(cards slapping)
- I feel like I have a completely useless memory.
I can barely remember a phone number
when someone reads it off to me.
And I'll never be any good at cards
because I have no recollection
of which cards I've already had,
what's been discarded, really anything that just happened.
Which is why it's so wild to read about memory athletes.
People who can memorize entire decks
of shuffled cards, or even bigger sets of data.
In 2015 a guy in India recited 70,000 digits of pi
for the Guinness Book of World Records,
from memory.
So what's the difference between him and me?
What would I need to go from forgetting seven digits,
to remembering 70,000?
Well first, that's not actually a fair comparison,
there are lots of different kinds of memory.
For example, to hear a phone number
and then dial it yourself, you need working memory.
That's the data you can keep and process
in the front of your mind spontaneously.
And it's not a lot of data.
Back in 1956, a famous psychology paper called
The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two
suggested that there's a limit
to what working memory can handle.
Somewhere around seven items at a time.
That doesn't seem like much, but try it.
Ask a friend to read you seven random numbers,
and then repeat them right back.
- Eight, two, nine, four, six, nine, one?
- Eight, two, nine, four, six, three, seven.
- Eight, two, nine, six, four, three, one, that's all I got.
- Now since 1956 a lot of research
has sort of muddied this claim of the magical number seven.
For one thing, people may instinctively
chunk those numbers up into groups
which makes recall a lot easier.
And in fact, try that same little experiment again,
but this time, chop seven numbers up
into a standard phone number.
- Four, five, two, eight, nine, six, one.
- Was that great, was that 100%, I got it?
- Other studies have pointed out, too,
that the magic number can be totally different
when you're talking about words or objects.
So all of this might be an oversimplification,
but most of the research out there
does point to a hard limit on working memory.
So what about those 70,000 digits of pi?
For that kind of task, we're talking more
about long-term memory.
And long-term memory storage is enormous.
Like, we don't even know how big, enormous.
But try sitting down with
a print out of pi and just going for it.
Three.
(paper crumpling)
There may not be limits to memory storage,
but there are clearly limits to
how we do the remember and the recalling.
But, unlike working memory, we can do something about it.
- So you can learn to have a better memory,
but you have to train the right way.
- [William] Here's Verge Science reporter, Rachel Becker.
- (laughs) All right.
Researchers wanted to figure out
if you could train someone to have a better memory.
So they scanned the brains of people
like you and me, and a bunch of people
who compete in memory athletics
like memorizing decks of cards or lists of words
and they found that structurally,
the brains were really similar.
- [William] Meaning, maybe this was a learned skill.
And that's the next part of the study.
- So they took a bunch of regular people,
and they had half of them train just
like the memory athletes do.
The people who trained for six weeks
just like the memory athletes did,
could remember almost as many words
as the memory athletes.
- So what does memory training look like?
Well, say you wanna memorize the order
of a shuffled deck of cards.
This is a common task for memory athletes,
and they use a method called the memory palace.
A simple version goes like this.
First assign every card an object.
The 10 of clubs is a weird stuffed animal.
The jack of hearts is a stapler.
The four of diamonds is a big knife.
One object for each of the 52 cards.
Then think of a place you're really
familiar with, like your apartment.
All that's just the prep work.
Now, say you've got a fresh deck
of shuffled cards to memorize.
Deal them out, and as you do,
imagine each card's object in a
striking memorable place within your home.
A stuffed animal guarding the door handle.
A stapler floating in the hallway.
A knife tucked into your bed.
Again, the weirder the better.
So that 52 times, and you can translate the whole deck
into your own terrifying student film.
I know that doesn't sound like science,
and honestly there's a ton we just don't understand
about the neuroscience of all of this.
But techniques like the memory palace
seem to co-opt memory networks
that you wouldn't ordinarily use in a card game.
- The idea is that this method
harnesses the same navigational part of your brain
that you would use to memorize how to get
to the grocery store just on autopilot.
So you're harnessing not only the narrative
storytelling memory that you have,
but also your navigational memory.
- [William] One way or the other, it gets results.
Memory athletes use tricks like this
to memorize decks of cards, names and faces,
and yes, thousands and thousands of digits of pi.
And civilians like us, maybe could, too.
- That means that it's not about being born
with any sort of special memory gift.
It means that you can learn to have
a better memory if you train the right way.
- So there is some hope for me and my memory.
I just have to work at it.
And I probably won't get any better at phone numbers.
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