Paul McCartney's Freakish Memory | Hacker News Reader

Paul McCartney's Freakish Memory

ianleslie.substack.com

248 pointstintinnabula179 comments

I knew guy that could just listen to an engine running, and hear that it had a timing problem!

I knew a guy that understood what this other guy was saying in a foreign language! That is crazy.

I knew someone that could just look at the curve on a bridge and immediately write down the equation for the curve, right there in front of everybody!

* *

I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician?

I hate to be negative, bring on the downvotes, but this is nothing less than being fascination with the ordinary. I also have zero doubt there are dozens and dozens of HN readers that also are musicians and can do the same. Not everyone who begins to study and play music can do it, but they will be able to eventually 1) recognize notes just by hearing them and 2) recognize chord changes just by hearing them. Some people have perfect pitch, and that makes it all the easier, but perfect pitch is not necessary, and it isn't an amazing trick any more than understanding someone speaking French.

David Byrne is freakishly smart. Tom Scholz of Boston has an MME from MIT. Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel have genius level IQs. Geniuses simply are not that novel. What sets Paul McCartney apart is not whether he has a good memory or can pick up a tune, but rather that he was a Beatle.

I play a lot of sub gigs, often on short notice, usually I get a set list in advance, but often I don't. I've been doing that for, maybe 25-30 years. In the event I get a set list, I've found that what works best for me is to start listening to them about 24-48 hours in advance, and not to play through them more than maybe 2-4 times. Obviously, this is popular short form music, and so I'm mostly getting a picture in my head of the form and the sound of the changes in my ear.

The gigs where I get no set list are interesting- after playing for a long time, I just know a lot of songs, or have heard a popular song enough that I know the form and the changes already, and if I can hear the changes in my head, playing them is not a problem. The really interesting bit though is if its a song I've never heard at all. Then, its a game of asking a few questions (what's the key, what's the feel), maybe someone will say it starts on scale degree IV, so you know there's going to be an intro and into the first verse, and you know thats scale degree I probably. Then, you just have to kind of guess your way through the first verse, but you're memorizing the verse at the same time, and usually the second one there's no guessing. And so on. There's also a great deal of watching peoples hands and bodies because there are tells when something is about to happen, and you just get a sense of what they mean.

So there's obviously rote knowledge of music, but there's also this subtext of guessing and watching and listening and mimicry that are a huge part of what is actually going on. The older I get, the more I enjoy thinking about that aspect of making live music.

Right? But in the history rock 'n roll, in the history of music, in the history of warm-blooded vertebrates, I don't know of hardly anyone that was ever a Beatle.

No more than a dozen or so. John, Paul, George, Ringo, Pete, George, Billy, Neil, Mal, Eric...

It's like wondering why anyone is even aware of St. Andrew. He was an Apostle. We need not look any further than that.

Bassist?

I get a fair amount of that kind of work too, on bass. Mostly jazz, where the repertoire of "standards" is finite. I also go to fiddle jams, where the fiddlers themselves often have no idea what the harmony should be, or how to express that information.

Of course a trick that a layperson might not notice, is that the notes are nowhere close to random.

But I love the challenge of that kind of work if it's with good players.

Yep! yeah man playing jazz is I think the ultimate challenge for a musician. I made the mistake of trying to lean on fake books for a long time, I think because I didn't believe that it was realistic to memorize enough of the tunes for it to make a difference. Eventually I wound up with a teacher who insisted I do exactly that. I think it should have been obvious to me, but as I'm sure you know, once you have memorized maybe a hundred tunes or so, you develop this mental model that the bulk of all standards fall into on the basis of form, changes, feel etc. Then, even when its an unusual tune, maybe you have to struggle through the first A and B, some kind soul might take pity on you and shout out the changes, and that little bit of extra information is enough combined with all that other stuff you know to get you through the tune.

I guess all that memorization is like the conditioning and training that an athlete might do to prepare for an event, and then at the event you're mostly responding conditions.

As an odd coincidence, I ditched the fake books, almost 2 decades ago. It was kind of by accident. I had been hoarding more and more books, and got to the point of hauling a huge pile of books to every gig. One time, I got a last minute call, and couldn't remember where I had stashed the books, so I rushed out of the house without them.

And it went OK! In addition to the mental model that you describe, I've also learned that most tunes are more forgiving of changes than one might guess by all of the chord symbols notated so precisely.

I've revived my fake books for another use: To practice treble clef sight reading, which I neglected when I was younger. Also, I think learning melodies helps a lot in terms of mentally organizing and navigating the standards.

There are players who are a lot better than me, and are still attached to the books.

And then every once in a while you get a song breaks all the assumptions and changes: https://youtu.be/ZnRxTW8GxT8 :)

Beato is a great teacher and has a wide if not complete comprehension of music. But he approaches this piece from his understanding of Jazz, and, cautiously, I would say the only rational way to fully map and chart this song is using the tools of Jazz, but I doubt it couldn't also be approached using Classical forms, it just makes more sense, is simpler, using Jazz. Because they are both individually comprehensive to notes and sounds and changes any instrument can produce, every musical piece in any musical genre can be understood and interpreted as either Jazz or Classical or both.

Yeah, I guess (from a very limited understanding of music) is that the main confusion comes from approaching (and hearing) this piece as a simple catchy pop song.

And then you're suddenly hit with all this complexity

I'm also a bassist that does a lot of improvisation on stage. I often play with a singer that knows literally thousands of songs, and he often pulls one on me that I've never heard.

What matters a lot is genre conventions. This particular singer mostly plays rock, blues, country and reggae. I know the basic mechanics of those four genres, and can often guess where the song is going, even if I've never heard it. Even if I hit a wrong note, it's usually in the chord that's being played (e.g. the 5), and sounds reasonable.

I do the same thing when I get a setlist and just listen to the songs multiple times in the days previous so that I can hear the songs in my head. If often say, "If I can sing the melody, I can play it."

Per the topic at hand, what's also interesting is that I can think that I don't remember a song, but often even years later, if someone starts playing it, I know immediately where to go. Once I find the key, which rarely takes me more than a note or two, I'm good.

But I've also got friends that play traditional Irish music. I can't sit in with them (I've tried) since the chord changes fall at places I don't expect them, and are often different chords than I'd guess. Having a feel for the style of music makes a ginormous difference.

agree, having a memory for music is nothing at all like being able to remember like, the dictionary, or the phone book, the human brain has a huge affinity for music memorization. i remember tons of music, songs I heard just once 40 years ago, songs from bands I played in that only we heard 30 years ago, that's just how music is for songs that you've played, they stick in your head. just go to any wedding with a real band. Think those musicians are reading music and rehearsing all those songs? not really, people that play in wedding bands often just show up never having met each other and it's expected that they just know every song you'd ever play, or you can fake it convincingly and perfectly enough on the fly (I did such a gig myself once, and I didnt really do that great, but that was the expectation). this is commonplace and actually required to be a pro-level popular music musician (which I am not).

