The Irish sports commentator Jimmy Magee was famous for his encyclopedic memory of sports facts. And not just stories he would use during commentating but he could be quizzed and was great at knowing the answers. How did he do it?
In this book he describes how he does not use mnemonic techniques like loci or memory palaces. He just had an interest in the area. And he tested himself.
I made a claim that I would learn the 625 words in the Fluent Forever list in Irish over the weekend.
And I did it. Learn means lots of things. 1. able to generate and understand quickly 2. able to understand in context 3. able to work out the word but it takes a while. I have 90+% at 1 now. Maybe 5% that a sentence would really help. And probably 2% that I had to make mnemonics for. For example leaf is a boring child stuck in a hedge (Dull Og).
The Anki deck is here now there are better pictures and some errors fixed. But if you see anymore please let me know.
I made a website to help people learn calculus. I have taken a 1910 book Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson that has already been digitized and put on the web in a nice format at https://calculusmadeeasy.org/. This was created by nadvornix and other volunteers. This edition has added some memorisation reminders to the text.
The book is famous for being accessible to teenagers. Some of the text has dated in the century since. Martin Gardner created a new edition in the 1980s with some of the text deolded and some extra background chapters. Making similar updates might improve this book some more.
Orbit is a tool that tests your knowledge of text you just read. And then retests you on a regular basis. This vastly increases the amount you remember for very little extra time or effort. Some of the evidence that timed repetition aids recall is given in this essay
Calculus made Easy and Memorable is on the web at http://calculusmadememorable.org/ and the code is here.
Why put a new more memorable calculus book online? ‘1 million students take a college-level Calculus 1 course in the United States, at an average cost of $2,500. And then 40% of them fail.’ That is 1 billion loss a year in one country from failing one course. Anything that helps reduce that rate could be a boon.
Poetry in a set form is much easier to memorise than free verse. The epic poems of The Táin and the lliad used strict metrics to aid memorisation. This is because they came from a time where they were not written down but memorised and so any technique that made them easier to recall was vital.
When you know how many words of syllables should be left in the line so many blanks are already filled inserting the rest is easier. Christopher Hitchens describes this with
"A preferred form was the limerick, of which I still have a hundred or so hard-wired into my cortex in case of need (or opportunity). Not all these need be filthy—I have a special reserve of clean ones, some without even a double entendre—but all of them do need to follow a certain simple but exacting scheme. It depresses me beyond measure that most people I meet cannot even recite, much less compose, this gem-like form. Nor can any student in any of my English classes produce a single sonnet of Shakespeare: not even to get themselves laid (the original purpose of the project)."
This is the first thing I do when trying to learn a poem
1. Get the text of the poem. Say Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 (which is on the Leaving cert)
SONNET 12When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
2. Find the rhythm and any rules the poem follows. Free verse can sometimes lack these but most poems clip along at a particular pace. Shakespeare's Sonnet XII is in an iambic beat with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The rhythm can be written as:
da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM
When I / do COUNT / the CLOCK / that TELLS / the TIME
3. See if there is an audio of the poem being read. Youtube is a good place to look but a google search for "
4. If there are any words I do not understand I look them up now.
5. Next I follow the memorisation technique described here
Read a line of the poem and say it back to myself. Ideally do this outloud.
The more senses involved in a memorisation the better. Neurons that fire together wire together and the more bits of your brain you can get in on the task the better.
Imagine any easily visualised objects mentioned in the poem
Try feel any emotions the line conveys.
Listen to the audio of this line.
6. Now do this again for the next line and so on.
7. Now go back through the poem but two lines at a time.
8. Do this again for 3,4 and 5 lines at a time.
9. Listen again to the full poem and then repeat it completely.
10. Repeat it again to myself and reread what I have learned before I go to sleep.
11. Repeat the poem and read it again it the next day, a week and a month later. This review advise is fairly common but I cant find research that shows this gap is optimal.
There are other techniques to memorize poems. Competitive memorizers tend to use the method of loci described in my post on memorising cards. In this a poem becomes a walk and each line is a particular location where you imagine something happening.
There is a good explanation of how this technique works for poems here
In my opinion it is worth practicing learning poems by rote initially as it will at least improve your ability to memorise small chunks of text which will help even loci based methods. A friend and I are working on a way to make this simpler system available easily to anyone with a phone.
Each of these items is actually a playing card and you are well on your way to memorising the order of a pack of cards.
Derren Brown's in his book 'Tricks of the Mind' describes a peg system where each number reminds him of a sound.
