Memorization Skills

I found an interesting article in the New York Times a few days ago called Secrets of a Mind Gamer. I found the article intriguing because I've been told I have a good memory. I have a distinct memory from my childhood of sitting in my grandfather's office one lazy afternoon while my grandfather taught me how to memorize. I think I had somehow finagled my way out of naptime that day and my grandfather promised my grandmother that he would keep me quiet. So I was tasked to memorize the Apostle's Creed, all 12 lines of it, by dinnertime. He instructed me to memorize it line by line. Memorize the first line until I knew it. Then read the 1st and 2nd line and be able to recite that. Then the 1st, 2nd and 3rd line and so on. I'm pretty sure I got a pre-dinner cookie out of the deal too. Bonus!

As I grew up, I learned that my memorization skills were not only useful, but not necessarily common. I can learn new katas at the dojo in three or four repetitions. I could perform a 7 minute speech from memory after 2 or 3 practices (I suppose not counting the act of writing the speech to begin with). I had plenty of other skills I needed to concentrate on with public speaking so it was a bit of a relief that I didn't really need to work on my memorization skills on top of it.

But back to the article in question. The author is himself a memory champion, having memorized the order of a deck of cards in 1 minute and 40 seconds, a US record at the time. The interesting part is that he didn't start off as a memory prodigy to begin with; he trained himself to become a champion.

From the article, I learned that the human brain is better equipped to remember things spatially and visually than numbers and words. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to know which plants to eat, which was the correct way home instead of logins and passwords for a myriad different websites. Using this knowledge, memory champions train themselves to attach a sequence of cards or numbers or words to odd combinations of visuals and imagine themselves walking through those visuals as if situated in a memory palace. Perhaps the five of clubs becomes a bear juggling spoons in the foyer, and behind it is a crab playing hopscotch in the living room (Queen of spades), meanwhile a herd of buffalo stampedes in the fireplace (King of diamonds) behind them and so forth. To recall the associated information, they only need to visualize their walk through their very strange palace and pull the attached information.

I thought it was an interesting methodology for memorization and completely unlike the one I was taught. But upon looking at it more closely, perhaps I am engaging the visual part of my brain when I recall things. When I memorize words, I'm envisioning reading them off of the paper or screenshot in my mind. When I memorize katas, I'm also engaging some muscle memory, so I guess that's spatial memory. Memorizing stories is probably the closest to the technique described above since I'm envisioning the movie of the story playing out in my mind. Nifty! I want to try out the picturesque memorization to see if that's faster or better or something. At the very least it should be entertaining coming up with absurd images to go along with more mundane things like numbers.