Required memory reading (7/29)

[Ken Jennings]

From today's blog post. Recommend 'em here.

[kmel]

Some people on the autistic spectrum supposedly have a highly visual memory. You might try Temple Grandin's books, especially Thinking in Pictures -- the first chapter is on her website.

See also the art of Gregory Blackstock.

[Ken Jennings Jr.]

Since you mentioned Sacks, I'll chime in with a plug for "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat." This book is probably in my Top 20 Nonfiction List ("probably" because I never get around to actually making the list). There are some chapters that deal with cognitive disorders relating to memory. One "memorable" one deals with the man who had a good memory up to a cetain point, at which all long term memory stopped. His short term memory was fine and he could play checkers. He couldn't play chess because the length of the game exceeded short term memory capacity. His brother visited him weekly at the institution and he always remarked about how quickly his brother had aged. He was somewhere in the 50's at which time alcohol abuse had brought an end to his long term memory. We learn a lot about how the normal mind works by examination of the abnormal.

I had a personal experience with memory when I was deposed (as a potential witness) by the SEC three times over about four years. Eventually they dropped the case, which was without merit from day one. I remember at one point in the last deposition that I was asked if I remembered a particular meeting, event, email or something. My reply was that I was no longer certain if I was remembering the actual event or subsequent recollections and discussions of the event. They didn't like that answer, needless to say.

My mother is 85 and sharp as a tack. However, it is now clear that she mixes actual events with subsequent thoughts about the event. One day she will say, "I should have told that guy XYZ." The next day she'll say, "So, I told that guy XYZ." Memory of events vs. imagination about events may be a fertile field of inquiry. I suggest that criminals who commit heinous crimes may be subject to internal reconstruction as the mind attempts to bury or justify that which is too hideous to remember. Hawkeye and the chicken in the famous last episode of M*A*S*H?

Don't get me started on "recovered memories."

[aunt em]

I've taught (and lived) with people who had autism. What I especially recall is the phenomenal memory, but it is iffy. My daughter, now 45, used to be able to identify people's DAY of birth by their date of birth....but "she doesn't do that anymore". Another student, at 4, could recognize all automobiles almost before seeing them. Today, nearly 40, he is an expert on rock and roll, knowing records, songs, length of cut, etc. When asked about automobiles, he also "doesn't do that anymore". My daughter still has a great memory, and I tease her about being my "calendar", but she has moved on, and has better social skills than she did when her only interest was a persons birthday (not age.)

When googling your maternal grandfather's name, you might find the reviews of books on memory in the Amazon review section. A local boy of that name was doing some research on memory.

[Lilly]

This isn't exactly on the topic of books dealing with memory, but Jr's post reminded me of something my mom does. When she "distinctly remembers" doing something, she usually is imagining it, but if she vaguely remembers doing something, then she usually really did it. "Oh, I distinctly remember sending you those CDs. Yes, I remember weighing it and putting the stamps on it, and putting it in the mailbox." (three weeks later) "Oh, I found those CDs I was supposed to mail. I guess I didn't really mail them after all."

Is this normal? Is there a name for this phenomenon? I would think it could be pretty common, because you remember things that you rehearse or repeat, and if you imagine doing something several times, the memory would be more distinct than the memory of actually doing it one time.

Ken, I too am fascinated by the study of memory. So if you find out anything interesting, please enlighten us!

[rjmason]

It's fiction, of course, but I recommend Borges's short story, "Funes the Memorious."

[kaledrina]

On the subject of Borges -- "The Library of Babel."

[rkd]

One entertaining story regarding memory is by physicist Richard Feynman in his second book of stories, What Do You Care What Other People Think? It's about Feynman discovering (anecdotally, that is) that people remember and encode things in different ways. Sounds dreadfully boring as I describe it, but like everything by Feynman, it's very funny.

I ran across a neat book last year called Mind Hacks, which has about 100 short segments on various aspects of memory and mental function. Evidently they've got a Web site at www.mindhacks.com .

I know there are others, but I can't remember them at the moment. D'oh.

--Raj Dhuwalia

P.S. There was also a Discovery Channel show which aired a few months ago called Everything You Need to Know About the Brain. It's part of a more general footage-intensive series about things like sharks and volcanoes and ghosts. Some of the show was a bit on the "pointlessly flashy" side, but it had some good content too. It had some good footage of savants in action, including a fellow who was supposedly the basis for Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man (non-ironic note: I could be remembering that wrong).

