Thursday, January 26, 2012

How memory works

"Drat," I thought to myself, "I was going to do something but then I got distracted and now I can't remember what it was. Maybe I'll write about it in my blog... oh, wait, writing in my blog was the thing I was going to do!"

What I was going to write about was the demand from an anonymouse: "plaese put some light on the loci or place method and movement that we need to associate with the words"

I get asked this question quite a lot (usually by the same person every time) and it always worries me a little. Because that's definitely venturing into the wrong territory for advice on memory. The amount of movement or the detail of the images you use varies wildly from one memoriser to another - everyone's brain is very different, and it really is very important to do your own thing and find your own way of memorising. Trying to imitate everything I do in exact detail is never going to work, believe me.

But when I say that, people assume I'm keeping secrets from them because I don't want them to be successful memory people, so I really can't win.

2 comments:

I am said...

Have you ever played blindfold chess, and in your opinion would blindfold chess be a good addition to memory competitions?

Zoomy said...

I've played blindfold chess, but only in the sense that I played non-blindfold chess against a blindfolded player, who beat me. It was Christian Schmitt, the German memoriser. I've also caught the tail-end of Ray Keene playing a blindfolded game, too, although to the best of my knowledge he can't actually memorise numbers and things. I think he won, but it was a long time ago and my own memory is bad.

Notwithstanding the above, I don't think it's a good thing for memory competitions, seeing as it relies as much on being good at chess as being good at memorising. On the other hand, a big event encompassing separate competitions in blindfold chess and memory would be good.