machine, itprovides a bit of perspective to be reminded what truly amazing feats our own minds are capable of performing.
