I feel like I have a completely useless memory. I can barely remember a phone number when someone reads it off to me and I have to read OTP Four times to write it down without looking back to the message. One thing for sure I will never be any good at cards because I have no recollection of which cards I already had and what’s been discarded. That’s why When I read about memory athletes and people who can memorize any book by reading it once, I just sought at me why can’t I? So I research into this and found that maybe I can’t be good at memorizing OTP at once and also I can be good at memorizing in general.
There are lots of different kinds of memory For example when you hear a phone number and dial that number yourself you need working memory. Working memory kind of like a CATCH memory in a RAM of a computer. Working memory is the place where the data is kept and processed in the front of your mind spontaneously And it’s not a place where you can keep a lot of data. Back in 1956 George A. Miller, a professor at Harvard University, published a famous psychology paper called ” The Magical Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two: Some Limits On Our Capacity For Processing Information”. This paper suggests that there is a limit to what working memory can handle i.e somewhere around Seven Items at a time. You can test that, First take a paper and write down seven random number for example 7873549 then pick some friends of yours and ask them to read it to you, now, take that paper away and ask them to repeat those numbers. You will most likely find that they can only recite 4 to 5 digits correctly.
Since 1956 a lot of research has sort of muddied this claim of the magical number seven. But it is safe to say there is a hard limit on working memory that is SEVEN. If that’s true then how memory athletes can memorize entire decks of shuffled cards or even bigger sets of data?
For that kind of task, we are talking more about long-term memory and long-term memory storage is enormous. It’s really huge. But it is hard to take advantage of long-term memory, I mean try to memorize this whole article, it would take days to memorize it and it is pretty boring too right?
Here the catch it’s all about how we memorize things. With the help of some technique, you can improve your power of using long-term memory. So you can learn to have better memory but you have to train yourself the right way. Researchers wanted to figure out if you could train someone to have a better memory. So they scanned the brain of people like you and me and a bunch of people who compete in memory athletics. Surprisingly they found nada nothing all brains are similar. Meaning, maybe this was a learned skill. So Researchers took some regular people and half of them were trained like the memory athletes do. After two months the people who were trained like memory athletes could remember almost as many words as memory athletes do.
So how memory athletes train them self? How you could learn them
For starter, you want to memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards. This is a common task for memory athletes, they use a method called the memory palace. First, assign every card an object. The 10 of clubs is an Apple. The Ace of hearts is a light bulb. The four of diamonds is a phone. One object for each 52 card. Now think of a place you are familiar with, like your apartment. Now say you have got a fresh deck of shuffled cards to memorize. Deal them out and as you do imagine each card’s object in a striking memorable place within your home. For example Apple on the head of your brother, the light bulb in the pocket of your pent and the phone in a sink. Again, The weirder the better. Do that 52 times and you are done.
I know that doesn’t sound like science and honestly, there is a ton we just don’t understand about the neuroscience of all of this. But techniques like the memory palace seem to co-operat memory networks that you wouldn’t ordinarily use in a card game. One way or other it gets results. Memory athletes use tricks like this to memorize decks of cards, names and faces. That means that it’s not about being born with any sorts of special memory gift. It means that you can learn to have a better memory if you train the right way.
All The Science Thinkers Out There Or Who Ever Reading This You Can Improve Your Brain Power And As Always Stay Curious.