In his system
0 sounds a bit like z
1 looks like an L
2 is n as it has has two down strokes
3 is m as it has three downstrokes
4 is r because it sounds like fouR
5 is v because fiVe
6 looks like a b
7 looks like a T
8 has a gh/ch/j sound in it
9 looks like a g
Now when you need to remember a number the digits become sounds and those sounds become words. With cards the suit of the card becomes the start of the word. So hearts H, Clubs start with a C, Spades S and Diamonds are words starting with a D.
A hen is 2 of hearts
Cash is 8 of clubs
Hive is five of hearts
Adolf Hitler is Ace of Hearts each of the picture cards I represent with a person. Kings are people with the surname King.
Jack White is the Jack of hearts. Jacks are younger men. Queens are famous queens or actresses you have played the queen.
It is vital you make the memory as vivid as possible. Change the objects size so it looks ridiculous like a Tiny Jack White in a sink. Have the thing doing something that produces an emotional reaction like the bee stinging you. Rude things are really memorable so use them when you can.
I won't list out exactly what words go with what cards. It is better you pick words that mean something to you. The six of clubs could be Cob a Cub a Cube or a Cab pick whichever one is most vivid to you. When you have a word for each card buy a deck and write the word on each card. Then shuffle the deck and walk around the house putting each card down in a location. Talk out loud about what is happening. "The Dinosaur in the Shower is really scared of the water and is screeching as it tries to escape". Dinosaur is 2 of Diamonds for me. When every card has been placed start back at the first card and try and list what the next one is before you pick it up. Name the object do not worry about the card it represents yet, you will remember the connection in time.
People have great memories for locations. You can probably describe the route and details along it of a walk you took on holiday years ago but be unable to think of anything you discussed that day. Great memorisers use this ability in what is called the method of loci to put things to be remembered along a known walk. Everyone knows their house well so that is a good location to use to practice memorising a deck of cards. To memorise a poem or mathematical constant a walk near your house might be ideal.
This method of remembering things is ancient. The story goes that about 500BC Simonides of Ceos snuck out of a banquet for a sneaky smoke when the building collapsed crushing to death everyone inside. Making the best of a bad situation Simonides realised he could remember where everyone was sitting and point out the spot so the realtives could dig out their loved ones. This trick of using locations for memory was borne out of this unlucky event.
Building were always falling on the Greeks. Take the case of histories worst loser. Kleomedes of Astypalaia was an Olympic boxing champion in the early fifth century BC. In 496 he killed his opponent at Olympia with a foul blow. Because of this fouling offence (not because of the death of his opponent which was considered fine) the Olympics judges took away his victory.
Kleomedes became depressed. On his return to Astypalaia he destroyed a school by pulling down the pillar which kept up the roof in a flash of insanity and so killed all sixty children present. The inhabitants of the city formed a mob and tried to kill him.
He hid in the temple of Athena, from where he disappeared miraculously. His confused pursuers consulted the oracle of Delphi and were told that Kleomedes had become a hero. From then onwards he was honoured with sacrifices. Think about that one next time someone talks about how clever the ancient Greeks were or how mass killings are an entirely new phenonomen. Also this story does illustrate quite how much random stuff I am willing to put into a blogpost.
Memorising large amounts of data even random looking data is quite easy with a system to turn the data into something concrete. I recommend Derren Browns book on how to improve your memory and Joshua Foer's 'Moonwalking with Einstein' a few simple techniques and a few minutes practice everyday can have you performing feats most people find unbelievable.
What is on your bed? If you remembered a giant Hen you are well on your way to memorising a deck of cards.
A form of synaesthesia in which people experience letters or numbers in colour may be trainable. The discovery could shed new light on how such traits develop.
Synaesthesia is thought to have a genetic component, but some people have reported synaesthetic experiences following hypnosis, so Olympia Colizoli at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and colleagues, wondered if it might also be possible to acquire synaesthesia through training.
To test the idea, they gave seven volunteers a novel to read in which certain letters were always written in red, green, blue or orange (see picture). Before and after reading the book, the volunteers took a "synaesthetic crowding" test, in which they identified the middle letter of a grid of black letters which were quickly flashed onto a screen. Synaesthetes perform better on the test when a letter they experience in colour is the target letter.
The volunteers performed significantly better on this test after training compared with people who read the novel in black and white.
The findings suggest that natural synaesthesia may develop as a result of childhood experiences as well as genetics, says Colizoli, who presented the findings at the Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam last week.
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// @name ColourChange
// @namespace http://localhost
// @description change the colour of characters
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==
var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
var html = body.innerHTML
.replace(/(^|>[^<a]*)([a])/g, "$1<span style=\"color:red\">a</span>");
body.innerHTML = html;
var html2 = body.innerHTML.replace(/(^|>[^<o]*)([o])/g, "$1<span style=\"color:violet\">o</span>");
body.innerHTML = html2;
