Moonwalking with Einstein
parts of the brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were
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Moonwalking with Einstein the art and science of remembering everything
parts of the brain were lighting up when the mental athletes were memorizing, they found that they were activating entirely different circuitry. According to the functional MRIs, regions of the brain that were less active in the control subjects seemed to be working in overdrive for the mental athletes. Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes of snowflakes? Maguire and her team asked the mental athletes to describe exactly what was going through their minds as they memorized. The mental athletes recounted a strategy that sounded almost exactly like what S claimed had been happening in his brain. Even though they were not innate synesthetes like S, the mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys. Unlike S, they weren’t doing this automatically, or because it was an inborn talent they’d nurtured since childhood. Rather, the unexpected patterns of neural activity that Maguire’s fMRIs turned up were the result of training and practice. The mental athletes had taught themselves to remember like S. I found myself fascinated by Ed and his quiet friend Lukas, and this formidable-sounding project of theirs to push their memories as hard and as far as they possibly could. And they likewise seemed fascinated with me, a journalist of roughly the same age, who might share their story in some magazine they’d never heard of, and perhaps jump-start their careers as mnemonic celebrities. After Ed’s lecture at the high school, he invited me to follow him and Lukas to a nearby bar, where we met up with an aspiring filmmaker and old boarding school chum of Ed’s who had been trailing them around New York with an 8-mm video camera, documenting their every antic adventure, including Lukas’s attempt to memorize a deck of playing cards on the fiftythree-second elevator ride to the Empire State Building’s observation deck. (“We wanted to see if the fastest lift in the world was faster than the Austrian speed cards champion,” Ed deadpanned. “It wasn’t.”) After a few drinks, Ed was keen to carry me deeper into the obscure underworld of mental athletic secrets. He offered to introduce me to the rituals of the KL7, a “secret society of memorizers” that he and Lukas cofounded at the Kuala Lumpur championships in 2003, and which, evidently, was not so secret. “KL, as in Kuala Lumpur?” I asked. “No, KL as in Knights of Learning, and the seven is because it started with seven of us,” Lukas explained, while sipping one of the three free beers he had just won by memorizing a deck of cards for the waitress. “It’s an international society for the development of education.” “Membership in our society is an extraordinarily high honor,” Ed added. Though the club’s endowment of more than a thousand dollars languishes in Lukas’s bank account, Ed conceded that the KL7 has never actually done much of anything, except get drunk together the evening after memory contests (occasionally aided by a sophisticated pressurized keg attachment designed by Lukas that folds up into a suitcase). When I pressed Ed for more information, he offered to demonstrate the society’s single cherished ceremony. “Just call it a satanic ritual,” he said, and then asked Jonny, his documentarian, to set a timer on his wristwatch. “We each have exactly five minutes to drink two beers, kiss three women, and memorize forty-nine random digits. Why forty-nine digits? It’s seven squared.” “I was surprised to discover that this is actually quite difficult,” said Lukas. He was wearing a shiny charcoal suit and a shinier tie, and had no trouble convincing the waitress, whom he’d already won over, to give him three pecks on the cheek. “Technically that’s unsatisfactory, but we’ll count it,” Ed proclaimed, a rivulet of beer running down his chin. From his pocket he pulled out a page of printed numbers and tore it into sections. His finger raced across the scrap until it got to the forty-ninth digit, at which point he stood up and sputtered, “Almost done!” and then limped over to a nearby booth, where he tried to explain his predicament to three silver-haired women who seemed far too old to be enjoying this loud bar. With time running out, and before they could respond to his plea, he had leaned across the table and planted his lips on each of their sunken, flustered cheeks. Ed returned triumphantly, pumping his fist and soliciting high fives from all of us. He ordered another round for the table. I didn’t know quite what to make of Ed. He was, I was gradually discovering, an aesthete, in the true Oscar Wilde sense. More than anyone I’d ever met, he seemed to participate in life as if it were art, and to practice a studied, careful carefreeness. His sense of what is worthy seemed to overlap very little with any conventional sense of what is useful, and if there were one precept that could be said to govern his life, it is that one’s highest calling is to engage in enriching escapades at every turn. He