USA National Memory Championships 215
bigtallmofo writes "Could you memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour? How about remember the exact order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in under an hour as well as one shuffled deck in less than two minutes? If so, you could be counted among 36 grand masters of memory worldwide. Slate is reporting that other spectacular memory feats were performed at the 2005 USA National Memory Championship. Congratulations to Ram Kolli, a graduate student in computer science at Virginia Tech, and this year's champ."
More practically.. (Score:5, Insightful)
In this context such methods are fairly controversial, since the mnemonics are rather time-consuming to learn and recall is slower than brute force (on the order of 5-10 seconds instead of instantaneous), but it has some quite dedicated followers.
Re:Congress To Open Hearings On Memory Championshi (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The Human Brain (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Human Brain (Score:4, Insightful)
Likely, not that much better. Read the article. These people use an assortment of mnemonic devices to remember these large chunks of data. If you tried to remember a series of cards, you would get lost in the volume of data. But if you remember each three cards in order as "person action object", then you can remember the sequence of cards as a story, and that is orders of magnitude easier to remember, because it has real meaning, whereas a sequence of cards is essentially meaningless. The brain sucks at remembering things without meaning, and excels at things that have meaning. That seems to be because our memory is inherently associative. We remember things by associating them to other things. That way the more associations you can make between a new factoid and existing concepts in your brain, the more easily you'll remember it.
Re:A game these guys would pwn at... (Score:3, Insightful)
This requires keeping track of one number up to 12 and one number up to 3, instead of four numbers up to 91 for your method.