Hacker News Reader

Comment by YeGoblynQueenne | Hacker News Reader

>> Peek read by scanning the left page with his left eye, then the right page with his right eye. According to an article in The Times newspaper, he could accurately recall the contents of at least 12,000 books.[6]

These are pretty extraordinary claims and I'm curious to know whether they were ever tested in controlled conditions.

For example, how does one verify the recollection of the contents of "at least" 12,000 books? Was there an experiment performed, where he was asked questions about a sufficiently large, randomly chosen, sample of those 12,000 books?

I understand that Tim Peek made a living out of his mnemonic abilities and I think, in that context, skepticism is justified.

View on HN

I grew up in a house of books and have lived with a bookseller for most of my life. Having therefore owned and lived with 10,000 to 15,000 books, periodicals and related ephemera (catalogues, concordance &c) I can assure you I cannot recall even fractional amounts of most of these although I can recall significant amounts of many and quite inaccurately quote some small amount. So I too think the question demands testing: it's the kind of thing people say but actually don't mean. "What is written on page 150 of the third book on the tenth shelf" is quite different to what comes after 'it was the best of times it was the worst of times' and many Shakespearean fans could quite easily quote significant amounts of most plays, Wagnerians could sing the ring cycle, my mum who certainly didn't have eidetic memory could whistle a lot of Mozart or Bach: getting from pedestrian memory to this specific recall Peek is said to have had is pretty strange, and I think should be verified. Day of the year or train timetables are tricks. Flow text with meaning? That's hard.

I know that calculating what day it was on a given date is a common mnemonic trick, e.g. see [1]. It's not easy to do but a person well-trained in mental arithmetic and memorisation should be able to pull it off.

I didn't know about recalling trains timetables and I can't find any pointers online. Can you point to a source explaining how it's done? I always like to impress at parties :)

Btw, the fact that Peek demonstrated common mnemonic skills that don't require unique abilities to perform casts further doubt on the fact that he had such unique abilities.

_____________

[1] https://artofmemory.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the...

I’m not certain meaning is implied.

My memory is decent, but nothing spectacular, and I have numerous poems accurately committed to memory in multiple languages I do not speak, or did not know when I memorised them - and I’m talking lengthy tone poems and that sort of thing.

I memorised them using traditional spaced repetition techniques, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Peek’s recall was similar - content without meaning, a progressing pattern. I think it’s similar to learning music by rote - at any rate, the recall feels similar - flow pickup points, like key frames in animation, with everything following being a seemingly obvious progression from that seed.

given that the left visual field of both eyes is connected to the right hemisphere and the right visual field of both eyes is connected to the left hemisphere, I wonder about the claim that each eye scans a separate page. It doesn't make sense. Actually both eyes would see each page and so the left half of both pages would go to the right brain and the right half of both pages would go to the left brain.

How do you remember facts you have read? Do you remember facts from reading or listening? Vision is the fastest input into the brain compared to other senses. I generally remember facts by remembering the image, for example some books I've read, I can tell you what page number, what side of the book and where on the page the information is but I can also tell you where I was standing when I read the book and sometimes the smells. Is that a clue as to how we remember? Websites are harder. Some information is irrelevant so I don't remember it, this could also be why some people don't learn at school if a kid has secret plans about their futures even from primary school age. Thing is people remember all sorts of things that are pertinent to them, life changing events and when detailed questioning is applied they can tell you everything about the situation even smells. So what I wonder is this, do certain hormones have an effect on recall considering the fight or flight phenomena? The Police also know witness statements can be unreliable because people switch off on repetition like driving to work, it becomes an almost unconscious task, so does this also back up the possibility that stressful environments can heighten learning? Do Neurologists sample hormones when putting people into a MRI scanner? Not in my limited experience.

I found it odd he turned books upside down to remember he read them.

Well, if you open a book you're currently reading you can pretty easily tell which parts you've already read and which you haven't - but you still probably use some sort of bookmark to avoid going through the hassle.

This sounds similar, a matter of convenience rather than a need. Glance at a bookshelf and you can know visually what's still unread without checking the books one by one.

> I found it odd he turned books upside down to remember he read them.

Unless you have another source, I think you've misread the article.

From the article:

> ...Kim was able to memorize things from the age of 16–20 months. He read books, memorized them, and then placed them upside down on the shelf to show that he had finished reading them, a practice he maintained all his life.

It sounds like he turned them upside down from an early age to signal that he'd read the book (perhaps to his parents?), not to remember that he'd read it. And then, for some reason, he maintained the practice for the rest of his life.

But either way, the article doesn't say he turned books upside down to remember he'd read them.

I think it's just stylistic phrasing.

"I place a piece of paper between books on the shelf to remember that I've read all the ones on the right."

Yeah, technically, I'm not 'remembering' in this case, I'm 'reminding' myself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com