Marlys’s psychology teacher at Bellerbys College is none other than James Paterson, the boyish- looking Welshman who just happens to be a rising fi gure in world memory competitions.24
When teachers at Bellerbys fi ll out the paperwork to take students on fi eld trips, it’s typically to a lecture at the Saïd Business School, or perhaps to the Ashmolean Museum or Bodleian Library in Oxford. Not so with James. His paperwork will more likely seek approval to take students to any of half a dozen different cafés around town, comfortable settings where they can tap into their imaginations and construct their mnemonic schemes. In order for the students to nail all thirty-fi ve essays securely in memory, they divide the topics into several groupings. For one group they build memory palaces in cafés and at familiar locations around the Bellerbys campus. For another group they use the peg method. Still other groups they link to imagery in favorite songs and movies.
We should make one important point, though. Before Paterson takes students on their mnemonic outings to construct memory palaces, he has already thoroughly covered the material in class so that they understand it.
Among Paterson’s former students who have graduated from Bellerbys and gone on to use the technique at university is Michela Seong- Hyun Kim, who described for us how she prepares for her university- level exams in psychology. First, she pulls together all her material from lecture slides, her outside reading, and her notes. She reduces this material to key ideas— not whole sentences. These form the plan for her essay. Next she selects the site for her memory palace. She ties each key idea to a location in the palace that she can visualize
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in her mind’s eye. Then she populates each location with something crazy that will link her to one of the key ideas.
When she sits in the exam hall and fi nds out the essay topics, she takes ten minutes to mentally walk through the relevant memory palaces and list the key ideas for each essay. If she’s forgotten a point, she moves on to the next one and fi lls in the blank later. Once the plan is sketched out, she sets to work, free of the stressful anxiety that she won’t remember what she’s learned under the pressure of getting it right.25 What she does is not so different from what Mark Twain did when he used sketches to remember his speeches.
Michela says that the idea of skipping a bullet point that she cannot remember but will fi ll in later would have been completely alien to her before learning to use mnemonics, but the techniques have given her the confi dence to do this, knowing that the content will come to mind momentarily. The memory palace serves not as a learning tool but as a method to or ga nize what’s already been learned so as to be readily retrievable at essay time. This is a key point and helps to overcome the typical criticism that mnemonics are only useful in rote memorization. To the contrary, when used properly, mnemonics can help or ga nize large bodies of knowledge to permit their ready retrieval. Michela’s confi dence that she can pull up what she knows when she needs it is a huge stress buster and a time saver, James says.
It’s worth acknowledging that Krispy Kreme and Starbuck’s shops are not often called palaces, but the mind is capable of wondrous things.
At Paterson’s fi rst World Memory Championships, that rookie year of 2006, he acquitted himself well by placing twelfth, narrowly edging out the American Joshua Foer, who later
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published an account of his experiences with mnemonics in the book Moonwalking with Einstein. Paterson can memorize the sequence of playing cards in a shuffl ed deck in less than two minutes, hand you the deck, and then recite them back to you with his eyes closed. Give him an hour, and he will memorize ten or twelve decks and recite them back without error.
Top champs can memorize a single deck in thirty seconds or less and upward of twenty- fi ve decks in an hour, so Paterson has a ways to go, but he’s a dedicated competitor and coming on strong, building his skills and memory tools. For example, just as the peg method involves memorizing an image for the digits 1 through 10 (1 is bun, 2 is shoe, etc.), in order to remember much longer strings of digits, Paterson has committed to memory a unique image for every numeral from 0 to 1,000. This kind of achievement takes long hours of practice and intense focus— the kind of solitary striving that Anders Ericsson tells us characterizes the acquisition of expertise. The thousand images locked into memory took Paterson a year to master, fi tted in between the other demands of family, work, and friends.
We caught up with Paterson in a school offi ce and asked if he’d mind giving us a quick memory demonstration, to which he readily agreed. We recited, once, the random number string 615392611333517. Paterson listened closely and then said,
“Okay. We’ll use this space.” He looked around at the fi xtures.