True. Music is relatively easy to perform and create (forgetting whether it is Eleanor Rigby or not). But even though there are many that can, let's not diminish the very often seemingly miraculous feat of those that can perfectly perform a piece they've never heard just by reading it, often while they perform it, even though perfectly reading English out loud is a similar exercise. As many people can't read music as can read literature, and I've never heard of music literacy ruining a musician's career. But it is a good thing music is so easy for the curious and determined, because though many have learned it in their later years, learning to read music gets more and more difficult the older one is, but music itself never gets more difficult. Now, Gold Records, OTOH, I seriously doubt are easy to do, even if it was very likely easy for the artist, they had no way of knowing beforehand even if they so claimed.

That is the wonderful thing about music. It is actually pretty easy/simple but quite often those simple things move our soul. When we attempt to intellectualize this we forget that part.

This is Jazz

> This is Jazz

Sure, but even though we consider Jazz anything that sounds jazzy, i.e. using Major 7ths or flat 5s, because Jazz and Classical are so individually encompassing, literally every other genre of music is also Jazz and Classical, any sound that can be made with an instrument fits in Jazz and Classical, i.e. it can be interpreted using the modes and forms of Jazz or Classical without changing how it sounds. It just isn't very useful to approach or interpret, say, a folk song from the perspective of Jazz, nor the sound a guitar makes when smashed to pieces, but technically, everything is either Jazz or Classical or both.

Why come from a perspective of x or y? It’s music. It isn’t jazz or classical. It’s music. Humans like to do 2 things: make stuff and categorize stuff.

My late daughter was able to memorize pi out to a hundred or so digits. She said she did it by making the numbers sound like a song.

May the best of the memories live with you always. I’m so sorry.

I am sorry for your loss.

My college gf had synesthesia. We played a game where I rattled off about 20 numbers from a phone book and randomly said several names. Without hesitation she recalled all their numbers, no mistakes.

Had a similar ability with music, upon hearing a melody or a chord, would rapid-fire off what the notes were. Detuned a string a few cents, could immediately tell is was out of tune. As a guitar player this was a bit annoying as she would always be telling me something was off when it was slightly out of tune, it was like a nails on chalkboard kind of experience for her.

I think ear training helps with that. I found listening to fusion helped because you were introduced to many scales you didn't hear in everyday music, so soon heard the differences.

There's nothing more grating than hearing people playing slightly out or doing half-bends on guitar. I've played with people who have played for decades and still can't hear that they're out, and it's terrible.

Ear training can help with relative pitch, but it's still super hard to tell for instance if your instrument is slightly sharp or flat due to changes in humidity unless you're playing against a piece of music or other instruments.

Guitarists can usually tell when one of their strings is slightly out of tune and can often tell when all their strings are out of tune yet in tune relatively to each other. Successful guitarists will have a guitar tech off-stage; swapping guitars isn't just for tonal purposes, it's to quickly swap out a slightly out of tune guitar for one that has just been tuned. But it seems unlikely that without perfect pitch that we can trust a non-musicians' assessment that a musician played a song perfectly faithful to the original. Even assuming that this occurred, this is not exactly all that unlikely nor that it rarely occurs, but, instead, it is academic for the experienced performer and trained musician. And for every hour of performance there are many hours of rehersal. The very best performances are built from muscle-memory which will obfuscate how much raw talent there actually is.

I've been a guitarist for 35 years who took an ear training course w/ vocal lessons about 10 years in.

I could probably do better than blind determining what is 432 vs. 440 because there are enough common reference examples out there that I have sense of feel for the difference, and I could tune an A4 cold +- 5 cents. But a third of that? A vanishingly small number of musicians would be able to do that with any reliability without a reference point.

She didn't know how on-point a pitch was because she was listening. It was innate and immediate. It was literally described as the intensity of a color that corresponded to a key.

We're kinda off in the weeds from the point I was making, which was refuting the notion that music could have any analog to reciting a phone book. There is a bit of a connection between memory and processing music in a way, at least for those with this condition, that probably is more subconscious for those without.

When I was in high school and was struggling with learning to recite a poem from memory, I'd compose a melody and record a song with that poem as lyrics. Suddenly, reciting it from memory was becoming incredibly easy.

I think the bizarre takeaway is that he recognized Fran and her boys. There are plenty of geniuses compared to the number of people that can recognize someone from an unimportant chance encounter from 15 or so years back. The fact that a lifelong musician can tell the difference between a mixolydian mode and a dorian mode, or a dominant from a diminished isn't shocking.

I don't think the author's argument was well-supported. I think it is more likely it was coincidence. In general, coincidences often seem contrived. There are countless photographs Paul McCartney has given to fans. If they were close enough for him to see, then it makes the occasion possible whether he recognized them or not. Hero-worship by a fan is a special thing, "wow, is there anything he can't do?" They're not exactly being objective, and everything the hero does becomes miraculous. Everyone has idiosyncrasies, and famous people are constantly observed, so every little thing they do becomes notable to the fanatic. "Look at the way he holds his fork!"

You raise a good point: it could have been a coincidence. I hadn't thought of that.

Humans are awesome. Some of them anyway.

Knowing one or two people in your life who could do such things is actually the opposite of being ordinary.

I think you are coming from a place of distrust for cults of personalities, and while I agree, we should not idolise them, we should not go the other extreme, that of the jaded teenager who "has already seen it all" and is therefore incapable of wonder.

That's not how we progress as a species, as a civilization.

I was hoping to avoid being accused of being a Paul McCartney basher. I was bashing the author's silly argument, not Paul McCartney.

There's levels to this. I once worked in a room full of graphic artists, but one of them had a skill level that was far above everyone else. His "demo" was to draw a detailed dwarf character in full battle armour and wielding a stone hammer... with one continuous line. Without picking up his pen, he could draw this character in minutes with better detail than the other artists could in hours or days.

Similarly, Mozart copied down Allegri's Miserere after hearing it just once in 1770. That's a sufficiently amazing achievement that it's still talked about, a quarter of a millennium later!

No preliminary rough, just pen to paper? Pretty impressive if so. Especially if he wasn’t sort of bashing in the overall shape first and going back in to add details.

And now that I think about it, trying to do this on a regular basis sounds like a pretty good way to boost one’s ability to hold a whole drawing in one’s head and “trace” it onto the paper, rather than doing a rough. I would not be surprised if this ability started as a game he played with himself when he was sitting in the back of his least favorite high school classes, doodling away.

(I am an artist; I can’t do this particular trick but I have definitely had moments when I was totally into a drawing and it felt like I was tracing it onto the paper from my mental image of it, with the hand of a dead artist I’d been studying guiding mine. I was also pretty high at the time; there’s some strains of weed that artists favor because it can give us a boost to this sort of ability.)

I'm pretty sure I have aphantisia, but for a few rare moments I could visualise a complete image against a blank surface and even start tracing it. I could never hold on to this for more than a few seconds.

My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.

