What We're Reading Now
28 February 2011
Rachel is a pretty frequent reader of the New York Times online; in fact, it's her browser's home page. She enjoyed reading 'Secrets of a Mind-Gamer' by Joshua Foer in last week's Magazine so much that she's now looking forward to picking up Foer's recent book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
Tags: rachel read, skills
I readily admit it. I'm a bit of a geek. At any rate, when the lede for the article talked about training to be a memory athlete, I was all in. If only being a brain athlete could have gotten me out of high school gym . . . but that's a story for a different day.
Come to find out, in the landscape of tournaments we have an array of classic and popular sports franchises (it's almost time for March Madness) and some more esoteric events (think chess tournaments and mini-golf championships). While the latter seem to be growing in popularity (as evidenced by ESPN's broadcast of the national spelling bee), they're still largely unknown. So if, like me, you didn't know that there was such a thing as a memory athlete, you're probably not alone.
Memory athletes train to be able to memorize random stuff on demand. From lists of numbers to nonsense words and everything in between, these competitors have developed uncanny abilities to recall assigned content - and then forget it on demand. Some of the tricks of the trade seem like the mnemonics I used to learn my multiplication tables; others date back to the memory techniques of the ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, none of them will help you find your keys when they're lost.
Anyway, the article was a fun read and I'm now looking forward to reading the full story of Foer's year-long foray into memory athleticism. (If you want to read the article yourself, check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html?src=me&ref=magazine.) And it's nice to know that if I ever need to memorize hundreds of random numbers on demand, there's a whole group of people who can teach me how to do that. That said, it's a little sad to me that the memory athletes among us can't put all that brainpower towards helping us remember other, more important things. Now that seems like something worth training for.
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Jorge
Oct 16, 2011
Valuable information I found, keep on posting. Thank you for your post.