was a genuine bon vivant, and yet he approached the subject of his PhD research, the relationship between memory and perception, with a rigor and seriousness that suggested he intended to accomplish big things. He was in no conventional sense handsome, and yet later that night, I watched him approach a woman in the street, ask for a cigarette, and a few minutes later walk away reciting her phone number. His “normal bar trick,” he told me, involves shimmying up to a young lady and inviting her to create an “arbitrarily long number,” and then promising to buy her a bottle of champagne should he successfully remember it. Over the course of the evening, Ed regaled me with story after story of his adventures and instructive misadventures. There was the time he threw his shoeless self through the window of a bar in New Zealand in order to circumvent a bouncer. The time he crashed a supermodel’s party in London. (“It was easier then, I was in a wheelchair, and I could do a superior wheelie.”) The time he crashed a party at the British embassy in Paris. (“I noticed the ambassador following my dirty shoes all the way across the room.”) And how could he forget the twelve hours he spent panhandling for bus fare in downtown Los Angeles? At the time, I may have sounded a note of skepticism about these self- mythologizing stories, but that was only because I didn’t yet know Ed well enough to recognize that he very well could have been understating their outrageousness. A few more drinks into the evening, it dawned on me that I’d spent the better part of the day with Ed and Lukas and neither of them had once called me by my name, though I was sure I’d told it to them when I first introduced myself. Ed had referred to me in front of the waitress as “our journalist friend,” and Lukas just hadn’t referred to me. These were evasions I knew well. But Ed had assured me earlier in the day that he could memorize the name and phone number of every girl he ever met. I thought that sounded like the kind of impressive skill that was bound to take one far in life. Bill Clinton is supposed to never forget a name and, well, look where that got him. But it occurred to me now that Ed’s “could” was a bit ambiguous, and might have been of the same nature as “He could count backward from a million”—as in, yeah, if he really wanted to. I asked Ed if he remembered my name. “Of course. It’s Josh.” “My last name?” “Shit. Did you tell it to me?” “Yes, Foer. Josh Foer. You’re human after all.” “Ah, well—” “I thought you were supposed to have a fancy technique for remembering people’s names.” “In theory, I do. But its utility is inversely proportional to the amount of alcohol I’ve imbibed.” Ed then explained to me his procedure for making a name memorable, which he had used in the competition to memorize the first and last names associated with ninety-nine different photographic head shots in the names-and-faces event. It was a technique he promised I could use to remember people’s names at parties and meetings. “The trick is actually deceptively simple,” he said. “It is always to associate the sound of a person’s name with something you can clearly imagine. It’s all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person’s face to a visual memory connected to the person’s name. When you need to reach back and remember the person’s name at some later date, the image you created will simply pop back into your mind ... So, hmm, you said your name was Josh Foer, eh?” He raised an eyebrow and gave his chin a melodramatic stroke. “Well, I’d imagine you joshing me where we first met, outside the competition hall, and I’d imagine myself breaking into four pieces in response. Four/Foer, get it? That little image is more entertaining—to me, at least—than your mere name, and should stick nicely in the mind.” It occurred to me that this was a kind of manufactured synesthesia. To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the “Baker/baker paradox.” The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering. When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work. The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. (When a word feels like it’s stuck on the tip of the tongue, it’s likely because we’re accessing only part of the neural network that “contains” the idea, but not all of it.) But when it comes to the man’s profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in. Even if you don’t at first remember that the man is a baker, perhaps you get some vague sense of breadiness about him, or see some association between his face and a big white hat, or maybe you conjure up a memory of your own neighborhood bakery. There are any number of knots in that tangle of associations that can be traced back to his profession. The secret to success in the names-and-faces event—and to remembering people’s names in the real world—is simply to turn Bakers into bakers—or Foers into fours. Or Reagans into ray guns. It’s a simple trick, but highly effective. I tried using the technique myself to remember the name of the documentary filmmaker who had been trailing Ed and Lukas around town all week. He