Becoming an expert rememberer

K.Anders Ericsson is a psychologist who has studied what it takes to become an expert at almost any skill from chess player to musician. Based on his decades of research he has shown over and over that experts are made and not born. Expertise is largely the result of a huge amount of carefully designed learning, training, practice. Learning to remember and become an expert at it is just another skill that any of us can learn to do extraordinarily well. Joshua Foer wrote an article on this topic in the New York Times Magazine section entitled “Secrets of a Mind-Gamer. Not only did he study ‘experts’ at remembering he trained himself to join them in memory competitions. He got to be pretty good at it and was helped in honing his memory skills in the laboratory of K. Anders Ericsson. At the same time he became a subject worthy of study in that laboratory. Foer became good enough at learning the skills necessary to remember loads of rapidly presented information that he too competed in the annual U.S.A. Memory Championship. There is no shortage of books on tricks for improving memory (including Ericsson’s ‘Skilled Memory Theory’ but the missing ingredient is most frequently hard and sustained work.

It should be pointed out that even without practice our memory is remarkably good, far better than we think it is. For example a classic memory experiment performed a quarter of a century ago attests to our terrific untrained memory ability. Normal volunteers were asked to look at 10, 000 images just once and for only 5 seconds each. Obviously it took days to expose the subjects to all of these images. Many days afterwards subjects looked at loads of pairs of images where one of each pair had been seen before while the other was a new image. Subjects were able to correctly remember over 80% of the previously seen images. That is amazing. Now add some memory training on top of what we can do normally and you end up with a super rememberer and that can be you.