Memory Decoding

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Memory Decoding

Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person’s first

and last name Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on

the next page. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oakpaneled

rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls.

It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and

it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to

be examined in an entirely different manner.

A In timed trials, contestants were challenged to took at and then recite a two-page poem,

memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their

photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took

just a few minutes; others lasted hours. In the 14 years since the World Memory

Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of

playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the fourminute

mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world’s best “mental athletes,”

as some of them like to be called are closing in on. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they’re not just being modest. Their

feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information.

Anyone can learn them.

B Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior

Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College

London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the

World Memory Championships. They wondered if the contestants’ brains were different

in some way. The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an

MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains

were being scanned When it came to memorizing sequences of three-digit numbers, the

difference between the memory contestants and the control subjects was, as expected

immense. However, when they were show photographs of magnified snowflakes, images

that the competitors had never tried to memorize before, the champions did no better

than the control group. When the researchers analyzed the brain scans, they found that

the memory champs were activating some brain regions that were different from those

the control subjects were using. These regions, which included the right posterior

hippocampus, are known to be involved in visual memory and spatial navigation.

C It might seem odd that the memory contestants would use visual imagery and spatial

navigation to remember numbers, but the activity makes sense when their techniques are

revealed Cooke, a 23-year-old cognitive-science graduate student with a shoulder-length

mop of curly hair, is a grand master of brain storage. He can memorize the order of 10

decks of playing cards in less than an hour or one deck of cards in less than a minute. He

is closing in on the 30-second deck. In the Lamb and Flag, Cooke pulled out a deck of

cards and shuffled it. He held up three cards—the 7 of spades, the queen of clubs, and

the 10 of spades. He pointed at a fireplace and said “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz

Schubert with handbags.” The next three cards were the king of hearts, the king of spades,

and the jack of clubs.

How did he do it? Cooke has already memorized a specific person, verb, and object that

he associates with each card in the deck. For example, for the 7 of spades, the person (or,

in this case, persons) is always the singing group Destiny’s Child the action is surviving a

storm, and the image is a dinghy. The queen of clubs is always his friend Henrietta, the

action is thwacking with a handbag, and the image is of wardrobes filled with designer

clothes. When Cooke commits a deck to memory, he does it three cards at a time. Every

three-card group forms a single image of a person doing something to an object. The

first card in the triplet becomes the person, the second the verb, the third the object. He

then places those images along a specific familiar route, such as the one he took through

the Lamb and Flag. In competitions, he uses an imaginary route that he has designed to

be as smooth and downhill as possible. When it comes time to recall Cooke takes a mental

walk along his route and translates the images into cards. That’s why the MRIs of the

memory contestants showed activation in the brain areas associated with visual imagery

and spatial navigation.

E The more resonant the images are, the more difficult they are to forget. But even

meaningful information is hard to remember when there’s a lot of it. That’s why

competitive memorizers place their images along an imaginary route. That technique,

known as the toci method reportedly originated in 477 B.C. with the Greek poet Simonides

of Ceos. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the other guestsat a royal banquet. The bodies were mangled beyond recognition, but Simonides was

able to reconstruct the guest list by closing his eyes and recalling each individual around

the dinner table. What he had discovered was that our brains are exceptionally good at

remembering images and spatial information. Evolutionary psychologists have offered an

explanation: Presumably our ancestors found it important to recall where they found their

last meal or the way back to the cave. After Simonides’ discovery, the loci method became

popular across ancient Greece as a trick for memorizing speeches and texts. Aristotle

wrote about it, and later a number of treatises on the art of memory were published in

Rome. Before printed books, the art of memory was considered a staple of classical

education, on a par with grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

F The most famous of the naturals was the Russian journalist S. V. Shereshevski, who could

recall long lists of numbers memorized decades earlier, as well as poems, strings of

nonsense syllables, and just about anything else he was asked to remember. “The capacity

of his memory had no distinct limits,” wrote Alexander Luria, the Russian psychologist

who studied Shereshevski from the 1920s to the 1950s. Shereshevski also had synesthesia,

a rare condition in which the senses become intertwined For example, every number may

be associated with a color or every word with a taste. Synesthetic reactions evoke a

response in more areas of the brain, making memory easier.

G K. Anders Ericsson, a Swedish-born psychologist at Florida State University, thinks

anyone can acquire Shereshevski’s skills. He cites an experiment with S. F., an

undergraduate who was paid to take a standard test of memory called the digit span for

one hour a day, two or three days a week. When he started, he could hold, like most

people, only about seven digits in his head at any given time (conveniently, the length of

a phone number). Over two years, S. F. completed 250 hours of testing. By then, he had

stretched his digit span from 7 to more than 80. The study of S. F. led Ericsson to believe

that innately superior memory doesn’t exist at alL When he reviewed original case studies

of naturals, he found that exceptional memorizers were using techniques—sometimes

without realizing it—and lots of practice. Often, exceptional memory was only for a singleof thing most people don’t even waste one hour practicing, but if they wasted 50 hours,

they’d be exceptional at it,” Ericsson says. It would be remarkable, he adds, to find a

“person who is exceptional across a number of tasks. I don’t think that there’s any

compelling evidence that there are such people.”

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