Five takeaways:
- As this piece’s title might suggest, it argues that memory is a buildable skill. It starts with the story of an Atlantic reporter who covered a memory competition for his job, became inspired by speaking to the competitors, and went back to the competition a year later after practicing their memory-honing skills everyday.. and won the whole thing.
- The technique is called ““elaborative encoding”— the act of “relating disconnected numbers, words, or facts to networks of existing memories and knowledge.” This involves giving the hard-to-remember things (like names or phone numbers) hooks that rely on our visual or spatial memory, which is much stronger.
- For instance, competitive “memory athlete” remembers the milk and eggs on his grocery list by placing items in a “memory palace,” picturing himself pouring a gallon of milk over his head just outside his front door, then walking inside to see a chicken juggling some eggs.
- In 2017, researchers found that learning to employ mnemonic devices when trying to build memory actually reorganized the connections in subjects’ brains. It showed that the act of memory actually lit up the brain’s nerve centers.
- Importantly, memory training forces us to collect a bank of images to use as memory devices. It hones our attention, and our imaginations. This makes it a hugely valuable pastime in a chaotic world that tends to pull our attention in far too many directions.
From Annika Neklason at The Atlantic:
Read the whole story.
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