Memory
How
to avoid losing your memory in the digital age
With
Google taking the place of memory, many worry that a vital faculty is
eroding. Can memory athletes – who can retain hundreds of numbers
in seconds – show us how to get it back?
Daniel
Lavelle
Tue
13 Nov 2018 07.00 GMT
Alex
Mullen has an extraordinary talent: after just 16 seconds of flicking
through a pack of cards, he can recall their exact order. The
26-year-old medical student began using memory techniques to help
with his university degree, but he picked them up so
quickly that soon he was entering competitions, eventually becoming
the International Association of Memory world champion in 2015. At
the championships, which take place again this December, “memory
athletes” compete to remember the most in the shortest time, in
categories that include card sequences, names, faces and dates of
historic events.
“My
first world championships win was very surreal. I was training hard,
but winning was never really on my radar,” Mullen says. “When I
won by literally one second, on the tenth and final event, I didn’t
really process it.” Yet he went on to win the championships again
in 2017, is ranked No 1 in the world and holds multiple records for
his recall skills.
People
like Mullen raise important questions in a world where digital
databases, whose powers of retention are far greater than our own,
are increasingly standing in for human memories. If we no longer need
to keep a mental note of facts, figures or dates, might we lose our
ability to retain information?
We
know that the brain is malleable. A study in 2000 showed that the
hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays an important role in
memory, was larger in London cab drivers than in the wider public,
perhaps because they had to learn and retain the “knowledge” –
the quickest routes through the capital’s streets.
Emma
Ward, a senior lecturer in psychology at Middlesex University, says
that the internet hasn’t been an integral part of our lives for
long enough for scientists to fully comprehend its long-term effect
on people’s brains. She adds: “There is evidence that memory
training is beneficial – and the very idea behind this is
practice and rehearsal, so that neural pathways become
strengthened.
Rehearsal: a
time when people practise a play, dance, etc. in order to prepare for
a performance
“One
may argue that the more we become reliant on memory aids and
technology as reminders, the less efficient our memory processes
become. It will be interesting, in years to come, to examine children
who grew up with such available technology, to see the effect it has
upon memory and cognition.”
Dean
Burnett, a neuroscientist and author, believes that memory needs to
be exercised. “It is a biological function, like most others, and
so not using it would mean it’s less robust and less reliable than
in someone who uses it often,” he says. “Memories are essentially
connections between neurons, and it is widely agreed that, to keep
these connections intact, they have to be ‘activated’ regularly.
Retrieving a memory activates it.” Yet he cautions against
the idea that we are “losing” our memories because we have
outsourced them: “It’s not that they fade away, degrade or
anything like that; it’s just that our brains struggle to find them
if they are seldom used.”
Retrieving: to
find and bring back something
Fade away: to
slowly disappear, lose importance, or become weaker
Technology
may affect us in more subtle ways, Ward believes. She cites a
study in which participants who were shown a faked photo of
themselves as children in hot-air balloons later “recalled” the
nonexistent event. “Memories are not like filing cabinets,” she
says. “Our brains adapt a lot of what we experience so that we can
make sense of the world around us, and our memories are quite often
representations or distortions of reality. Being bombarded with vast
amounts of information and photos online may create what we call
false memories.”
Being
able to capture your holiday entirely on a smartphone is convenient,
for instance, but experiments have suggested that if you are doing
this, you are not paying attention to your environment. If you are
distracted, neural pathways in the brain are not being exercised in a
way that would strengthen the memory, leaving it vulnerable to
distortion.
Being
able to capture your holiday entirely on a smartphone is convenient,
for instance, but experiments have suggested that if you are doing
this, you are not paying attention to your environment. If you are
distracted, neural pathways in the brain are not being exercised in a
way that would strengthen the memory, leaving it vulnerable to
distortion.
It
is not all bad news when it comes to our reliance on Google and co,
though. Other studies have shown it could benefit short-term memory
and problem-solving. Gary Small, a professor of psychiatry and
biobehavioural sciences at UCLA, compared the brains of “internet
naive” and “internet savvy” older adults and
found that neural activity increased among the naive group after they
had spent a week searching for things online. “We saw significant
increases, particularly in the frontal lobe – the thinking brain,
the part of the brain that controls working memory.”
Naive: If
someone is naive, they believe things too easily and do not have
enough experience of the world.
Savvy: practical
knowledge and ability
He
believes that this study shows that people can develop cognitive
efficiency, and likens the memory to muscles. “It’s similar to
what happens if you work out at the gym. At first, it takes a lot of
energy to lift weights, but with training you can lift a lot more
weight and exert less energy.”
