Lynne Kelly writes:

How good is your memory? How effectively can you learn new information that you can reliably call upon? If you are like most people, you want to improve your memory. I know I did. My natural memory is pathetically poor, and I often felt hamstrung by my inability to recall dates, names, places, vocabulary. The inadequacy of my natural memory made me feel hemmed in and deeply frustrated: there was so much information just barely beyond my grasp. And my memory made it difficult to learn something new, since it often seemed like it would slip through my fingers the moment I had a handle on it. But no longer: I have learnt the tricks of the memory trade.

You are a member of the only species on the planet that can store information in a way that has enabled humans to constantly adapt to new situations, new environments and, for better or worse, inhabit every continent on the planet. This required the storage of vast amounts of information and, for almost 99 per cent of the existence of modern humans, we depended on our memories for everything we knew. It’s only very recently in the story of our species that we outsourced our knowledge to writing. Without writing, how did our ancestors do it?

In our literate world, very few people practise the memory arts other than those who compete in memory competitions. A number of studies have explored whether memory champions were born with some kind of exceptional memory ability. The Swedish psychologist K Anders Ericsson concluded that natural ability might help but it is actually practice in the use of memory techniques that granted champion memory abilities. A better memory can be achieved with the right techniques.

I’ve competed in the Australian Memory Championships as a senior (over 60). I took the title in 2017 and in 2018, the last time the competition was held. I managed to memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than five minutes. At the time of writing, the world record for memorising a shuffled deck of cards is 12.74 seconds, held by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, a software engineer in San Francisco. The British memory champion, Katie Kermode, was shown hundreds of faces with their names, over a period of 15 minutes. She correctly associated 224 names with faces.

You may not want to become a memory champion, but there is a suite of techniques that we could all adopt from their toolbox. The most valuable of these is also the most ancient: the memory palace. [Continue reading…]