[jamietr]

A few come to mind:

Carl Sagan's The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence
Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works
Skoyles and Sagan (Dorian)'s Up From Dragons

Each of these books discuss memory to some degree as it fits in with the human mind. If you've never read Dragons of Eden you should start with that one; it's outstanding.

[Rick, Recovering KJL]

This isn't precisely related, but the mention of Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat reminded me of it. Sacks describes two highly autistic twins who were non-verbal but apparently would play a game with one another where they'd say prime numbers of from 6 to 12 digits back and forth to one another.

That continues to bother me to this day, because what is it that they're doing? Do they have some kind of number-related recall that allows them to do this? (Seems unlikely; how could they be familiar with that many different numbers?) Is there some formula or system for quickly determining prime numbers that the rest of us just don't know?

Anyway, even though I'm not really a numbers guy, that just vaguely haunts me. Some of this memory-related stuff interests me in the same way. I'm awfully skeptical of people who claim to have this kind of perfect recall, and would tend to go first for obvious explanations (they're just making this crap up, they "cheated" and watched video of the incidents after the fact, other people are conforming their memories after the fact since these people seem so certain in their accounts, etc.). I'd be interested to see if I could be convinced that they're actually perfectly recalling old memories.

[jtb3485]

It had some good footage of savants in action, including a fellow who was supposedly the basis for Dustin Hoffman's performance in Rain Man (non-ironic note: I could be remembering that wrong).

That would be Kim Peek. I've read a lot about him recently. Unlike other autistic savants, he has many areas of interest. I'm sure others here have read about him too.

[rkd]

In reply to Rick, I'd guess the prime number thing is probably legitimate. There are what I'd consider two main classes of such calculation feats -- one depends largely on shortcuts or simple algorithms, while the other seems to rely on brute-force and lightning-fast calculation (this prime-number problem is an example of the latter).

Many calculation problems are fairly simple if you know an algorithm or memorize some charts. For instance, telling the day of the week for any given date is pretty easy ... there's a simple algorithm for it which chiefly requires a lot of mod-7 (i.e. remainder after dividing by 7) applications. I forget the pattern, but I learned it from a book by Shakuntala Devi some years ago and was able to apply it pretty easily. Another problem with a big shortcut is finding the integer root of a very large number, like the 9th root of a 43-digit number. Specialists in that sort of problem will memorize log tables, take the approximate log of the first part of the 43-digit number, divide the result by 9, use the chart again to do an anti-log, and use the end of the number to get the final digits and the answer. It's very hard, and it requires a lot of memorization, but the log shortcut makes it at least remotely possible for a non-savant.

On the other hand, I don't know a good way to calculate primality sans computer besides the Sieve of Eratosthenes. In other words, to test whether 673 is prime, one would divide by 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, etc, up to the square root of 673. There are a few shortcuts involved, and for a 6-digit number, you can get through the first six primes very quickly. The sum of digits will be a multiple of 3 for any number divisible by 3. The product of 7, 11, and 13 is 1,001, so testing the primality of 364,221 reduces to testing whether those three numbers go into 143, or 364 - 221. But after that, it's a lot of brute force. To test the primality of a 6-digit number, you'd have to check that it's not divisible by any prime up to the square root of the number, which could be up to 200 numbers. And for a 12-digit number ... yikes!

Finding a 6- to 12-digit prime number seems very cumbersome, but there are enough examples of "human computers" over the past few hundred years that it doesn't seem unreasonable. Johann Zacharias Dase, Zerah Colburn, Truman Stafford, and Frank Marshall(?) are among those whose ability to work with numbers clearly falls into savant territory, capable of multiplying massive numbers very quickly. Better known folks with extraordinary calculation abilities include Brian Greene, Gauss, Euler, and Ramanujan. Greene, for instance, was supposedly able to multiply 30-digit numbers when he was a kid (how quickly, I don't know). So while instantly picking out prime numbers of 6 to 12 digits seems absurd, it's not unreasonable in the context of savant calculations. Testing primality of a 6- or 8-digit integer is actually pretty mild compared to some savant feats, especially since it only requires dealing with integers and not decimals.

--Raj Dhuwalia, wordily

[Hieronymus]

It's not exactly memory, but it is about mind games and first impressions and I found it wildly entertaing. I reviewed it a little bit more on my blog, but I highly recommend "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell. He wrote another book called "The Tipping Point", which sounded interesting as well.