> My suspicion is that this artist had the opposite -- the ability to maintain a detailed image in his mind's eye as he traced it.

Check out Kim Jung Gi. He's basically doing that in real time, with impossible speed, accuracy and level of detail. He's making a living via performing live shows of his skills.

> He's making a living

Not any longer, sadly..

Some are blessed with talent, some more than others, but when inherent talent is encouraged and stimulated and disciplined and focused from a young age, and the historical tools of music and music literacy are mastered, when there is total support, removal of distractions and the leisure and time to accomplish all this, the result is seen as nothing less than miraculous. Not everyone could have been Mozart, but certainly there are some that could have been had they been given the same support, encouragement and education from a young age. But I don't think many would have wanted Mozart's father as a parent. I have never heard it argued, but it is possible Mozart's father's treatment of his son could be seen as narcissistic abuse, and that Mozart had obsessive and compulsive symptoms. While Mozart had incredible talent and discipline in music, he lacked discipline and restraint in other areas of his life, and it ultimately killed him at a relatively young age.

Except Paul McCartney is considered as one of the best song writers of all time. There may be many musicians who can do the same on a technical level but even then he is a significant outlier.

But some of his lyrics are terrible: how many times can you say "in"? In this world in which we live in...

And "someone's knocking at the door, someone's ringing a bell, do me a favour, go to the door, open it and let them in"...

It's like he was trying to lyricise everyday activities. Very odd.

I say this as a penniless musician in contrast to the very successful Mr McCartney (who plays bass lines like he's playing the tuba, very clever)

I wish people would sing about the mundane rather than sex, drugs and crime all day.

I think A Day in the Life fits that requirement.

In my opinion this is like criticising Picasso's paintings for not being anything close to as realistic as photos.

Fine, it's a valid opinion to dislike either for those reasons, but for many people it was, and is, art that's exciting in part because of its perfect non-perfection.

I think with lyrics most people don't give them a second thought and don't realise what the person is singing about. Most people can't even tell you which instrument is being used in a part of a song.

This is different to visual art - most people can play spot the difference no problem, but with audio most people are deaf to the details, and the lyrics!

Eg. My Sharona - most people don't realise it includes the lyric "I always get it up for the younger kind"....

Why should lyrics have meaning?

> Except Paul McCartney is considered as one of the best song writers of all time.

This is a loaded observation, basically arguing "because all his songs sold well, he must be a significant outlier in songwriting." Similarly, Apple is considered one the best cell phone manufacturers of all time, or McDonald's is considered one of the best burger manufacturers of all time. Popularity does not equate to whether something is any good. And not all of McCartney's songs are the best songs of all time. Some of his notably terrible songs are still popular because he, himself, is famous (because he was a Beatle). One example is the Wing's song Jet, which is popular enough to still get radio play, yet when critically analyzed falls quite short of, say, Hey, Jude.

But my argument is not that Paul McCartney can't write good songs, only that it is ordinary that a musician can recall to perform music they have heard before in the same way most that read something impactful to them can more or less recall it verbatim.

It isn’t that he was a Beatle. It is that he is Paul McCartney.

Not really, no. I don't believe McCartney's best songs would have been as good as they are without Lennon's pessimistic criticism. Otherwise, McCartney may have become like Pygmalion falling in love with his sculpture, Galatea. Unfortunately in this metaphor, Lennon is Venus who solves Pygmalion's problem that the sculpture was not a real person. But I hope the point is made, which is that only through dissent does anything progress to excellence.

What?

McCartney didn't create in a vacuum, and if everyone always agreed, nothing would change for the better.

That is the beauty of all things.

Speaking of music and memory..

A guy named Hilly Kristal ran the famous nightclub CBGB's for something like 30 years. My band was lucky to play there a few times in the '80s.

It was said about Hilly that he remembered every single band that ever played at the club. Years later I ran into him on the street and he immediately recognized me. Not only that, he asked how every member of the band was doing by name. We were never famous or anything, he just had this love of music and musicians and a steel trap mind for these details.

There's a movie titles CBGB about him/the club, played by the late Alan Rickman:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scW0Dqims9c

I'm guessing they play a little fast and loose with history, but its a good watch.

"In 2003, comedian Billy Crystal was asked, on the field at Yankee Stadium before one of the league championship series games, for his first recollection of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry. "I was sitting right up there [first-base side, upper deck],'' Crystal said. "In the second game of a doubleheader, Ted Williams strikes out against Bobby Shantz. Thirty years later, I meet Mr. Williams. I said, 'I have home movies of you striking out against Bobby Shantz in the second game of a doubleheader at the Stadium.' He looked at me and I swear, Tim, he says, 'Curveball, low and away.' He said, 'Ellie [Yankees catcher Elston Howard] dropped the ball and tagged me, right?' I said, 'Yes, that's it!'""

https://www.espn.co.uk/mlb/story/_/id/6996357/seventy-years-...

I know a guy who subbed at a concert for the bass player on short notice.

Before the gig started he listened to the first song and learned its bass line. During the first song (while he was performing it) he was listening to the second song on his headphones and learning its bass line!

It's utterly mind blowing what the human mind is capable of.

He's listening to one song while playing another song? That is mind-blowing.

I think that works both ways: what sets the Beatles apart is that they had Paul McCartney as a member during his (probably) best creative years.

And he was tremendously creative because of his relationships with other very creative people.

If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band. I think it's absolutely justified to discuss a particularly talented musician's mind.

Of course there are many good musicians who can play a tune immediately after hearing in (if you want to see this in action, check out Rick Beato or Justin Hawkins on Youtube), but having heard it once decades ago, not knowing what the song is or who it's from, trying to find out and failing, and yet perfectly reproducing it including all the verses, decades later, that's absolutely an example of a really impressive memory.

> If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual, The Beatles wouldn't have been that special a band.

For an argument, this is question-begging, but I'm not going to argue that The Beatles were ordinary, because provably they changed music, and this is both a criticism of them and a compliment. However, for all we know, if they hadn't been so prolific in performing and marketing themselves from their earlier career, we might have missed them entirely. The more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more a band plays, the more familiar their music becomes, the more popular they become, the more they play, etc.

Though it should be noted that whomever is judging these kinds of achievements of covering a song from memory isn't exactly critically comparing the original side by side with the reproduction. "It sounded exactly the same," is likely embellishment by someone without a trained ear. Picking up a song is such a common notion that it has its own idiom, namely "picking up a song."

> If Paul and John weren't in any way unusual

I should add but can no longer edit my reply, that these two are distinctly contrasting and somehow complementary. Notable about McCartney is that with all the success, accomplishment and tragedy in is life, he is still able to be happy. He stands as a positive example of how to be, focusing on the bright side of things, an optimist. In contrast, Lennon wasn't satisfied with anything and always had something negative to say about everything. He never seemed happy unless he was causing conflict. He was a pessimist. They seem to be two sides of the same coin of humanity, a yang and a yin that make a complete and comprehensive picture.