Exert: to use a lot of
physical or mental energy to do something
If
you feel the need for some of this training, the memory athletes say
that anyone can learn their techniques. Mullen says that before he
was breaking world records, he had an average memory. That started to
change after he read Moonwalking With Einstein, Joshua Foer’s book
about his attempt to become the US memory champion. “You need to do
a lot of practice,” Mullen says. “It just depends on how much
you’re willing to put into it.”
The
most common technique used by memory athletes is the “method of
loci”, better known to fans of the TV series Sherlock as the
“memory palace”. The idea is that when memorising a list – such
as a to-do list – you associate an image with every item on it. The
images, which can be as absurd as you like, are then placed in the
rooms in your “palace”, which will typically be your home or
another familiar building. To recall the list, you imagine walking
from one room to the next.
Katie
Kermode, from Cheshire, holds two world records: for memorising 105
names and faces in five minutes and for memorising 318 random words
in 15 minutes. “I have a journey that goes around my house and
other houses I have lived in,” she says. “I put two words in each
room and I just associate those two words in a visual way. Then I
walk back in my head through the different routes and I remember
which words I saw.”
Boris
Nikolai Konrad, a Netherlands-based neuroscientist who is also a
record-breaking memory athlete, says he has “60 or 70” memory
palaces. “One is on the Thames in London, one is at Buckingham
Palace and one is my former student house in Reading,” he says. But
he uses a different technique to memorise long strings of numbers,
creating an image for every two digits in what is known as a
person-action-object mnemonic. The number 19, for example, could be
represented by a giraffe (the “person”) eating (the action)
leaves from a tall tree (the object). As one image follows another, a
story or journey builds up, which helps somebody to recall the whole
long series of numbers.
Mullen
uses a similar device, only with each image representing three
digits. He asks me to provide him with six random digits. I offer
876518. “For me, 876 is like a large palm tree – a classic palm
tree that you’d see on a beach,” Mullen says. “And 518 is a
Twinkie [a popular American snack]. So the trunk of the palm tree is
all made out of Twinkie, all the coconuts are weighing down on the
trunk and the creamy filling is spilling out.”
Yanjaa
Wintersoul, usually known as Yanjaa, is a Mongolian-born Swedish
memory athlete based in New York, and is one of the more exciting
figures in a sport that is hardly spectator-friendly. (“It’s a
bit like a school exam with everyone sitting at their desks staring
at paper,” is how Konrad describes the championships.) Like Mullen,
Yanjaa was initially drawn to memory competitions after reading
Moonwalking With Einstein. Yet she believes the techniques can help
in other areas. “At the beginning, it feels elaborate and
complicated, but in the end, it’s automatic and faster than
anything you can possibly do any other way,” she says. “People
see this as a wacky party trick, but the truth is it’s so
helpful for mental health and focus.”
Wacky: unusual in a
pleasing and exciting or silly way
She
has seen that at first-hand. “In my case, the battle was with
depression and anxiety. During the memory training, you’re spending
all your time thinking about happy things – if you choose your
imagery correctly.”
With
the right approach, even Kermode’s five-year-old can memorise
shopping lists. “If the first item on the list is bread, I tell her
to imagine that on her head,” Kermode says. “The next item, she
imagines on her eyes, the next one, on her nose … and you just work
down the list. When we get to the shop, she can tell me what we went
to the shop for.”
That
must make visiting the supermarket more fun. But do the memory
champions’ techniques help in more profound ways? Would we all
benefit from retraining our brains? Burnett isn’t convinced. “It
doesn’t actually help you understand anything,” he says. “It
just helps you remember things. If you do crosswords every day, then
you will become very good at doing crosswords. That doesn’t mean
your brain has improved; it just means your brain is now good at
doing crosswords because it has the ability to specialise like that.”
The
neuroscientist Susan Greenfield argues that children should be taught
to join up the dots rather than just recall them. She asks: “What
is more important? Remembering the date of a battle, or understanding
why the battle is important? We mustn’t confuse those quick memory
tricks with understanding. If you understand something, you don’t
have to make an effort to understand it – it’s just there.”
Even
the memory champions admit their hard-earned abilities have their
limits. Mullen and Kermode say that if they don’t practise some of
their skills, they begin to fade with time – and they still
regularly have lapses in memory. “Despite being able to memorise
names really well in competitions, I do forget them in real life,”
Kermode says. “The other day, I not only forgot the name of someone
I met, I also wasn’t sure if it was even the same person.”
Fade: to (cause to)
lose colour, brightness, or strength gradually
Still,
there is one benefit that even the sceptics can’t quibble
about. “Memory training has helped me remember where I put my keys
much faster,” says Yanjaa.
Quibble: to argue
about, or say you disapprove of, something that is not important
•
This article was amended on 13 November 2018 to make it clear that
the five-year-old mentioned was Katie Kermode’s daughter.
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