March Reading List

[sidnelle]

It's not precisely about memory, per se, but I remember reading a book back in the 70's called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was by a Princeton fellow called Julian Jaynes. The hypothesis was that way back in the cave-man days men did not have conscious thought as we do today, but rather heard "voices" that came from one side of their brain. I can't remember everything about it, but the book was fascinating and made a bit of a splash at the time. One thing is certain, there is much about the brain that we do not understand. Oliver Sacks makes that point in spades. I loved The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and had intended to mention it in this forum when I signed in, only to find that Ken already did and counted it as one of his favorites. Great book.

[curiosity]

"Eyewitness Testimony" and several other books by Elizabeth Loftus
See her biography here
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/



she's a fascinating person to talk to and can give you lots of contacts for more info.

[missbitesalot]

The Mind of A Mnemonist by A.R. Luria

I guess I should include more about this book as people seem to be bypassing its mention more than is imaginable (to me).

This is the definitive book on the astounding nature of human memory. The subject (S.) has synaesthesia (another fascinating [mal]function of the human mind) and uses it to create a striking mental archive from which he can readily recall events in extremely lucid detail even as far back as infancy.

A must-read for anyone curious about eidetic memory.

[Xenkylm]

You might be interested in some of the currently-influential researchers in memory. Neal Cohen is a great example, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He does work on formal theories of memory, and has done work with covert measures of memory (eye-movements, expert performance, etc.) that helps reduce the problems with explicit measures of memory. Here's his website

http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/profiles/faculty/n-cohen.html

Also, though Loftus' theories have also been quite influential (and thanks to her we rightly doubt eyewitness testimony), many of her findings have not been replicated, and her theories regarding 'implanting memories' are somewhat less grounded than her eyewitness work. Essentially, it's much easier to change the way someone remembers something than it is to completely implant a new memory, but it often seems like this distinction doesn't find its way into her research enough.

Enjoy.

[Ken Jennings]

"Eyewitness Testimony" and several other books by Elizabeth Loftus
See her biography here
http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/



she's a fascinating person to talk to and can give you lots of contacts for more info.

AND she's (sort of) local. Very nice. Eyewitness testimony and invented memories are definitely areas I'd like to look at.

[bobg]

Back in college I was briefly tempted away from my computer science major into a career in neuroscience by the pop-science writing of Richard Restak, who has a number of books to his name as well as at least one PBS series. Check out http://www.richardrestak.com/thebrain.htm. There's plenty in there about the workings of memory specifically, in addition to other aspects of the brain, though by now a lot of the info is probably dated. (Restak has several more-recent books to his credit which I haven't read.)

Cheers,
- Bob

[Homo Duplex]

I thought I would re-post my 'Question for Ken' here as it seems appropriate:

Hi Ken. I don't think you have this as a FAQ, though I suspect you've been asked this 1,000 times before (so I'll try to put a slightly different spin on it): How do you remember all that stuff!? I too have a good deal of information stuffed in my head, but the large part of what I know I can recall because it's systematized (as a Ph.D. student I'm forced to read systematically). The thing with trivia is that, although I'm sure you can and do organize alot of the infomation, alot of it is still factoid and curio. Is it just that you have a great memory, or do you have a way of managing this sort of information too? And how often do you find yourself unable to recall something you know you once knew?

[kimvlcek]

We read Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past by Daniel Schacter as required reading for my class on memory. One of the nice things about the book is that while it doesn't delve far too deeply into any one area of memory, it gives a pretty good introduction to quite a few of the areas of memory research - implicit vs explicit, eidetic, flashbulb memories, etc.

As a side note, the class was at UIUC, which I see was mentioned earlier in this thread.

[missbitesalot]

I should mention that I, too, have been accused of (heh) having a photographic memory. When people ask me how I memorize so many things (particularly numbers or things with numbers, which I know many people have trouble with) I act modest and say that I don't know. But seriously, I do seem to capture a visual to go with each memorized item. When it needs to be recalled, I don't want to trivialize it, but a page just comes up in my brain and I _see_ the information, it's like reading it off of a post-it note right in front of your face. For example, if I get a number off of yahoo yellow pages, that one snippet of screen is what I see when attempting to recall that phone number.

It's not like that every time, but sometimes it IS just that simple. A lot of the time I honestly don't know where the information comes from or how I memorize it. Especially particularly trivial (no offense!) things like addresses and phone numbers to places and persons I will only be seeing/calling once.

I rarely if ever studied for tests in school. In 10th grade, my psychology class teacher subjected us to a bunch of tests designed to see what kind of learners we were. His logic for such was that if little Susie was auditory and she wasn't paying attention during a manual exercise, he would look at her tests and think: "Oh, of course, she's auditory." He would then address the student's boredom and tell them that something that appealed to their type of learning was coming next or the next day. He figured it minimized the disconnect between teacher and student that often lead to the frustration of both. I ranked as auditory/visual because I was equally adept at both. This is where it gets interesting. For things I have memorized auditorily, no visual is required, but one is sometimes generated for me by my brain. My memory is by no means eidetic, or "perfect." I can't tell you "it was a Tuesday when my cat died and the second I heard it I looked down and saw dirt on my pant leg," or anything like that.

