where did I put my keys?
April 2nd 2011 19:13
Joshua Foer has trouble remembering his girlfriend's birthday. So how did he end up competing in the final of the USA Memory Championship?
'My memory was average, at best. Among the things I regularly forgot: where I put my car keys (and the car); the food in the oven; my girlfriend's birthday; phone numbers; why I just opened the fridge...'
I am wearing earplugs. I've also got on a pair of industrial-strength earmuffs that look as if they belong on an aircraft carrier deck hand (in the heat of a memory competition, there is no such thing as deaf enough). My eyes are closed. On a table in front of me, lying face down between my hands, is a deck of playing cards. In a moment, the chief arbiter will click a stopwatch and I will have five minutes to memorise the order of the deck
The unlikely story of how I ended up in the finals of the USA Memory Championship, stock-still and sweating profusely, began a year earlier, when I encountered Ed Cooke. I met Ed, a young memory champion from Oxford, at the finals of the previous year's competition. I was there to write a short piece about the event. Ed, then the 11th best memoriser in the world, was in training for that summer's world championship.
The contest itself unfolded with all the excitement of a school exam. A bunch of men (and a few women), widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep, sat quietly at tables poring over pages of random numbers and long lists of words, then scribbled answers that they handed to judges. Sometimes it was difficult to tell whether they were deep in thought or sleep.
The contestants referred to themselves as "mental athletes", or MAs for short. I asked one of them, Ed, when he first realised he was a savant.
"Oh, I'm not a savant," he said, chuckling.
"Photographic memory?" I asked.
He laughed again. "Photographic memory is a detestable myth," he said. "Doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories."
That seemed hard to square with the fact that I'd just watched him recite back 252 random digits as effortlessly as if they'd been his own telephone number. "What you have to understand," he added, "is that even average memories are remarkably powerful, if used properly."
Ed was 24, had a shoulder-length mop of curly brown hair and could be counted among the competitors who were least concerned with habits of personal grooming. He was wearing a suit with a loosened tie and, incongruously, a pair of flip-flops emblazoned with the Union Jack. He had graduated from Oxford the previous spring with a first-class degree in psychology and philosophy, and since then had been pursuing his cognitive science PhD at the University of Paris, where he was doing outre research with the aim of "making people feel like their body has shrunk to a tenth of its normal size". He was also working on inventing a new colour – "Not just a new colour, but a whole new way of seeing colour."
Ed, like all the other mental athletes I met, kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It's simply a matter of learning to "think in more memorable ways" using mnemonic techniques that are thousands of years old. In fact, Ed offered to train me, claiming he could get me up to scratch for the following year's championship.
I honestly wasn't that interested in spending an hour a day pawing through playing cards, or memorising pages of random numbers. I have always embraced my own nerdiness – I was captain of my high school quiz team and have long worn a watch with calculator functions – but this was a bit much even for me. And yet I was curious enough about learning where the limits of my memory lay, and intrigued enough by Ed, to consider this exercise.
My memory was average, at best. Among the things I regularly forgot: where I put my car keys (and where I put my car, for that matter); the food in the oven; that it's "its" and not "it's"; my girlfriend's birthday, our anniversary, Valentine's Day; my friends' phone numbers; why I just opened the fridge. When I wake up, the first thing I do is check my electronic organiser. When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
Growing up in the days when you still had to punch buttons to make a telephone call, I could recall the numbers of all my close friends and family. Today, I'm not sure if I know more than four phone numbers by heart. And that's probably more than most. According to a survey conducted in 2007 by a neuropsychologist at Trinity College Dublin, a third of Brits under 30 can't remember their own home landline number or the birthdays of more than three immediate family members.
Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about. What would it mean to have all that otherwise lost knowledge at my fingertips? I couldn't help but think it would make me more persuasive, more confident and, in some fundamental sense, wiser. To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
Ed started his first lesson with the most basic principle of all mnemonics: "elaborative encoding". Our memories weren't built for the modern world, he said. Our ancestors didn't need to recall phone numbers; they needed to remember where to find food and resources and the route home. That's why, the theory goes, we're largely good at remembering visual imagery and terrible at remembering other kinds of information, such as lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren't good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.
Ed explained that mental athletes saw themselves as "participants in an amateur research programme" whose aim was to rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training. The tradition began, at least according to legend, in the fifth century BC, with the poet Simonides of Ceos. When a banquet hall in Thessaly collapsed, Simonides, the only survivor, was asked to recall who was among the dead. As the poet stood in the rubble, closed his eyes and reconstructed the building in his imagination, he had an extraordinary realisation: even though he had made no conscious effort to memorise the layout of the room, he remembered where each of the guests at the ill-fated dinner had been sitting.
He realised that if it hadn't been guests sitting at a banquet table but, say, every great Greek dramatist seated in order of their dates of birth, he would have remembered that instead. Just about anything that could be imagined, he reckoned, could be imprinted upon one's memory simply by engaging one's spatial memory. To use his technique, all one has to do is convert something unmemorable, such as a string of numbers or deck of cards, into a series of engrossing visual images and mentally arrange them in an imagined space.
