His memory has always been laughably impressive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVJFRl6f6s
For example, if you start off learning a language, there are all kinds of tiny details to pronunciation that you don't even recognize and could never recall afterwards. If you try to repeat what someone's said, you might miss a lot of those details.
But if you've become fluent at a native (or near-native) level, you've trained your brain to subconsciously recognize and focus on all of those details and can recite something that someone's said perfectly.
Similarly with basketball or any other highly curated group of individuals performing a skill.
I have 20 years experience as a glassblower, and the apparent duration of the most intense parts has mentally expanded for me over time. Guitar playing is similar - my awareness while under pressure for improvisation or a slick solo has slowly changed over the years. The intensity of opening a wine glass foot is about the same as playing a quick improvised jazz solo. If you asked a musician how a performance went, they could probably tell you how it fell playing each line. Same with a glass collaboration – I can usually recall how making a piece went, but in a setting like a collaboration or competition, I would remember every part of making a 2 1/2 minute piece as if it was a 15 minute story.
When you start out making cups, the process can quickly go wrong in a jumble when it is time to open the rim. The next time, you remember to avoid that mistake… but might make a different one. Or maybe make the same one again. Each time it’s 10 or 20 minutes until you can be at that point again... it reminds me of 8 bit games where you have to go through a level repeatedly to get to a difficult jump, and keep trying til you make it. Eventually, you start finishing the process, and after many repetitions can do it without thinking. After even longer you learn every microsecond of the process - with glass, the feel of the hot bubble folding over and turning from a sphere to a flat disc in about 800 milliseconds, as you spin it in the flame. That’s the part that expands mentally for me - the control during that time. One learns to not fail to pay close attention at that time.
While these moments still feel like they are over in an instant, over time, my ability to make good decisions repeatedly while taking it in stride has increased. I’d sum it up as my level of overwhelmedness has gone down.
It’s as if time is expanded, though it all still happens very quickly. Due to all the practice, my awareness stays active instead of being overwhelmed. This phenomenon could also show up in other activities like sports.
Your question comes down to basically nature versus nurture, though. Do some people have innate talent, or does it come from training? It seems like the answer is both, of course. My analysis is that some people are better at releasing their minds to accept learning things. Then, it’s a matter of practice and experience. Anything eventually becomes commonplace.
But when they took chess boards of randomly placed pieces, they could not remember the placement of pieces any better than a random group of people.
The idea is that through practice, you develop the ability pattern match and chunk together the data into more cohesive blocks, and memory fewer of these blocks.
The rough analogy in software is to take a quick look at some code and recognize the design patterns, and remember the design patterns used rather each individual character.
In fact, words are a form of chunking -- we don't remember hundreds of character sequences, but we remember the words instead.
The difficulty in recalling nonsensical positions is not that it's like "boxing a beginner", it's that the pieces are literally placed in a way that the positions could not have been reached with legal moves.
Analogously, remembering famous quotes or memorable phrases in a certain language is quite easy. If instead, you had to memorize a string of randomly placed words that did not follow established rules of grammar or sentence structure, it'd be a much harder task.
Chunking is context and experience dependent.
I'm guessing it's because of the adrenaline. I don't remember anything from my first Formula Ford race (and I had years and years of street racing experience at that time and vast databases of memories from those street races), but after a while that level of "combat" actually becomes cherished, you relish the "fight". Then you are in the position to make use of your memory to aid yourself in becoming better when you are not even participating.
I'd say this is probably more true for racers where seat time is very expensive so you must develop the ability to bench race (visualize yourself actually driving, shifting gears, looking into the corner, and so on, and so on) to become competitive.
FWIW, and in my personal experience; when you get to the point where you remember what you were actually thinking right before you made an input, then you are truly in a position to really improve when you are not even actually participating.
The current drivers are really impressive too, they have the track layout, the braking points, the turning points of every track they race in their head to the point they can drive it by memory[1][2]. I think this also contributes to the memorisation of the race detail as the track contours and details are in their 'cache' or background memory so they can spend more cognitive capacity in feeling out the changes instead of trying to absorb the whole 'event' or race.