I think a lot of people who are trivia buffs have good memory skills--I mean if you're just going to retain everything anyway, why not seek out things that are interesting?

Anyone else have the same problem/curse/affliction/"gift"?

[Ken Jennings]

I thought I would re-post my 'Question for Ken' here as it seems appropriate:

Hi Ken. I don't think you have this as a FAQ, though I suspect you've been asked this 1,000 times before (so I'll try to put a slightly different spin on it): How do you remember all that stuff!? I too have a good deal of information stuffed in my head, but the large part of what I know I can recall because it's systematized (as a Ph.D. student I'm forced to read systematically). The thing with trivia is that, although I'm sure you can and do organize alot of the infomation, alot of it is still factoid and curio. Is it just that you have a great memory, or do you have a way of managing this sort of information too? And how often do you find yourself unable to recall something you know you once knew?

That's true...I never answered this one because it seemed hard.

When I have to retrieve remembered facts, I'm vaguely aware that there's some kind of "filing system" where like is stored with like and connections are made. I might remember where I learned a particular fact, for example, or a group of related facts. But it's not even close to being conscious. It all happens under the waterline somewhere.

As for failing to remember stuff...I forget the names of distant acquaintances, the location of my car keys, etc. all the time. But the nagging "on the tip of my tongue" scenario is less common when it comes to facts. Maybe once a week or so. Happened on Jeopardy quite a bit. I was taking an on-line trivia quiz the other day and had a little Alzheimer's moment on "Death Cab for Cutie." I could remember the tiniest details about them...except the name of the band. I'm sure that'll get more common as the years go by.

[Homo Duplex]

I thought I would re-post my 'Question for Ken' here as it seems appropriate:

Hi Ken. I don't think you have this as a FAQ, though I suspect you've been asked this 1,000 times before (so I'll try to put a slightly different spin on it): How do you remember all that stuff!? I too have a good deal of information stuffed in my head, but the large part of what I know I can recall because it's systematized (as a Ph.D. student I'm forced to read systematically). The thing with trivia is that, although I'm sure you can and do organize alot of the infomation, alot of it is still factoid and curio. Is it just that you have a great memory, or do you have a way of managing this sort of information too? And how often do you find yourself unable to recall something you know you once knew?

That's true...I never answered this one because it seemed hard.

When I have to retrieve remembered facts, I'm vaguely aware that there's some kind of "filing system" where like is stored with like and connections are made. I might remember where I learned a particular fact, for example, or a group of related facts. But it's not even close to being conscious. It all happens under the waterline somewhere.

As for failing to remember stuff...I forget the names of distant acquaintances, the location of my car keys, etc. all the time. But the nagging "on the tip of my tongue" scenario is less common when it comes to facts. Maybe once a week or so. Happened on Jeopardy quite a bit. I was taking an on-line trivia quiz the other day and had a little Alzheimer's moment on "Death Cab for Cutie." I could remember the tiniest details about them...except the name of the band. I'm sure that'll get more common as the years go by.

That's still superlatively impressive. I don't have near that memory capacity it seems. My best example comes from my years as an undergraduate student. I began then and have maintained the practice of looking up a word if I don't understand its meaning, but what I did then that I find too depressing to do now is to put a checkmark next to the word evertime I had to consult the dictionary for its definition. Some of the words--I'm embarrassed to say--had 7 or 8 checkmarks! I'm currently reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman (quite an interesting story) and have come across a number of fun little facts (e.g. who served as the model for Alice in Alice in Wonderland?), but alas, already find myself forgetting. I know in other words that for me to be competitive with you and 'your kind' in trivia, I would have no choice but to compile and pour over massive lists of related facts. For me to remember they have to have some sort of meaning, they have to be connected to other things that I know.

That being said, I do have a completely antithetical capacity to remember long strings of numbers (I remember them in 'bunches' somehow, a phenomon partially explained by the recent article in Scientific American: 'Secrets of the Expert Mind').

Anyway, thanks for answering Ken!

[Professor John]

That gift you have, my friend, is to see "mathematical patterns"...and you are in great company. Many of the great minds had the same ability. They saw number patterns, not merely numbers.

Enjoy it and embrace it!