Hacker News Reader

Comment by mashmac2 | Hacker News Reader

2007 USA Memory Champ from the high school division here-

Yes, it's very difficult to become a national champion (or be competitive at that level). However, these skills really do help in real life at a much less intense level - grocery lists, names and faces, cough card counting... lots of practical applications.

View on HN

Can you apply it to mathematical formulae et al. as well?

I'd also like to know this, though I imagine it's possible. I've been thinking about what sort of things I'd like to remember with these methods, and I feel that the Periodic Table would be a good, fun place to start.

Absolutely. I used a rhythm mnemonic in middle school to remember pi to 106 digits in middle school, and that was the day of the quiz (it was extra credit in... geometry for some reason). Actually the more you practice these techniques on completely ordinary and mundane things, the easier it becomes when attempting formulae, tables, and graphs. Saving your memory for "important things" will only deprive you of essentially free practice. The periodic table is actually a good place to start as long as you don't overwhelm yourself, so for example start with the names of the elements in order, then the numbers will associate, and you can keep building with recursion. OR you could begin with smaller blocks if you're more comfortable absorbing a lot of different information at once, which can sometimes work much better.

Have you ever counted cards properly, and if so did memory tricks actually help? I can only imagine it complicating what are frankly easy-to-remember tasks.

Card counting in the blackjack sense, not really. That's just reading the cards and adjusting.

That being said, in other games it can be very helpful - remembering poker hands, etc...

Thanks for sharing! I'd be interested to know how it carriers over to other parts of your professional life if you program as well.

Not as much as I'd like, really. The events at the memory championship are geared towards short-term (not short-term memory, but < 1 hours between memory and recall). Additionally, some events occur twice (random cards, for example) back-to-back; you have to compete, then forget that set and build another memory palace with the new deck.

Great to remember groceries, not so good to remember the parameters for that function you created yesterday.

@mashmac2 is the memory of large volumes of information, plastic?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com