introduced himself as Jonny Lowndes. “We call him Pounds Lowndes,” Ed interjected. “He used to be heavyset in high school.” Since my older brother’s childhood nickname was Jonny, I closed my eyes and pictured the two of them together, arm in arm, gobbling up a pound cake. “You know we could teach you more tricks like that,” Ed said. He turned to Lukas ebulliently. “I’m trying to think if by the end of the night we could have him winning the American championship?” “I get the sense that you hold the Americans in rather low esteem,” I said. “On the contrary, they just haven’t had the right coach,” he said, turning back to me. “I reckon you could win the championship next year with an hour’s practice a day.” He looked to Lukas. “Don’t you think that’s right?” Lukas nodded. “You and Tony Buzan both,” I said. “Ah, yes, the estimable Tony Buzan,” Ed scoffed. “Did he try to sell you that nonsense about the brain being a muscle?” “Um, yes, he did.” “Anyone who knows the first thing about the respective characteristics of brains and muscles knows how risible that analogy is.” It was my first hint of Ed’s tortured relationship with Buzan. “Look, what you really need to do is bring me on as your coach, trainer, and manager—and, um, spiritual yogi.” “And what would you get out of this relationship?” I asked. “I’d get pleasure,” he responded with a smile. “Also, you being a journalist, I wouldn’t mind if, in the course of your writing about this experience, you managed to give the impression that I would be an excellent person to have tutoring your daughter in the Hamptons at, like, a squillion quid an hour.” I laughed and told Ed that I’d give it some thought. I honestly wasn’t that interested in spending an hour a day pawing through playing cards, or memorizing pages of random numbers, or doing any of the other mental calisthenics that seemed to be involved in becoming a “mental athlete.” I have always embraced my own nerdiness—I was captain of my high school quiz bowl team and have long worn a watch with calculator functions —but this was a bit much even for me. And yet I was curious enough about learning where the limits of my memory lay, and intrigued enough by Ed, to consider this exercise. All the mental athletes I’d met had insisted that anyone was capable of improving his or her memory—that the untapped powers of S are inside all of us. I decided I was going to try to find out if that was really true. That night, when I got home, there was a short e-mail from Ed waiting in my in-box: “So, anyway, can I be your coach?” THREE THE EXPERT EXPERT T hough it’s best not to be born a chicken at all, it is especially bad luck to be born a cockerel. From the perspective of the poultry farmer, male chickens are useless. They can’t lay eggs, their meat is stringy, and they’re ornery to the hens that do all the hard work of putting food on our tables. Commercial hatcheries tend to treat male chicks like fabric cutoffs or scrap metal: the wasteful but necessary by-product of an industrial process. The sooner they can be disposed of—often they’re ground into animal feed—the better. But a costly problem has vexed egg farmers for millennia: It’s virtually impossible to tell the difference between male and female chickens until they’re four to six weeks old, when they begin to grow distinctive feathers and secondary sex characteristics like the rooster’s comb. Until then, they’re all just indistinguishable fluff balls that have to be housed and fed—at considerable expense. Somehow it took until the 1920s before anyone figured out a solution to this costly dilemma. The momentous discovery was made by a group of Japanese veterinary scientists, who realized that just inside the chick’s rear end there is a constellation of folds, marks, spots, and bumps that to the untrained eye appear arbitrary, but when properly read, can divulge the sex of a day-old bird. When this discovery was unveiled at the 1927 World Poultry Congress in Ottawa, it revolutionized the global hatchery industry and eventually lowered the price of eggs worldwide. The professional chicken sexer, equipped with a skill that took years to master, became one of the most valuable workers in agriculture. The best of the best were graduates of the two-year Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School, whose standards were so rigorous that only 5 to 10 percent of students received accreditation. But those who did graduate earned as much as five hundred dollars a day and were shuttled around the world from hatchery to hatchery like top-flight business consultants. A diaspora of Japanese chicken sexers spilled across the globe. Chicken sexing is a delicate art, requiring Zen-like concentration and a brain surgeon’s dexterity. The bird is cradled in the left hand and given a gentle squeeze that causes it to evacuate its intestines (too tight and the intestines will turn inside out, killing the bird and rendering its gender irrelevant). With his thumb and forefinger, the sexer flips the bird over and Download 1.37 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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