Both sides are important if not essential. If Lennon was instead McCartney's yes-man, McCartney's music would have suffered. Lennon's criticism made McCartney's songs better than they would have been otherwise, and McCartney's positive support allowed Lennon's music to be developed rather than abandoned.

>I have no doubt Paul McCartney can just listen to a song once and immediately play it. Did the author even realize that McCartney is a musician?

The first several minutes of reading are an anecdote about memory that has absolutely nothing to do with music.

While you're arguing a straw man, that portion was only exposition to support the subject and underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory. But in particular, that portion was not well-supported nor all that compelling. It was, as you say, "anecdote." The idea the PM "doesn't just take pictures with random people" is absurd on its face, neither provable nor unprovable. Surely there are hundreds or thousands of such pictures.[1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=paul+mccartney+with+fans&tbm...

>underlying argument of the piece, which is that PM has a good memory

frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about, secondly unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man? You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.

If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article; the article makes several arguments for things McCartney has remembered being out of the ordinary that were not musical, you dismissed his having a phenomenal memory by essentially saying all trained musicians remember music. Which has hardly any bearing on the arguments in the article.

I agree that the article's examples are not well supported, or from my viewpoint based on more supposition than someone should make when trying to establish something as freakish. But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!

> frankly your first post did nothing to indicate you knew that was what the underlying argument of the piece was about

The title of the piece is "Paul McCartney's freakish memory." I don't believe anyone was confused about the author's argument.

> unless you dispute the text you wrote is somehow falsified I'm not sure how my response could be described as arguing a straw man. You wrote something, I quoted it, I pointed out that the first few minutes of reading described a feat of memory you did not address.

You are correct that I did not address it, so it is a straw man because it wasn't my argument. You attacked an argument that was not mine.

> If anything I'd say you were arguing a straw man by only focusing on the musical arguments for McCartney's memory made in the article

I only argued against the essence of the piece, that McCartney's memory is not anything more than exhibiting ordinary abilities of someone who is literate (in the loser sense) in music in the same way it is ordinary that someone that is literate (in the narrow sense) can read. I ignored the irrelevant anecdote about his memory because it was only relayed to support the argument that Paul McCartney is a good musician because he has good memory, and because that portion was not well-supported nor even clear that is what occurred, that he remembered the woman and recognized those must have been her children. It was a ridiculous notion on its face and more easily explained by coincidence using Occam's Razor. The same is true of McCartney's composition of She's Leaving Home, that it is more easily explained by the author seeing connections after the fact rather than McCartney consciously contriving the piece for those outrageously specific reasons.

> But whether they were well supported or not you just didn't address them at all!

It is not required to address every single point in order to defeat the author's fundamental argument.

If you watch Get Back, it is kind of freakish how fluid Paul and John are. Telepathic communication, writing songs constantly for a decade.

It's true. Lots of amateur musicians can do that to some degree. Of-course results vary, but it's common.

I'm probably "not even an amateur", whatever that means, and with popular music I can usually play a song (the chords) after hearing it once. Pop music is oftentimes 4-5 chords picked from a well known set of ~7 progressions, without any scale change. I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.

> I'm not able to hear-play more complex harmonics s.a Jazz, or things like Queen which are not totally trivial.

Granted, but Queen didn't just show up at the studio unprepared. Given the same preparation Queen gave, it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility that you could pick up any of their songs, making it look easy to someone that didn't observe your preparation.

Did you read the article? Most of the examples given in it have nothing to do with music.

I ignored the irrelevant and unsupported anecdotal premises and focused on and defeated the underlying argument which is "Paul McCartney is a great musician because his memory is freakish." I think, instead, like anyone at the top of their field, McCartney is a great musician because he studied and practiced music.

There's plenty of people who studied and practiced music who didn't become great musicians. So, it's a necessary, but not sufficient component. I suspect great memory is absolutely a huge boost for any musician, probably even more so than in other fields (where it's also a huge boost).

I have studied classical music, and a friend of mine applied to a master in conducting. In the entrance exam they had to listen to a 4-part piece and when it was down they had to write it down.

Genius level would however be the following: There is a rumour about a mass that the Catholic church held secret (I believe it was an Allegri mass). One day Mozart went to the service and when he got back he wrote it down.

It reminds me the chess memory experiment where more experienced chess players had much better recall of real chess positions than novices and the same recall for random positions (around 4 pieces).

If it is the same phenomena then we may expect that Paul as an experienced musician should have an excellent recall for real music and an ordinary one (no better than anyone) for cacophony (random sounds).

> In 1999, McCartney recorded a haunting cover version of an obscure song called No Other Baby. He’d had the song in his head for years without knowing who recorded it or who it was written by. Whenever he sang it to people, nobody knew it. Only after recording it did he discover that the song, or at least the version of it, was by a skiffle group called The Vipers, who released it as a single in 1958, the year after John met Paul (as it turns out, the record was, rather remarkably, produced by George Martin). Paul said he never owned the record, which means he would have heard it on the radio, or in a record store listening booth, what - once, twice? Yet forty years later, he remembered all the verses, as well as the refrain, which goes, I don’t want no other baby but you….I don’t want no other baby but you…

This kind of memory is certainly possible. And from what I've seen of McCartney - he has a vast repertoire of songs he knows (not just his own) - it seems almost certain that he has this talent. I suspect it's actually a relatively common ability though. I have family members who can remember both the tune and the lyrics of songs after 1 or 2 listens through. This just isn't so noticeable because they're not musicians.

In general, I find what people find easy to remember a fascinating topic. my personal ability to remember song lyrics (and in general auditory information) is awful - I actually can't remember the entire lyrics to single song. I'm sure I could memorise some if I really tried, but it would take me hours of conscious. effort. On the other hand I often recall visual or written information from a single glance, and am very good at book learning and retaining an understanding of system and concepts.

The power of ad jingles is often attributed to songs being easy to memorize. According to legend that was the core idea for Sesame Street teaching things with songs and music. But I am sure I don’t remember nearly as many songs as musicians do, never mind McCartney

Yes, this is not so surprising. I remember songs I heard in my infancy and never again. I also didn't have a record. I guess people find this surprising because they live in an era where you can find any song you want (the already common thought of "how people did this before smart phones...").

In high school I got rather adept at memorizing our marching band music. By my senior year I could play a song once or twice, and not have to look at it again for the rest of the semester.

While this kind of skill is nice to have, there is a curse to this kind of musical ability. I often find myself humming songs or fragments that I cannot place. Worse you cant just hum or whistle the tune into some app and have it tell you the song. And it's maddening when you know you don't have it quite right.

For example, for years I had a reoccurring little tune stuck in my head. I had nothing to go on other than a couple of bars of the song that repeated. One day I finally(!) figured it out when I got out an old copy of NES Mega Man, and selected Cutmans stage. The cutman theme had been stuck in my head for years, and it was quite the relief to know what the song was.

>Worse you cant just hum or whistle the tune into some app and have it tell you the song.

