Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion

Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion

Bryan Clark

How Mnemonics Work
In an evolutionary sense, our memory hasn’t quite become a powerhouse for nonvisual information. Early hominids had little need to remember dates or phone numbers. They did, however, require an acute sense of what times of the year were best to plant crops, what flora were edible, and when they might need to pack up and move to keep pace with nomadic food sources.

“From an evolutionary prioritization perspective, I think most of this comes down to gating mechanisms we have in place for denoting and ‘tagging’ incoming stimuli as important for the continuation of our existence,” Nicco Reggente, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said.

Even today, sensory representations drive memory in ways mere memorization can’t touch. Dr. Reggente explained that this is best seen in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that originally evolved to support movement. “In order for this movement to be purposeful, it must be guided via prediction,” he said. “It is the same region that is now, in our modern age, repurposed for non-spatial (non-movement based) memories as well.”

I remember (pun) being taken in by a scam in the 1980's which recruited people to promote (sell) memory improvement courses to students, etc. I realised, pretty quickly, that the method was not proprietary so the excessive cost of the course could not be justified because you could wander down to a bookshop and buy a book which described exactly similar techniques. Nevertheless, I was impressed with those techniques and practiced one of the demonstrations which involved memorising a grid of numbers (I think it was a 12x12 grid) in five minutes so as to be able to correctly identify any number at any position in that grid when asked. The demo was impressive but the technique was simple and I've heard it described by various memory champions - some call it the Memory Palace, I believe.

Apart from that, I'm a little dismayed to see yet another pat evolutionary explanation as though anything to do with the mind can be explained by inventing some explanatory phrase such as "evolutionary prioritization perspective".