Reporter Joshua Foer explains how to remember everything

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0600

Science reporter Joshua Foer was standing outside the building where the U.S.A. National Memory Championship competition was taking place. He was there covering the event, which was new to him, and which he thought of as a kind of quirky curiosity.

A British competitor who had come to the American championships as a kind of “spring training” in advance of the world championships stood outside smoking a cigarette.

“You’re a journalist,” he said to Foer. “Do you know Britney Spears?”

No, Foer said. He did not.

Ah, it was too bad, the competitor replied. He had a dream of teaching Britney Spears some age-old memory-enhancing techniques on live television, to prove that anyone could learn to memorize hundreds upon thousands of random words or digits in a row, as he and the other would-be memory champs did every year.

Foer reasserted that he did not know the young pop star.

“But maybe you can train me,” Foer said.

That was the beginning of how Foer went from observer to competitor, training himself with those same memory-enhancing techniques, and eventually going on to win the 2006 U.S. championship. (He documented his journey in his much-praised book, Moonwalking with Einstein.) In the process, he also set a new U.S. record, memorizing the order of a randomly shuffled deck of playing cards in 1 minute 40 seconds. (His record has since been broken, and currently stands at 29 seconds.)

Foer went on to represent America at the world championships that year, where unfortunately, he “had his tuchas handed” to him by the Brits, the Germans and the Malaysians, among others.

But through his journey, Foer learned that the British competitor he met that first day was right: People who succeed at this memory thing aren’t geniuses. They aren’t smarter than the rest of us, nor do they have brains that are anatomically superior.

What they’ve done is trained themselves with a technique called the Memory Palace -- a mnemonic device that dates back to ancient Greece that allows users to trick themselves into using the visual and spatial parts of their brain to remember things that don’t always have a visual or spatial dimension.

In the tape above, Foer demonstrates the Memory Palace technique to the audience at the talk he gave at Elmhurst College last week. And in doing so, he proves that whether you’re Britney Spears or not, you too can turn an ordinary assembly hall into your very own Memory Palace.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Joshua Foer spoke at an event presented by Elmhurst College in February. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Clever Apes #23: First memories

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:11:00 -0600

I’m sitting at a picnic table in our screened-in porch. It’s my third birthday party, and I’m opening presents. I unwrap a Tonka truck, and drop to the floor to start playing with it.

That’s been my earliest memory ever since I can, well, remember. But as the years wore on, something weird started happening. I started to feel less attached to the person in that memory. Now, I feel like I’m seeing the memory through someone else’s eyes, watching myself push that truck on the green astroturf carpet. I’m not even sure it’s a real memory anymore.

This has been on my mind because my own son recently had his third birthday. It got me wondering what his first memory will be, and more broadly, what is the nature of early memories? How reliable might they be, and how important to the construction of our identities?

On the latest installment of Clever Apes, we dig into what science has to say about early memory. Young kids actually have lots of memories that don’t make it into long-term storage. The phenomenon, called “childhood amnesia,” is not very well understood. But it seems to have something to do with the lens through which we see the world, and how it changes from early childhood (say, age three) to the more verbal period starting around age five or six. It’s tough to bridge that divide, and that may explain why I’m having a hard time connecting with my three-year old self.

And there’s another reason: memories are made from networks of neurons in our brains. That wiring gets used for lots of things, and so with each new memory, the networks change a little. When we remember something, we effectively rewrite it. That means that in some sense, each time we reflect on a memory, we’re putting a little more distance between ourselves and the actual event. Recent research suggests we’re even doing this in our sleep.

It’s enough to give a fellow a dose of existential distress. But there’s an upside too: A Chicago researcher has demonstrated ways that parents can reinforce and help solidify a child’s memories. If you listen to the show, you can hear me trying this out on my son, Ezra. I bribed him with M&Ms to get him to sit still.

Watch this space in the next day or so for a collection of first memories from our colleagues here at WBEZ. You can also get it via podcast. We’re on Twitter and Facebook, too.

WBEZ | memory

Reporter Joshua Foer explains how to remember everything

Clever Apes #23: First memories