[0]: http://atlasf1.autosport.com/98/bel/schumacher.html
This reminds me of how many chess grandmasters can easily recall and recite and visualize every move in a game from years past. I think James deserves a little more credit than just being on par with chess GMs: to memorize something so complex as a basketball game without even attempting to commit it to memory speaks to his extraordinary intelligence.
Did LeBron’s memory of the fourth quarter surprise you?
Kerr: “Not for a great player. I think great players remember everything. It’s like a quarterback.”
Your guys do?
Kerr: “Yeah. Not all of them [laughs]. Draymond would be the same way.
“We’ll be watching tape of a game from, we played Houston in December or something, and guys will be like, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that. This is what happened next.’
“So I don’t think it’s that rare. But the best players generally remember the most and have the sharpest memories.
If basketball is analogous, one could suppose that (A) there may not be anything special about LeBron's memory per se - e.g. he might remember the plays in a cricket match as poorly as anyone else - and (B) it argues that on the court LeBron is thinking out the game, and the implications of each exchange, in a way comparable to how chess masters think out moves (and he probably puts similar mental effort into the other pursuits the article describes).
If one accepts that hypothesis then it would make sense that you can reconstruct more accurately things that behave according to a fixed and small set of rules that you understand thoroughly and intuitively.
*small relative to the universe of rules outside of things like chess and basketball.
Um, 7? 6? 14?
I think coaches and athletes don't necessarily get upset about having to answer questions per se. I think a lot of times they are upset that the people writing about their sport have so little knowledge or curiosity about it.
Zach Lowe, as a counterexample, seems to get a lot of interesting answers out of players and coaches because he makes good observations and thus can actually ask interesting questions.
the idea that what we're trained to notice changes what we perceive, doesn't strike me as strange thesis at all
I'm reminded of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
So trading one set of anecdotes for another: I don't see support for your hypothesis. I think it's plausible that professionally successful people without college education tend to have a better memory, perhaps because they need to in order to compensate for lack of formal education. But even that is unsubstantiated. We probably can't draw any meaningful inferences from the n = 1 example of one of the most successful basketball players of all time. Many of Lebron James' qualities - both mental and physical - are likely several sigma from the mean.
"Eidetic memory is typically found only in young children, as it is virtually nonexistent in adults.[5][6] Hudmon stated, "Children possess far more capacity for eidetic imagery than adults, suggesting that a developmental change (such as acquiring language skills) may disrupt the potential for eidetic imagery."[6] Eidetic memory has been found in 2 to 10 percent of children aged 6 to 12. It has been hypothesized that language acquisition and verbal skills allow older children to think more abstractly and thus rely less on visual memory systems."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory
one way to think about what education is, is that its a process for taking your perceptual inputs, and putting them on an abstract lattices
this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways
but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things
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(there a sort of similar thing going on when you're looking at something to draw it, you have to sort of un-abstract it, instead of putting the lightwaves hitting your eye onto the lattice 'apple', you have to get it back to lightwaves in certain pattern)
this is an obviously useful process in all sorts of ways but it probably does change the way you both notice things, and remember things
The problem with this is you're inducing a hypothesis via intuition and analogy. I don't see any reason to think education has the deleterious effect you're proposing. I guess it could, but I don't think there's any compelling evidence for it. It doesn't strike me as the simplest explanation.
From my perspective, I don't think there is any inverse correlation between memory capability and educational achievement. I could just as reasonably say eidetic memory decreases as language skills develop because we no longer have as much need for episodic recollection versus semantic recollection.
But neither of these proposals is grounded in anything empirical, it's intuitive speculation based on limited anecdata. The simpler explanation, by Occam's Razor, is that educational achievement trains memory faculties.
how else do you create a hypothesis?
You're correct that I haven't done a peer reviewed study on the question.
(fwiw, I suspect we're talking around each other, I'm not sure I disagree that educational achievement trains memory that fits on an abstract lattice, what I question, is memory that doesn't fit on a lattice, either way, yes, its all mere speculation on my part, imo that's the sort of thing internet message boards are good for)