“I see this water cooler here becoming the space shuttle, which is taking off just as an underground train comes shooting out the bottom of the cooler. In the bookshelves there behind the cooler, I see the rapper Eminem having a gunfi ght with Leslie Nielsen from Naked Gun, while Lieutenant Columbo looks down on them.”26
How to make sense of this? He remembers digits in groups of three. Every three- digit number is a distinct image. For
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example, the number 615 is always a space shuttle, 392 is always the Embankment tube station in London, 611 is Leslie Nielsen, 333 is Eminem, and 517 is Lieutenant Columbo. To make sense of these images, you need to understand another, underlying mnemonic: for each numeral 0 through 9, James has associated a sound of speech. The numeral 6 is always a Sheh or Jeh sound, the 1 is always a Tuh or Duh sound, and 5
is an L sound. So the image for the number 615 is Sheh Tuh L, or shuttle. Virtually every three- digit number from 000 to 999 lives in Paterson’s mind as a unique image that is an embodiment of these sounds. For our spontaneous quiz, for example, he drew on these images in addition to the space shuttle:
392 3
= m, 9 = b, 2 = n
e mb ankme n t
611 6
= sh, 1 = t, 1 = t
sh ootou t
333 3
= m, 3 = m, 3 = m
Em ine m
517 5
= l, 1 = t, 7 = c
Lt C olumbo
In the memory championship event of spoken numbers, which are read aloud to contestants at the rate of one per second, Paterson can memorize and recite back seventy- four without error, and, with much practice, he’s raising that count.
(“My wife calls herself a memory widow.”) Without mnemonic tools, the maximum number of digits most people can hold in working memory is about seven. That is why local telephone numbers were designed to be no more than seven digits long. By the way, at the time of this writing the world record in spoken digits—what psychologists call memory span—is 364 digits (held by Johannes Mallow of Germany).
James is quick to acknowledge that he was fi rst drawn to mnemonics as a shortcut for his studies. “Not the best of mo-
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tives,” he admits. He taught himself the techniques and became a bit of a slacker, walking into exams knowing he had all the names, dates, and related facts readily at hand.
What he didn’t have, he discovered, was mastery of the concepts, relationships, and underlying principles. He had the mountaintops but not the mountain range, valleys, rivers, or the fl ora and fauna that compose the fi lled- in picture that constitutes knowledge.
Mnemonic devices are sometimes discounted as tricks of memory, not tools that fundamentally add to learning, and in a sense this is correct. The value of mnemonics to raise intellectual abilities comes after mastery of new material, as the students at Bellerbys are using them: as handy mental pockets for fi ling what they’ve learned, and linking the main ideas in each pocket to vivid memory cues so that they can readily bring them to mind and retrieve the associated concepts and details, in depth, at the unexpected moments that the need arises.
When Matt Brown, the jet pi lot, describes his hours on the fl ight deck of a simulator drilling on the rhythm of the different hand movements required by potential emergencies, he reenacts distinct patterns he’s memorized for different contingencies, choreographies of eye and hand, where the correct and complete sequence of instruments and switches is para-mount. Each different choreography is a mnemonic for a corrective maneuver.
Karen Kim is a virtuoso violinist. When we spoke with her, Kim was second violin in the world- renowned string ensemble Parker Quartet, who play much of their material from memory, a rarity in classical music. Second violin is often largely accompanimental, and the mnemonic for memorizing the harmonies is the main melodic theme. “You sing the melody in your head,” Kim says, “and you know that when the
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melody goes to this place, you change harmony.” 27 The harmonies of some works, like fugues, with up to four themes that pass around the group in intricate ways, are especially challenging to memorize. “You need to know that while I’m playing the second theme, you’re playing the fi rst. Memorizing the fugues is very diffi cult. I need to learn everybody else’s part better. Then I start to recognize patterns that I maybe knew intellectually before, but I wasn’t listening out for them.
Memorizing the harmonies is a big part of knowing the architecture of the piece, the map of it.” When the quartet is mastering a new piece, they spend a lot of time playing through things slowly without the sheet music, and then gradually speeding it up. Think Vince Dooley gradually synchronizing the different positions on the Georgia Bulldogs football team as they tailor their plays to take on a new Saturday night opponent. Or the neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold, examining a gunshot victim in the emergency room and methodically rehearsing what he’s likely to encounter in a brain surgery that he’s about to perform.
Seeing the pattern of physical movements as a kind of choreography, visualizing a complex melody as it is handed off like a football from one player to another, “seeing the map of it”: all are mnemonic cues to memory and per for mance.
With continued retrieval, complex material can become second nature to a person and the mnemonic cues are no longer needed: you consolidate concepts like Newton’s 3 laws of motion into mental models that you use as a kind of short-hand. Through repeated use, your brain encodes and “chunks”
sequences of motor and cognitive actions, and your ability to recall and apply them becomes as automatic as habit.
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The Takeaway
It comes down to the simple but no less profound truth that effortful learning changes the brain, building new connections and capability. This single fact— that our intellectual abilities are not fi xed from birth but are, to a considerable degree, ours to shape— is a resounding answer to the nagging voice that too often asks us “Why bother?” We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities.