I've had reasonable luck with folktunefinder, not for humming, but for tapping in a snippet as notes or a rhythm.

Google lens audio search works pretty well for humming, not so much for whistling

No doubt when corporate vultures arrived for their cut.

The article says McCartney had a similar problem with a song, and only found out which song it was when he recorded and released his own version!

Same, but it started in middle school for me. I could only read a piece of music once.

It took me over 40 years to listen again and immediately recognize a catchy tune I had in my head since I was like 14 or 15. It was "Do I kill you" by Les Humphries Singers, btw.

I think what contributes to this ability is already knowing a number of songs, and being able to remember them as "systems" rather than individual notes and words.

Similarly, it is easier for someone who plays often to remember a chess game.

Yeah I'm always impressed when someone is like, the dance is like this and this and this and then it seems the whole room got it except me. But for most of my life (as I'm aging I'm losing it somewhat) I pretty much only had to read something once to remember it forever. Never understood the process of "studying".

Lebron James has been remarked upon for his ability to remember practically any play of any game he's ever been in (and many that he hasn't) in precise detail. And actress Marilu Henner can basically remember every detail of her entire life, a condition called hyperthermesia. I think superior memory is an underestimated driver of successful people.

I had what was probably hyperthymesia until I got into college. Lots of drinking, drugs, experiences, illnesses and whatnot and now I'm almost 50 and can't remember much of what happened a couple hours ago. It's like Flowers for Algernon but in slow motion so not as painful.

Coming around to my mid 40s and I can say the same with the same approximate reasons.

I used to throw events with tens to hundreds of people as a teenager and I could remember the names of every guest including anecdotes about them. Even weeks after the event. Now it takes hearing a name about 15 time on several occasions for it to stick.

I need to write down everything these days.

>Lebron James has been remarked upon for his ability to remember practically any play of any game he's ever been in (and many that he hasn't) in precise detail. And actress Marilu Henner can basically remember every detail of her entire life, a condition called hyperthermesia. I think superior memory is an underestimated driver of successful people.

I think it depends. There is certainly a balance to be struck here. In the case of hyperthermesia its selectivity (tightly coupled to autobiographical details) makes it quite different from ordinary memorization:

>Even those with a high level of hyperthymesia do not remember exactly everything in their lives or have "perfect memory". Studies have shown that it is a selective ability, as shown by Price's case, and they can have comparative difficulty with rote memorization and therefore cannot apply their ability to school and work.[0]

The short story Funes el memorioso by Jorge Luis Borges - who explores this theme[1] quite radically in his typical style - is imv particularly enlightening.

In short: A certain amount of "forgetting" (you don't want to remember all details at all times) helps to consolidate and facilitates to see "things" in a new light. In a sense sleep itself (biologically hardcoded) fulfills a very large part of that function.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia#Difficulties

[1]https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/borges-memory-funes-the-m...

El Memorioso Funes is more like a journalistic/chronicle parody of the phenomenon, rather than an exploration of it.

At least that's how it feels in the Spanish version.

I have a photographic memory and notice it is getting worse with age. Do you find anything helps?

A successful memory might be good for successful people but it might also be a curse to be surrounded by a sea of people who need to be constantly reminded of things when you yourself remember everything. It's like the universe is going in slow motion.

An analogous scenario would be that Magnus Carlsen can look at a chess board where pieces are well advanced and know when that historic event happened.

Steph curry can tell you the dates and plays and sequences from one still image of a video highlight.

Cristiano Ronaldo can head the ball into the goal with his eyes closed.

> I suspect it's actually a relatively common ability though. I have family members who can remember both the tune and the lyrics of songs after 1 or 2 listens through. This just isn't so noticeable because they're not musicians.

I'm like this, more or less, and I'm no musician or singer. If I hear a song, I can't not hear the lyrics, and I'll remember them and the melody after a listen or two. It's great for music quizzes where you have to figure out the name of a song or artist, because if they only play a short bit I can usually fill in, to help my team mates figure out the answer.

I also tend to recall numbers quite easily. Faces too, but tell me your name however and I'll forget it in about 7 seconds.

> Paul said he never owned the record, which means he would have heard it on the radio, or in a record store listening booth

or in a discotheque, or in George Martin's living room, or other people had the record and he heard it at parties. People used to get together to play records. I'm not doubting he has a good memory, and especially for music, but he could have heard the song many times.

Yeah the article treats George Martin producing it like a cool coincidence. But it seems more likely that he heard the song, perhaps many times, because Martin played it.

It's not like the Beatles and George Martin socialized all that much, to the extent of "come over to my place and listen to records". They both had insanely busy schedules for years, and were at their creative heights. I doubt Martin even remembered much about that particular song, given how many he'd worked on, even by the mid 60s.

Accidentally hearing a tune is also the case for lawsuits, eg. Coldplay / Satriani from years ago.

When I was young, there was a song I'd sing Beelentzin Gluejeez which I'd drive my mom mad singing.

It wasn't until decades later I realized it was Venus in Blue Jeans.

When I was 9 my Dad took me to see "Those Magnificent Young Men In Their Flying Machines," an entertaining movie for a 9-year-old. (Which I was in 1965 when it came out.)

I knew the theme song by heart, music and lyrics, after only being exposed to it in the movie, and remembered it years later. That's the only time I can think of when I had anything like that kind of ability except for one: I was watching TV, still as a kid, and Harry Belafonte sang Leonard Cohen's song Suzanne. For years after I would sing the chorus to people, asking if they knew who had written it because I wanted to hear more from the writer. Finally when I was at summer camp a counselor told me it was by a guy named Leonard Cohen. As soon as I got home I got an LC album and I've been a huge fan ever since, and have played and sung Suzanne myself on guitar for people many times.

I cannot remember a single song lyric...

I can recall every single password ive ever typed into a computer ;

FblQ00Ho --> First auto generated ISP password to me from ix.netcom.com in ~1995 or so...

im not some weird serial killer/hacker doo-dad ... im just telling you my memory fn weirdness... I DONT WANT THIS ABILITY

but its not an _ability_

Its just an memory mech

I know how to lucid dream and memorize... but its really fn hard.

There are signals that tell you when youre lucid... I have two no, three specifics which tell me I am lucid...

Yall gunna hate this, but.... there are lucid dreamers watching you... IN GOOD WAYS.

Just in case anyone else has any of the callings to determine if they are LUCID dreaming (which means that you can take mental thought over your dreams)

[PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO READ THIS ASIDE] ;; 'On Hoffman's 100th BDAY AND he had just died ; [THIS IS IMPORTANT TO YC]

[[HOFFMAN IS TO NETWORKING (THE INTERNERNET) AS OPPENHEIMER WAS TO THE MANHATTAN PROJECT]]

So Hoffman invented LSD

One of the founders of CISCO stated : "We wouldnt have even discovered RIP or BGP is we hadn't done LSD..."

Do you know where DOS was from.

