Mind games
[Written in my office last night while backing my external hard drive up onto my work desktop, before I discovered my laptop was working again, and with the internet not working. Lots of grumpiness removed!]
Earlier, I finally got round to starting on Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind. Some people hate him I know, but, even though I can see why one might find some of his stunts objectionable, I think he’s fascinating, amazing, unsettling, and utterly brilliant at what he does – which is the kind of thing that fascinates me… showmanship, psychology, trickery, magic… candid knavery. The book’s brilliant too. I’m not good at reading even the most fascinating and engaging and 'light' of non-fiction, even though I passionately love reading and eat novels by the dozen*. I want very much to be someone who reads books and remembers what they say and knows about things, but I usually find it heavy going, starting books and never finishing. This book is an exception.
There is a section in there on memory. I always tell people I have a terrible memory, which is absolutely true. I am hopeless with names and details and things people tell me and I wish I was better at remembering my own experiences – what happened to me last week, last year, last decade. However, I’m not too bad on facts. I’d remember things for exams by a mixture of seeing patterns (real or spurious), making connections between words or ideas, a bit of repetition, and a lot of last-minute cramming and relying on what my history teacher once, crushingly, called my “native wit”.
I’ve always though of all those complicated strategies they teach you for remembering things – making a mental picture linking things you need to remember, placing them on routes or in memory palaces– as rather absurd and pointless. But tonight, in the spirit of having nothing else to do, I thought I’d give them a go. I am astounded.
After two or three hours and various other mental activities and no active effort to remember them, here is a list of twenty random words from the book:
telephone
sausage
monkey
button
book
cabbage
glass
mouse
stomach
cardboard
ferry
Christmas
athlete
key
wigwam
baby
kiwi
bed
paintbrush
walnut
These were remembered using mental images to link them in pairs: turning the dial on a telephone with a sausage, a monkey grilling sausages, a monkey to do up your buttons, a book fastened with buttons etc. The image has to be vivid and unusual and you have to engage with how you react to it. It takes maybe five or ten minutes and I really think I could remember them, with occasional refreshment, indefinitely; just now I rattled them off without hesitation. Whereas if you try just stuffing them into your brain they all fall out again – you can’t remember that many things at once – it’s just hopeless, however vivid your individual pictures might be of monkeys and mice and cabbages!
More usefully, here is a list of nine chores, again from the book, remembered by placing relevant images on my walk the office:
Buy stamps [the walls of my staircase papered with brightly-coloured stamps…]
Take suit to cleaners
Ask a particular colleague to phone another colleague
Get phone repaired
Feed parrot
Phone Dave
Set video for Derren Brown’s TV show
Buy rubbish on ebay
Check video
So it seems remembering things could be so much easier! Who knew? I have rather a way of being stubborn and not doing things which will make my life easier, but I hope I can remember my sense of amazement at just how easy this is, even if it does make me feel a bit silly (who knows why… because I am British and therefore mad, I expect). It shouldn’t come as such a surprise, because I know I am a visual kind of person. I just never entertained the idea I was a mnemonics kind of person… how blind I can be!
* This is not new. I remember at primary school asking one of the boys in my class – a fairly studious redhead called Mark – what he was reading. It was a history book about kings and queens. I was a little contemptuous, rather awed, and just incredibly surprised – it had simply never even occurred to me that anyone would choose to read about facts when they could be reading stories.
posted by Eloise @ 9:13 am
3 comments
3 Comments:
I'm impressed. But it's not very useful to remember lists of words. How do you make yourself remember something more complex - a concept, a history or an argument? I read interesting stuff, enjoy the sense of gaining an understanding of things and then promptly forget everything except the vaguest impression! If you could help me with that I'd be so indebted you'd run out of things to ask me to do for you, even with your busy imagination... and I guess you'd be a billionaire!
I have always found the remembering of mnemonics and other aides-de-memoire just got in the way of remembering the actual thing itself - like an added layer that was unnecessary, but I couldn't have remembered a string of words like that for more than a short time. I am a D. Brown fan too, I like the way that be emphasises that it's all mind tricks rather than "magic", which to my rational view of the universe is very satisfying. And I almost fancy him in a kind of creeped-out way!
I read very fast and I have endless, circular arguments with the blue-eyed boy about whether it's better to read something more slowly and absorb more, or read fast and therefore read more books in the same amount of time. I'm all for speed, though I don't think I could slow down if I wanted to. My beloved loves reading but reads the most dense intellectual stuff (typical unread pile: the psychology of fascism, the rise of globalisation, assorted classic literature, poetry, Greek tragedies) and never reads the kind of, not fluff as in chick-lit, but light relief that I do. I think he reads for self-improvement as much as enjoyment, and though while I read lots of non-fiction, if it's dense and hard going I give up quickly.
Ha ha, I know a certain other person who fancies Mr Brown too! Reading the book I find myself rather liking him and thinking he's awesome and wondering if we would be friends if we met, which is much more ridiculous!
I always felt the same way as you Laura about mnemonics - unwieldy, as well as kind of silly - but, several days later I can remember both lists pretty much straight off, which certainly wouldn't be the case if I'd just tried to memorise them, so at least for me they can obviously be useful for some things.
I agree with you Josie that it's not particularly useful to be able to remember lists of words, except maybe as a party trick! But you can use the same techniques to remember shopping lists, errands or tasks you need to run, points you need to make in a presentation... all of which is a bit more helpful. And then there's facty things like Shakespeare's plays in order, or Prime Ministers, or world currencies, or anything like that, which it might be nice to know just for the sake of knowing things, even if - thank goodness - exams aren't something we have to contend with any more. He also has a similar system to remember numbers (each digit has a consonant or consonants associated with it, you make numbers into words and remember the words as an image), which I can see being pretty handy - for example if you had to remember a phone number and you didn't have a piece of paper you would have no fear at all of forgetting it.
But yeah, it's a different kettle of fish to being able to remember interesting things you read in anything but the vaguest way. It's probably the thing about myself I'd most like to change, but sadly I suspect there's no easy tricks to it! I think I read or heard somewhere about learning to absorb more of what you read with exercises like reading a book chapter by chapter and after each one writing a short summary... but that in itself is always so stressful for me because I tie myself in knots over leaving things out of the summary!
I think it's probably relevant to the fast/slow reading debate too. I am a fast reader, and I think it gets in the way of remembering things... definitely with fiction I know I race through things too fast. But then I don't know if I could slow down either - when I do I tend to just get bogged down entirely.
Oh dear, I feel all anxious now about what I could be doing to be a better reader and rememberer of things.
And as for actually being able to remember my own life, I don't think there's anything I can do about it... photos and oily fish, anyone?
Post a Comment
<< Home