“Remembering an 11-digit telephone number is hard enough for most of us. Yet one of the current record-holders for a feat of memory, Chao Lu of China, was able to accurately recite 67,890 digits of pi from memory in 2005. But is that a mere drop in the ocean compared to the brain’s true capacity?
Our ability to absorb information is vast. In 1986 Thomas Landauer, then at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, New Jersey, looked at studies of how much visual and verbal information subjects stored while examining images and text, and how quickly they forgot it. This led him to estimate that the average adult stores around 125 megabytes of this type of information in their lifetime – enough to store the contents of 100 books the length of Moby Dick.
Accurately memorising a long string of digits in the correct order is a more demanding task than memorising ad hoc facts about a text or a picture. To discover the limit of the length of a single memory, it may be more informative to consider the techniques used by the memory champions.
Many of them use a mnemonic method. Before starting to memorise a number, they associate a person or object with each four-digit number from 0000 to 9999. The digits of pi can then be translated into a sequence of these people and objects, which the memoriser links by making up a story. This helps add interest to the random sequence of numbers and pegs down the memory.
Lu takes roughly 1000 hours to memorise 40,000 digits. Assuming this rate would apply no matter how big the memory feat, someone who started memorising a number at the age of 20 and spent 12 hours a day at it, every day, would be able to remember around 8,760,000 digits by their 70th birthday.”
Read more at New Scientist
"
Good stuff. But it’s worth considering memory not just as an individual capability but as a distributed one. Family events, gatherings of friends and work reunions are all great places to observe how “we” are often better at remembering than “I”.
Makes sense also when you start to think of us as a social rather than a fundamentally independent – lone wolf – species
Is it just me or does 125 megabytes over a lifetime not seem that much?!
I genuinely had an interesting comment to make and totally forgot what it was my the time I’d put in the anti-spam text… d’oh.
i keep my entire memory in my laptop…
So the question begs to ask, when is Derren going to beat this record?
Does he know if he could beat it or is it a feat too much?
Scott
Trouble is, I’d forget the person or object I’d have used to associate with any particular number…..
LC x
Human brains are very interesting indeed.
I wonder, are we meant to have a super-memory? Certainly, there are many tricks to store a quite large amount of data coherently and long-term, but I think we are based more on the emotions, feelings, etc, not some random numbers.
It’s quite impressive though.
I find memory fascinating – as an actor, I have to learn and memorise great chunks of text and direction for each play I’m in, and I find it interesting how long some speeches last, whilst others fade within days of the final performance.
I’m also curious about what the average age of “earliest memories” is. I know it’s hard to determine what are true early memories and what are “inherited” memories we’ve been told about – but there are two instances I can remember from my perspective the took place between 12 and 20 months. To quote Rosencrantz/Guildenstern; “what’s the first thing you do remember?”
Memories are tricky things i personally need reminders to remember me to look at my reminders!!!
I have two boys with really strange memories one never forgets anything he has read or seen the other child is dyspraxic and has a really bad short term memory he forgets what he has done 10 Min’s before but will recall everything the following week in detail the mind is truly a wonderful thing!!!
I’ve find getting married and having children has helped with storage capacity immeasurably. I now no longer have to remember what I’m doing of an evening or at weekends, and, as a result, can recall my pre-marriage and children life with absolute clarity at any time of the day!
i remembered part of your book lol
chapter on Neuro Linguistic Programming because im terrible at explaining things 