MEMORIES ARE WHAT SHAPE OUR LIVES

Joshua Foer is a journalist and writer (“Moonwalking with Einstein”). He became interested in memory and especially the extraordinary feats of memory some achieve some remembering hundreds of numbers in sequence or the cards in several packs of cards. He was intrigued that the seemingly impossible could be memorised. He wanted to know more so he visited the USA Memory Championship. There’ve been sixteen such championships in New York City. His interest deepened. So much so that in 2006, just out of interest he trained for and entered the championship.

There he discovered people specialists in things like remembering as many decks of playing cards as possible, 5min Historic Dates (fictional events and historic years) and memorizing the order of one shuffled deck of 52 playing cards as fast as possible. World record: 21.90 seconds. There are ten exercises in all.
Jonathan was blown away. He realised he was in the presence of mental gymnasts of an extraordinary order. Yet in 2006 he entered just for interest and…and he won it. Jonathan Foer became US Memory Champion almost by chance. How? Well he explains on TED how you have to make things you want to remember meaningful and tangible. He explains how techniques invented 2,500 years ago still work.

The lyric poet Simonides had a wonderful memory.  During the excavation of the rubble of one Scopas' dining hall that had collapsed in an earthquake, Simonides (who’d luckily left before the disaster) was asked to identify each guest killed. Although their bodies had been crushed beyond recognition he successfully finished the task by remembering who was who from their positions at the table before his departure. He later developed what became known as  the 'memory palace', a system for mnemonics widely used until the Renaissance …when things we needed to remember  were printed so are memories weren’t called on with quite the previous urgency.

Today of course our memory is on our iPad or smartphone. Today children at school are not taught to memorise. Today we’ve forgotten about memory. Yet memory today is still a vital thinking tool.
I’d go further. It’s virtually impossible to be a great success without a reasonable memory. Imagine a lawyer who can’t cross reference relevant cases. Imagine a toymaker who can’t recall similar toys to his latest idea. Imagine a writer who couldn’t remember the references that enrich his assertions.

You cannot busk when you have poor memory.

One of our biggest problems is our mind attic is stacked full of rubbish we don’t need. So, in specific areas we really want to focus on, we need to do a “Spring Clean”. Learn some stuff by heart, put some structure around a subject in which you have a keen interest and see
what happens. Look after one of your precious assets.

(By the way the 17th USA Memory Championship was on March 29, 2014 at Con Edison headquarters, 4 Irving Place, New York City.)

IS IT GOING TO BE LIKE THIS ALL MY LIFE?

This was a 16 year old to his mother after being persecuted repeatedly by friends on his i-Phone when he didn’t instantly reply to his voice mail and texts. It’s worth considering in this techno-age.  Bryan Appleyard author of “The brain is wider than the sky” did just that at the RSA this week. Bryan writes for the Sunday Times. There were many questions - has technology made our lives better? Are “they” out to control our minds? Is the progress to thinking machines inevitable?

He was uneasy. In his research he spent time in Silicon Valley where employees at Microsoft confessed “we are not whole people here” and everyone described what they did as “transforming” and “life changing”.
Technology is responsible for one of the things people hate most – call trees on phones where a computerised voice tells you to “press 1 or 2 or whatever” (www.gethuman.org advises you how to beat this system, by the way.)

Check out Facebook updates to discover what “seeing inside our minds” is coming to. Bryan reckons if they have your date of birth and postcode you are nailed. So, if they don’t control our minds yet but that’s where it’s leading.

The Turing Test comprises putting a computer and human answering service to see if you can tell the difference. My advice is to tell the computer a joke.

Science has moved from human experiments to human observation to computer modelling to neuro-experiments. Put “neuro” in front of anything and it certainly sound uber-cool. (“I’m on the new neuro-diet. We do laboratory neuro-research instead of focus groups now.”)  Science and its bastard offspring “singularity” and “scientism”  are worrying signs of making information neutral and fact defined…a world of “if you can’t count it,  it isn’t there.”

Then Rod Liddle Spectator and Sunday Times who looks like an out-of-condition bouncer who’s very clever laid in to Bryan calling him a “bourgeois escapist Leavisite” – in other words anti-science and reactionary.  “Can robots think?” “Yes” asserted Liddle. “Celebrities today are our most successful robots.”  Well done Rod. “I’m a robot get me out of here”.

The rush of technology as with all trends is excitingly undiscriminating. Lives are generally improved but the bearers of tech banners (to get back to my comment on jokes) have this in common. No irony. No sense of humour. Utterly self-obsessed.  Consider the late Steve Jobs. Genius is not always a good companion or right. Except when he’s called Einstein and says “not everything that that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted.”