Once upon a time, Ed insisted, every literate person was versed in the techniques he was about to teach me. Memory training was considered a centrepiece of classical education, on a par with grammar, logic and rhetoric. But then, in the 15th century, Gutenberg came along and turned books into mass-produced commodities, and eventually it was no longer important to remember what the printed page could remember for you. In the past century, we've gradually supplanted our natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids. Meanwhile, 100 years of progressive education have discredited memorisation as oppressive and stultifying – not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain. Memory techniques were relegated to carnival sideshows and tacky self-help books – only to be resurrected at the end of the 20th century for this bizarre and singular competition.
Virtually all the details we have about classical memory training were first described in a short Latin rhetoric textbook called the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, written sometime between 86 and 82BC. It begins by making a distinction between natural memory and artificial memory, the former being the hardware you're born with, the latter the software you run on your hardware. Artificial memory, the anonymous author continues, has two basic components: images and places. Images represent the contents of what one wishes to remember. Places – or loci, as they're called in Latin – are where those images are stored.
The idea is to create a space in the mind's eye and populate it with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the "method of loci" by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a "memory palace".
Memory palaces don't necessarily have to be palatial – or even buildings. They can be routes through a town, or station stops along a railway line, so long as they are intimately familiar. Ed told me to use the house I grew up in. "We're going to array items from a shopping list along a route that will snake around your childhood home," he explained. "When it comes time to recall the list, all you will need to do is retrace the steps."
The first item on Ed's list was cottage cheese. "I want you to close your eyes and see an enormous, pool-size tub of cottage cheese. Now I want you to imagine Claudia Schiffer swimming in the tub, dripping with dairy."
The Ad Herennium advises readers at length on creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder and more bizarre, the better. What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I was learning, is the ability to create these lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any that has been seen before that it cannot be forgotten.
The next item on the list was six bottles of white wine, which we placed on the stained white couch next to the piano.
"Now, animate images tend to be more memorable than inanimate images. Perhaps you should imagine the wines discussing their relative merits among themselves," Ed suggested.
"So, like, Mr Merlot is saying…"
"Merlot is not a white wine, Josh," he interrupted with a bemused titter. "Rather, let's imagine that the chardonnay is insulting the soil quality of the sauvignon blanc, while the gewürztraminer is giggling away at the expense of the rieslings… That sort of thing."
I followed Ed like this around my childhood home, dropping images along the way as I sauntered from room to room in my imagination. Then I closed my eyes and retraced my steps, remembering each item in turn.
"Exceptional!" Ed shouted. "And having done this with 15 words, we could easily do it with 15,000, provided you had an appropriately large memory palace to store them in."
My next assignment was to begin collecting architecture. I needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal – Ed said I'd need about a dozen just to begin my training. He has several hundred, a metropolis of mental storehouses.
Ed had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of 200 lines an hour, he told me) and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare. "My philosophy of life is that a heroic person should be able to withstand about 10 years in solitary confinement without getting terribly annoyed."
Like Ed, I imagined becoming one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always seem to have an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. So I decided to make memorising a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except I was actually going to do it. Each morning, before showering or dressing, I spent 15 minutes working through a poem.
The problem was that I wasn't any good at it. When I sat down and tried to fill a memory palace with Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, I couldn't figure out how to transform the "brillig" and "slithy toves" into images, and ended up just memorising the poem by rote, which was exactly what I wasn't supposed to be doing.
The question of how best to memorise a piece of text or a speech has vexed mnemonists for millennia. One could try to remember the gist, or try to remember verbatim. But if your memory hinged on knowing every word, and you forgot a single one, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace, lost and unable to move on.
Cicero argued that the best way to memorise a speech is point by point, not word by word, making one image for each major topic you want to cover and placing each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word "topic" comes from the Greek "topos", or place.
I started trying to use this kind of memory in everyday life, even when I wasn't practising for the arcane events that would be featured in the championship. I began to pay a creepy amount of attention to name tags. I memorised my shopping lists. Whenever someone gave me a phone number, I installed it in a special memory palace.
Remembering numbers proved to be one of the most useful of my new skills. I used a technique known as the Major System, which is a simple code to convert numbers into phonetic sounds. Those sounds can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace. The number 32, for example, would translate into MN, or the image of a man.
When it comes to memorising long strings of numbers, such as 100,000 digits of pi, most mental athletes use a more complex technique that is known as "person-action-object", or PAO. In the PAO system, every two-digit number from 00 to 99 is represented by a single image of a person performing an action on an object. The number 34 might be Frank Sinatra (a person) crooning (an action) into a microphone (an object). Unlike the Major System, these associations are entirely arbitrary and have to be learned in advance, which is to say it takes a lot of remembering just to be able to remember.