I enjoyed reading this, but what a strange article that's projecting a lot onto McCartney. Every anecdote has some plausible, other reason for these situations, but the article seems insistent on putting McCartney's memory on a pedestal. Paul himself never acknowledges these anecdotes are due to memory, and he's never mentioned his memory is particularly noteworthy. If I got anything out of this article, it's the mystique of celebrity when they don't answer your every question.

Yes, I found this one of the oddest articles I've read in a while. It's just the author projecting all of these things onto McCartney, without ever having any clear evidence of what really happened in any of these cases or evidence that he has a particularly good memory.

Yeah, exactly this. This is an unwitting article about how people are desperate to deify celebrities. I've always been a bit bewildered by the phenomenon. It almost seems like internalized marketing.

In fact, he alludes to just the opposite with the title of his 14th solo album, "Memory Almost Full", which itself is an anagram of "for my soulmate LLM" (Linda Louise McCartney).

Paul insists this was not intentional.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_Almost_Full

I had the first version of that album and it's mastered and mixed horrendously. One of the worse albums I have ever heard - I emailed the mastering engineer and he said "McCartney wanted it like that..." and that he think he had learned from it because he rereleased it some years later with a much less brickwall compression.

I agree with you. I have a four-year degree in audio engineering technology and I think my college years (2004 - 2008) were some of the most hostile for audio recording. Listening back to Memory Almost Full, Paul's songs are fully there but there's that Strokes flat-as-a-pancake pastiche layered on top that's hard to hear through. There are moments where he breaks through (the middle bars of "Gratitude") but you can tell it's a fight for the dynamics from top to bottom.

I don't have a degree but my ears are pretty good at detecting the complete flatness of bass dynamics and destruction of all peaks as soon as the bass is played. Horrendous.

Was the degree interesting?

The degree was very interesting! It was a good mix of acoustics + electronic engineering. The first two years' base courses were a lot of math and physics mixed with more general biology/anatomy with a focus on how the entirety of the human body perceives sound. Then the latter upper-level courses were more hands on electrical engineering mixed with artistic theory. One one occasion, an actual graded exam consisted of our professor playing obscure recordings where we had to guess what month/year in which it was recorded based on the aesthetic and recording techniques, as well as technically describe as best as possible _how_ it was recorded. Cycling '74 was big at the time, and I first got into all of the audio engineering by messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter as a teen, which eventually led to a more stable programming career in Javascript, but I still enjoy audio engineering as a hobby.

"A Bigger Bang" by the Rolling Stones is another great example from that era of an album with great songs that was horribly recorded. It was remastered in 2009 but the original 2005 recording was intense. (The fact that it was remastered four years after release says a lot!) I recall record reviews at the time describing the mix as "rough and ready" but really it sounded half-finished to me. I think we can now look back on these records as artistic decisions associated with the era, which is interesting in itself.

I've also heard so many more impressive and concrete memory anecdotes.

John Mulaney had a great one about Bill Clinton remembering his mother's name decades after meeting her once in college.

So I was expecting a lot more out of this article.

> John Mulaney had a great one about Bill Clinton remembering his mother's name decades after meeting her once in college.

I just want you to know it took me several minutes to parse this correctly.

Hearing a particular story about a person’s memory may well be survivorship bias. (Many people will have some impressive memory recollections. A famous person interacts with lots of people —- who are likely to remember those stories —- so certain stories ‘survive’ to be retold.)

A curiosity I’ve seldom seen noted in all the rich lore of the Beatles generally: they recorded their entire catalogue of studio albums over just slightly more than seven years. From their first album release, only a bit more than 2.5 years passed while they released four more albums, two of which were soundtracks for iconic films released in tandem. The fifth album is the one many fans mark as their creative breakout. It was only a year and a half til Sgt Pepper with another creative breakout milestone in between, then only a year and a half til the White Album, then less than a year til Abbey Road (which I personally find preposterous because I sincerely believe it’s objectively the best album by any artist ever), and just over half a year til their final full studio release Let It Be. Oh and Yellow Submarine was in there too, of course.

I don’t know how much Paul’s “freakish” memory made that possible. I do know that it astonishes me every time I remember the fact that the whole Beatles recording career lasted about as long as the time I had a locker in grade school.

I actually had a Ask HN question that went nowhere about how senior folks in tech with bad memories got to their positions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309597

I ask b/c it seems that most (if not all) of the senior folks I've worked with in the past somehow managed to have incredibly detailed memories around:

- the tech stack

- the people that worked for them etc

If they didn't, they did the "if you are a fighter pilot with bad vision, get a wingman with good vision" and hired a number 2 or team lead who did.

This is def me. Interestingly, I have a terrible memory when it comes to facts and names and things I read in books and so on and so forth. But I have a way-above-average situational memory. Interactions with people (or code), conversations and reasons why decisions were made tend to stick forever. It's bizarre. Granted I'm not Paul McCartney interacting with innumerable people across time and space over a whole lifetime, but this story felt familiar because I can imagine something like this happening to me.

I'm the opposite. I can remember all sorts of weird facts and numbers. I can remember the IP address of the DNS servers of a job I worked 20 years ago. And lyrics to songs I learned as a child.

But I will forget someone's name minutes after meeting them even if I try all the tricks of repeating it 3 times or associating it with a particular action.

As a side note, after I got COVID, for a few weeks I couldn't retain anything. I'd read some documentation and afterwards couldn't remember a single thing. I remember discussing it with my sister and her response was "welcome to the world of ordinary people!" It has made me more patient with people not getting what I've explained on the first hearing, so at least I've learned from my experience.

How interesting -- and then after COVID resolved your memory gradually improved? I've heard anecdotal evidence about this. How frustrating! And sorry you had to experience it!

Thanks, yes it slowly recovered over a few weeks. Work was pretty understanding possibly because a work colleague and my manager both had the same reaction. Must be tough for the long covid folk where it goes on for months.

This is me as well. I can remember code snippets down to line numbers. I can remember what, who and why decisions where made (from jobs I last worked at 5+ years ago). I can remember, almost to the exact wording what people said when having discussion/arguments but I have trouble remembering the names of people I've met multiple times, I forget basic facts about my childhood or general knowledge and I forget to follow up with people after meetings etc.

I've always thought of it as having a good `situational memory`, it's interesting you say the same. I'm lucky I'm a dev, I'd be useless at anything else!

Writing things down. It's the ultimate hack.

Good memory doesn't scale at all organizationally, so a good memory is actually a liability, in a sense.

Reminds me of the old Chinese proverb that says “the faintest ink is more powerful than the strongest memory.”

Is that a broken link or is my browser broken? That opens to an empty Hacker News page for me.

I am having the same problem, not only for that thread but for all of the old threads. I already contacted HN about it, let's see.

The post was [dead] for some reason. I've unkilled it now.

Anyone who wants to see all the [dead] posts can turn "showdead" on in their profile. If you do that, just realize you're signing up to see all the crap that regular users don't see, like spam and troll posts and whatnot. There are also, unfortunately, legitimate posts that shouldn't be [dead]. If you see those, please vouch for them as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cvouch.

