Tag: Memory

[Link] We are what we remember

..there is a physical connection between memory and imagination. “The process that gives us vivid memories is the same as the one that we use to imagine the future.” We use the same parts of the brain when we immerse ourselves in an event from our past as we do when we create a vision for our future. Thus, one of the conclusions of Adventures in Memory is that “as far as our brains are concerned, the past and future are almost the same.”

Fascinating reading from the book Adventures in Memory. Discovered on Farnam Street blog.

Going back in time – @jobsworth took me down memory lane [Article]

+JP Rangaswami has a way with words, and especially when using history as a guide to the future. This post reminded me of my childhood-  when the medication for almost all ills could be found without the need for a prescription:

 Stomach ache? A spoonful of omum water. Sore throat? Gargle with warm salt water. Cough and cold? Vicks Vaporub, with or without head-under-covers steam session, depending on how chesty the cough was. Cough continues? Vasaka syrup. Really bad? Benadryl. Fever? Blankets and rest. Sweat it out. 

This post is not about that though. JP cuts to the quintessence of the conversation that is called “market”, the need for generic rather than the brand.

Can anyone learn to be a master memorizer? [Video]

In his TED talk on memory, Joshua Foer takes the audience through an evocative image that he paints, & then shares his transformation from a science writer covering the US memory championships to becoming a contestant. Training, he reckons, can make anyone into a master memorizer.  He shares a few ideas with the audience too.

Ayumu’s photographic memory & recall [Article, Video]

Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny were awarded the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (If you’re interested in their research paper, click here for a pdf document). A recent essay by de Waal in the WSJ, called the “Brains of the Animal Kingdom” begins thus:

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece….

 If nothing, watch the video of Ayumu for a demonstration of his photographic memory!