With Ed's help, I laboriously created my own PAO system to correspond to the 52 cards in a pack. To be maximally memorable, one's images have to appeal to one's own sense of what is colourful and interesting. Which means that a mental athlete's stock of PAO images is a pretty good guide to the gremlins that live in someone's subconscious: in Ed's case, lingerie models and Depression-era cricketers; in my case, 80s and early 90s icons. The king of hearts, for me, was Michael Jackson moonwalking with a white glove.
Ed set me a schedule, with benchmarks I was supposed to meet along the way and a strict regimen of half an hour of practice each morning, plus two five-minute booster sessions in the afternoon. A computer program tested me and kept detailed records of my mistakes, so we could analyse them later. I emailed Ed my times every few days, and he would write back with suggestions about how I could improve.
He also insisted on an equipment upgrade. All serious mnemonists wear earmuffs. A few of the most competitive wear blinders to shut out peripheral distractions. "I find them ridiculous, but in your case they may be a sound investment," Ed said during one of our regular twice-weekly phone check-ins. That afternoon, I went out to the hardware store and bought a pair of industrial-grade earmuffs and some plastic laboratory safety goggles. I spray-painted them black and drilled a small eyehole through each lens. Henceforth I would wear them to practise.
If Ed was my yogi and manager, a psychologist called K Anders Ericsson became my professor. Ericsson is probably the world's leading expert on experts. I kept him appraised of my development and my evolving thoughts about the competition, which I noticed had gradually begun to shift from innocent curiosity to zealous competitiveness.
At one point, a few months into my training, my memory stopped improving. "My card times have hit a plateau," I lamented to him by email.
"I would recommend you check out the literature on speed typing," he replied.
When people first learn to use a keyboard, they improve very quickly, until eventually the process becomes unconscious. At this point, most people's typing skills stop progressing. They reach a plateau. We've always been told practice makes perfect, so why don't they keep getting better and better?
In the 60s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the "cognitive stage", you're intellectualising the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the "associative stage", you're concentrating less and becoming more efficient. Finally you reach the "autonomous stage", when you're basically running on autopilot. You could call it the "OK plateau", the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, and lose conscious control over what you're doing.
What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labelled "deliberate practice". Amateur musicians, for example, are more likely to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros are more likely to work through tedious exercises.
With typing, it's relatively easy to get past the OK plateau. Psychologists have discovered that the most efficient method is to force yourself to type faster than feels comfortable, and to allow yourself to make mistakes. Ericsson suggested I try the same thing with cards. He told me to find a metronome and memorise a card every time it clicked. Once I figured out my limits, I set the metronome 10-20% faster and kept trying at the quicker pace until I stopped making mistakes. Within a couple of days, I was off the OK plateau and my card times began falling again at a steady clip.
By the final months, my scores were improving on an almost daily basis. My digit span, the gold standard by which working memory is measured, had doubled from nine to 18. I could recall more lines of poetry, more people's names, more pieces of random information thrown my way. I was still forgetting where I parked my car and losing my keys. But I was beginning to suspect that if I kept improving at this pace, I might actually have a chance of doing well in the USA Memory Championship.
The night before the competition, I lay in bed obsessively marching through each of my palaces. When I finally did get to sleep, at around 3am, I had a terrifying dream in which Danny DeVito, my king of spades, was riding around a garage on a pony, the seven of spades.
The first event of the morning was memorising 99 names and faces, which I'd done pretty well with in practice. To my surprise, I came in third. For the second event, speed numbers, always my worst, I came in fifth. Then came speed cards. I was the only competitor armed with what Ed referred to as "the latest European weaponry". Most of the Americans were still placing a single card in each locus but, thanks to Ed, the PAO system I was using packed three cards into a single image, which meant it was at least 50% more efficient.
From the front of the room, the chief arbiter shouted, "Go!" and I began peeling through the pack as fast as I could. The art of speed cards is in finding the perfect balance between moving quickly and forming detailed enough images. When I put my palms back down on the table to stop the clock, I knew I'd hit a sweet spot in that balance. But I didn't yet know how sweet.
The judge flashed me the time on her stopwatch: one minute and 40 seconds. Not only was that better than anything I'd ever done in practice, I immediately recognised that it would shatter the US record of one minute and 55 seconds.
Cameras and spectators began to assemble around my desk. The judge pulled out a second, unshuffled deck of playing cards and pushed them across the table to me. My task now was to rearrange the unshuffled pack to match the one I had just memorised.
I took a deep breath and walked through my palace one more time. I could see all the images perched exactly where I'd left them. After waiting a moment for one of the television cameras to circle around for a better angle, the judge began flipping the cards over one by one and, card by card, each one matched. When we got to the end of the decks, I looked up with a wide, stupid grin. I was the new US record holder in speed cards. Not only that, but my record performance with the cards was enough to leave me in first place at the end of the competition.
"Congratulations to Joshua Foer. He's really going to have a story to write about this time, isn't he?" announced the commentator. "You're on your way to the world championships."
The crowd applauded. I closed my eyes, put my head down on the table, whispered an expletive to myself and took a second to dwell on the fact that I had possibly just done something – however geeky, however trivial – better than it had ever been done by anyone in the country.
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