An IT manager in a company that is my client have extremely terrible memory. He is well aware of his shortcoming, ask people to remind him stuff they ask for and is important to them, and himself writes down in notebooks everything he need to follow through.

The guy is doing awesome job, pushing his department forward, he is very precise and meticulous and have years of experience in leading people and projects. He developed sharp instincts that enable him to make smart decisions regarding complex issues very fast, nevertheless he is very thoughtful and open listener and doesn't act as if he knows better than everyone else.

> If they didn't, they did the "if you are a fighter pilot with bad vision, get a wingman with good vision" and hired a number 2 or team lead who did.

A good friend of mine I made in college told me right when we first met, "I have a terrible memory. You're going to have to remember things for me, I just can't even remember people's names."

Brilliant programmer (and guitar player) as well. Every 2-3 years like clockwork, he messages me saying, "I think I'm getting prematurely senile/dementia, I just have trouble remembering things." Then I explain to him again, "OK, so one of the first things you told me was..."

> Of course he got it from the cemetery. The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible.

...

> (Note that the gravestone in question isn’t even for Eleanor Rigby herself but her grandfather; her name is further down, a detail).

So, in any case he didn't name the character after someone who died in the church, or was even buried there, but someone whose name appears there. Essentially, the connection is that the name Eleanor Rigby is engraved in a place where Paul McCartney has been before. The fact that he met Lennon there does not mean that the place is seared in his memory, it just means it's of historic importance to Beatles fans, which may be making this coincidence seem like something else.

I do not now the custom of that area or era, but I took that grave marker to be basically a family marker and they were all buried there.

That is clearly the case. It's almost certainly like the plot behind it and to the right -- not covered by dirt, but more like a buried mausoleum which is opened to add urns with the ashes of recently passed family members.

The names listed on the stone are the names of people buried there. Multiple people are buried in the same plot. Eleanor Rigby was buried there. The coincidence or non-coincidence is indeed of really low importance in the grand scheme of things, and says nothing about McCartney's "freakish memory".

It's more likely that he felt it was inappropriate to link the song to the grave which the song title derived from for his own personal reasons.

That's a weird article. The anecdote at the beginning has a big buildup then goes absolutely nowhere and the pattern keeps repeating.

>The idea that he coincidentally landed on the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ - for a song about a woman who “died in the church and was buried along with her name” - is wildly implausible.

... is it, though?

An exceptionally unusual line about names and burials and a fairly unusual name associated with a burial in one of the only churches the Beatles are likely to have spent much time hanging around?

(Throw in the fact that Lennon claimed to have written a lot of the song, which meant McCartney who disagreed with that claim had a lot of reason to make up an alternative story if he couldn't remember where the name or line came from...)

I passed a narrowboat called Eleanor with the location it's based in (Rugby) painted below the name (it's from the Aintree Beetle range too... ) a month or two back. If the owner told me he'd named his boat Eleanor because of a film star, and coincidentally decided to moor it at Rugby some time later, I wouldn't believe him :)

In my opinion it's not that impressive either way.

If he did remember it: Seems like it's very common for artists to take mental or physical notes of interesting things they see. He saw the name, associated it with the cemetery, then forgot that it was a real name and place.

If it's a coincidence: Tons of people are buried at churches, that's not unusual. There's a chance there's more than one Eleanor Rigby buried at a church.

In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word.

> In counterpoint, a recent 60 Minutes piece on Paul MacCartney showed him playing an impromptu concert in his local pub. While playing one of his old hits – I can't recall which one – he suddenly started to stumble and couldn't remember the lyrics. Fortunately the audience was signing along and knew every word.

I'm sure that the 80-year old Paul McCartney deserves a free pass when he misses a line or two from an impromptu song.

There's also the possibility that he's mixing up lyrics from earlier drafts/renditions of the song. But I think the key is understanding that a freakish memory does not mean that the person has insanely good recall regardless of the situation.

... or that it doesn't start to falter in your 80's

I saw him live in Montreal about 3 years ago and he played non-stop impeccably for 3 hours, dancing around stage, switching instruments, no break. I had to take a bathroom break. I'm pretty sure he's not faltering mentally yet…

One thing I've noticed about older people, and even myself (nowhere near 80).

They have much more uneven cognitive performance. There's just days where their thinking is crap.

I'm 43. I'm nearly as sharp as my peak as I was 20 years ago (and I have a lot more knowledge). But I can only access that "peak" on maybe a third of days now.

I saw him on tour in 1990 and he got lost in a Beatles song on stage and had a laugh about it. That’s said, everything I’ve read or seen about him points to him having an encyclopedic memory of songs.

Those slips - I'd assume - tend to occur with people who have very high trust in memory. Sometimes something gets messed up. Doesn't even have to be due to forgetting something but rather overmemorizing versions of a song getting entangled upon accessing them. People who don't trust their memory will rehearse more thoroughly.

He's done this multiple times - We Can Work It Out from Unplugged, for example. I think in some cases, it's semi-rehearsed. But not in all cases, certainly, and he can just roll with it apparently.

This sort of thing is sometimes an act. I recall a friend mentioning him (with his whole band) missing an entire verse to some song, only to confess the mistake and "correct" it at the end. Tomfoolery.

He is a godfather to a relative of mine and there was a wedding where we were not sure whether or not he would make an appearance.

Luckily he didn't. I say this because the wedding had the lucky couple as top billing and did not need to have the cameras focused on one of the guests. It was their special day, not his.

Everyone thinks that they know him, whereas he does not know them. This skews things and I think that it is this that gives the appearance of a 'freakish memory'. People project what they want onto him and have made up their minds about him already.

Those of us that write code know how hard it is. With Paul McCartney he can meet up with a friend, bang out some ditty in minutes and sell that by the bucketload. As much as I might mock 'The Frog Song' and such, I don't have the chops to do better. Yet compared to the effort to write code, I do not see 'The Frog Song' as in the same league of endeavour. I am not saying it is easy, but then I am.

Personality is a 'skill' and the likes of McCartney can hold a stage with an audience of thousands and no material. He can work that crowd, raise spirits and make everyone have a good time. These experiences are practically faith healing and, again, people read things like 'freakish memory' into this.

> I find this fascinating. The exact sequence of his writing process for the song [Eleanor Rigby] is probably irrecoverable now but I’d love to know precisely when he decided on the song’s theme of loneliness, death, and worship, and when the name ‘Eleanor Rigby’ bubbled up into his conscious mind [from a gravestone in a graveyard he and John used to walk through]. It’s almost as if his unconscious mind had been giving him prompts, first ‘Eleanor’, then ‘Rigby’ (hey, check that sign out!), like a stage magician guiding their mark towards a card while creating the illusion of a free choice.

It's not uncommon for writers to put things into their novels even they don't see. Readers and editors note what's there, and the writers can be surprised that it happened.

