The extraordinary skills of memory experts, who train themselves to remember vast quantities of often random material, seem beyond the reach of ordinary people. While natural talent is certainly an advantage, the technique is also vital. With the right training and dedication, could any one of us become a memory maestro?
On a visit to Rome in 1770, the 14-year-old composer Mozart went with his father to hear the Sistine Chapel choir sing the Miserere, a famous choral setting of Psalm 51 by the 17th century composer Gregorio Allegri. This work, which lasted nearly half an hour, was considered so beautiful that its performance and publication outside the Vatican were forbidden. So Mozart had never even heard the piece before – but later that day, he wrote down all the music of the AJiserere from memory.
Outstanding memory feats like this are often associated with professional expertise. People can acquire a vast amount of specialist knowledge without the need for exceptional memory simply by working for a long time in a particular field. Virtuoso musicians remember many pieces of music, and actors are able to learn new parts within a short space of time. In such cases, the practice has improved the normal processes of comprehension and retention.
Specialist data
We tend to be most impressed by people who can recall large amounts of material unrelated to their professional knowledge. In the 1930s, in Japan, Sigeyuki Ishihara showed that he could recall a string of 2,500 random digits (numbers) with 99 percent accuracy. His technique involved converting groups of digits into words and creating a mental image for each word. He then recalled the sequence of word images using the ancient method of loci. Ishihara took about two seconds per digit to learn a string of 200 digits and six seconds per digit to learn longer sequences up to 2,500 digits. Dominic O ‘Brien, the World Memory Champion, uses a similar method to learn a random sequence of 3000 binary digits (ones and zeros) in half an hour.
Like Ishihara and O ‘Brien, people who memorize strings of numbers commonly use mnemonic methods to turn them into a more meaningful form that is more suited to the way the mind works. The mind does not make a continuous ‘ video tape’ of experience. If it did, nothing could be retrieved from memory without laborious mental ‘ rewinding’ to the right part of the ‘ tape.’ instead, the mind is more Like a librarian, arranging our vast repository of memories into meaningful categories and going directly to the right’s help to extract what we need from the stored knowledge.
Inherent talents
Dedicated practice and special methods are not the whole stories in impressive feats of memory. Studies sometimes bring to light people who can retain and recall large amounts of information without any special training in-memory techniques. An unusual musical or visual memory is sometimes associated ted with autism, although most autistic people are not gifted in this way. There are people with an unusual talent for a particular type of memory task who can rapidly take in large numbers of words, figures, or images and remember them after a substantial delay.
A famous example was Alexander Aitken, a mathematics professor at the University of Edin burgh with an amazing talent for memorizing many kinds of material, including number sequences, using his wide knowledge of numerical facts. In 1934, Aitken read an Indian folktale called War of the Ghosts twice. Some 26 years later, without seeing it in the meantime, he repeated the tale to researchers, who found that he could recall 58 percent more than subjects asked to read the story and recall it immediately. In the US, psychologists studied a man known as CJ, who could master a new language in just a few weeks. He learned to pronounce the language perfectly with a speed and ease that is normally found only in children, suggesting that he did not learn languages in the way that most adults do.
Using natural abilities
Alexander Aitken seemed to be naturally talented at absorbing and retaining information without the use of any special memory techniques, and both the speed and pattern of CJ’s language learning suggested an unusual natural ability. But did they acquire their extraordinary gifts with experience, or were they born with them? It seems likely that some people do have innate talent, at least for certain types of information. For example, studies of twins suggest that the ability to remember musical knowledge may have a strong genetic basis. So, while Mozart’s achievements required practice, it is likely that he also had an inherited talent for absorbing musical knowledge – his father and sister were also highly regarded musicians.
Experts versus naturals
Most studies of ‘super memory’ have focused on a single expert. Still, two British psychologists, John Wilding, and Elizabeth Valentine, have undertaken extensive studies of people with high memory ability to assess how much is natural and how much is learned. They compared a group of ‘ normal ‘ people with good natural memory and a group of acknowledged memory experts – people who had undergone special training in memory techniques. Wilding and Valentine presented each group with a variety of short-term memory tasks, including remembering a story, faces, names, numbers, and pictures of snowflakes. A week later, without prior notice, Wilding and Valentine re-tested the participants on the same material. When the results for the various tasks were combined, some of the experts came out very well, but others did less well than some of the ‘ normal’ group.
The most remarkable results came from a 17-year-old schoolgirl known as JR. In the short-term tasks described above, she averaged 84 percent accuracy, compared with 70 percent for the memory experts and 56 percent for the other non-experts. When the two groups were tested without notice on the same tasks a week later, she remembered 80 percent of the material, compared with 57 percent achieved by the best of the experts. JR’s memory skills seemed to be a natural gift since she employed only one simple strategy – making up a story to help her learn a word list. Her talent may have been inherited because, according to JR, one of her grandparents also had a very good memory. Oddly, JR’s earliest memory was of something that occurred when she was seven – whereas most people can remember events from about the age of three.
The strategies used by the memory experts in the Wilding and Valentine tests tended to follow a standard process: first, select one part of the information; second, associate it with something that is easily recalled, such as an image; finally, place this image within a familiar structure, such as a well- known route or a poem. A comparison of the experts and people with good natural memories showed that experts were very good at tasks to which they applied their methods but unremarkable otherwise. In contrast, ‘ naturals’ showed a consistently high success rate at all types of tasks. The conclusion was that you could supplement an average memory by learning special techniques, but your basic ability remains the same.
While convincing real-life cases of ‘ photographic’ super memory are hard to find, this research shows that memory ability does vary naturally. There are people with an unusual gift for a particular type of memory and others with superior general ability. In another study involving a group of sixth-formers, those who rated their memories most highly tended to perform best at memory tests and examinations. Ln, in this case, none of the pupils had exceptional memory ability, but clearly, natural variation does produce an occasional memory marvel. For most of us, however, the only way to avoid forgetting or to astonish our friends with memory prowess is to apply ourselves to tried and tested methods.
The Snowflake Test
Look at these five snowflakes, each for seven seconds, then turn the page and test your memory powers by trying to pick them out from the series of 20 snowflakes shown there.
The Knowledge
The drivers of London’s black taxi cabs spend two years ‘doing the Knowledge’ – learning every street and route in the city. This special training produces physical changes in the brain. When psychologists scanned the brains of 16 taxi drivers, they found that the area that stores spatial memories at the rear of the hippocampus was about five percent larger in cabbies than in other drivers. In contrast, the front of the hippocampus was smaller. Memorizing huge amounts of spatial information apparently caused one part of the brain to grow at the expense of another. The effects were even more marked among more experienced cabbies.