Sean Coyne talks about this several times on the Story Grid podcast, and it's on display in several of the episodes in which a writer's draft is examined.

Maybe the real story here is how the process of creating art taps into a part of the mind that it keeps hidden from itself, or at least doesn't expose without persuasion.

This is impressive, especially remembering all the exact lyrics after all those years, but hey, he's Paul McCartney!:)

I usually have decent memory for tunes: some I can sorta play at the 1st listen, others need a lot more time, not necessarily related to their difficulty, but nothing special. However the most accurate memory I have is for sounds, or actually how a song sounds in its whole: I have on some occasions guessed a song, artist and title, just by listening just one second of it, probably less, while for example a friend was quickly changing stations on the car radio. I have never been able to give an explanation of this, but happened a few times. Sometimes I guessed the wrong song but got correctly the artist and album, which reinforces the idea that I could have memorized the sounding (that album sound) rather than the song structure itself, which probably would have been meaningless when mentally decoding such a short sample.

No doubt that Paul has an amazing memory, above ordinary but I would put it at freakish level. There's quite a few people who remember events, people and music really well. Anybody whose a frequent writer would def report similar recalled names and events leaking from their subconscious into their work. Probably happens to all of us at some point.

Another issue is that there's an obviously selection bias. The article only picks up the amazing stuff (rightly so). If my friends went through my life and listed all the amazing genius moments I've remembered something obscure, you'd thing I'm a genius too. But what you wouldn't get is the 1000s of times I've forgotten stuff.

I'm not attacking the editor. They are doing what they are paid to do, and the article was fun to read, but bias is just something readers should be aware about.

The main thing I took away from this is how hard some things can seem to someone who has a casual acquaintance with the topic. This seems to be particularly true with regard to some acts of memorisation.

Lots of classical musicians can play a reasonably wide repertoire of complex and long pieces from memory. Is that freakish? Not really, and if you play an instrument you will soon find yourself being able to remember long stretches of the music you play without much effort - people say 'it's in the fingers'.

Almost everyone "smart" has a really good memory. Turns out it's a lot easier to think of things when you have everything in RAM instead of tape storage.

Ironically beatles famously used an analog tape-based predecessor to synthesizers in "Strawberry Fields".

Boy the evidence in this article is pretty thin.

I often come up with numerical sequences also involving letters. Like RLT237-b, something like that. Sometimes I'll track down what those mean, and very frequently turn up a toy I had when I was 4, or a window code in the back of an International Harvester. Stuff is down there for all of us, it's just a matter of how to summon it.

For all his 'great memory' anecdotes (and I've read others too), we can also see that... he may not always be correct. Anthology series showed Paul, George and Ringo recounting stories that contradicted each other (Elvis meeting in particular).

That just means George and Ringo were wrong :-)

I don't get it. Please explain. Is it the weird dollar sign on the stone?

That's an IHS with the letters imposed on one another. It's short for 'ihsous', Greek for Jesus.

Fun fact: the actual "dollar" sign is actually a P and an S superimposed, as it's actually a symbol for "peso".

The superimposed IHS: https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/ihs-ancient-medieval-chri...

And actually the dollar sign started out as two pillars with ribbon banners wrapped around them in an S shape, not as a P-S.

Given the context, I think that says "IHS". There are a variety of IHS symbols, some can be confused as a dollar sign.

https://cemeteries.wordpress.com/2006/08/23/ihs/

If you examine anybody's life, you will probably come up with 'coincidences' like that. Because we all have associations we're not aware of, or at least not aware where they came from.

My lone amazing skill was I could sometimes grab a handful of quarters and have exactly $10. I rolled a lot of coins when I worked for my uncle's coin-op arcade game business in the 80s.

That the Beatles were astoundingly, uniquely talented actually became fodder for right wing conspiracy theories [1]. I remember a relative in 1974 asking rhetorically how four uneducated working class men could produce music of musical genius. The actual story is the Beatles had a remarkable series of musical opportunities, from the background described here to studying with some of the Greatest American Rock and Rolls to endless performance in their first gigs.

[1] https://publicseminar.org/essays/was-theodor-adorno-the-fift...

The topic of the Beatles is one of those where the more you learn about it, the more uncanny and mysterious it becomes.

Yeah, but survivorship bias is a big thing as well. There are a number of "relatively uneducated folks" who generated significant catalogues: the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, ... The writers at the Brill Building generated gobs of hits and none of them were musicologists as I recall. In the case of the Beatles, they were coupled to a producer who was musically trained, had an ear for comedy and was willing with his engineers to push the technology quite hard.

We don't remember or even hear about the also rans and nearly made it's, so we can't really judge how rare the Beatles talent was vs. how rare their opportunity was (and how they jumped on it). Certainly did the 10K hours of training and continually advanced. They also had the advantage of doing it first so there was (far?) less of a minimum-standard they had to exceed.

https://youtu.be/Sd4NstnaEk8

https://youtu.be/ZQS91wVdvYc

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/39381

N.B. the speaker in the first linked video was a member of the Hollies, which happened to be the second best-selling band of the 1960's in the U.K.

Even he found the Beatles beyond understanding.

Sometimes in life the whole turns out to be greater than the sum of the parts.

It's a version of the anthropic principle at work. For us to be having this conversation, the Beatles need to be uncanny

In 2007, he told us his memory was almost full.... Yet in 2022, here we are, it's still seemingly got room for a bit more.

rhyme and rhythm are linguistic information compression mechanisms

MARWOOD: Even a stopped clock gives the right time, twice a day.

Related to his vegetarian lifestyle?

where is freakish memory evident? (and i did read it)

Does he drink?

It sounds like he had a short stint with over-drinking but got it in control before it got out of hand: https://www.nova.ie/paul-mccartney-cuts-booze-beating-alcoho...

So much of what is described matches perfectly my experience with having ADHD. It’s less about having an insanely good memory and more about being able to find connections where others don’t normally see them, completely subconsciously.

Plus the “homework while doing TV and remembering both perfectly,” etc.

I would bet many dollars Paul McCartney has ADHD. :)

Observe a trivia night focused on a specific TV Show (like Simpsons or Seinfeld trivia) and you'll see this phenomena en masse. People make connections based on plotlines, celebrity guest stars, or even head writers on episodes and then can drill down to a precise line of dialogue or gag.

The same thing happens with die-hard sports fans. You ask "Who was the rookie points leader on the 05-06 Toronto Maple Leafs?" and a sports nut can start piecing together how the team did that year, who was on their roster, and finally derive an educated guess.

For sure! One of the hallmarks in how ADHD often presents is also hyperfocus on things they’re particularly interested in, which also exists in non-ADHD folks sometimes of course. Paul was clearly curious about everything, and hyperfocused on a few things (music). Get Back is a great thing to watch to see this in action; his brain flies from idea to idea, until he lands on one he is imminently curious about and then that’s all he talks or thinks about for hours.

It's not so much hyperfocus as the inability of the executive function to unswitch

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