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✦ New Frontier Of Your Mind ✦
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Twenty six words.
That is what 51 people managed on a list of 72.
Ordinary heads with no knack for it, and no training behind them.
Six weeks later one group came back and scored 62…
Their trick is 2,000 years old and costs nothing.
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// Quick Check
First reaction?
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Martin Dresler works between Nijmegen and Munich. He wanted to settle an old argument.
Memory champions can hold a shuffled deck after one pass.
Are they born that way? Or is the skill something you fit to a normal brain?
His team put 51 novices through six weeks of drilling.
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// Brain Hack
The Memory Palace
The novices were split three ways, 17 to a group. One lot drilled the method of loci at home. Thirty minutes a day, across 40 days.
A second group trained working memory. The third did nothing at all.
Only the loci group doubled its score. It went from 26 words to 62.
Scans put their brain wiring closer to that of world memory champions.
| 01 |
Take a route you know by heart. Your front door through to the kitchen. |
| 02 |
Fix ten stops along it and hold that order. Start at the doormat and end at the kettle. |
| 03 |
Turn each item on your list into a picture. Make that picture strange. |
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Park one picture at each stop. Look at it for a beat before you walk on. |
| 05 |
Walk the route in your head to read the list back out. |
| 06 |
Reuse the same route later on with a fresh list. |
Start with a shopping list of ten. A deck of cards can wait.
↗ Source: Dresler, Neuron, 2017
↗ Source: Radboud and Max Planck release, 2017
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// The Facts
| 30 |
minutes a day, for 40 days. |
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| 36 |
more words on the list by the end of it. |
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| 22 |
still held above baseline four months on, with no drilling in between. |
The other two groups gained far less, and kept none of it. All 51 trainees were men of about 24, so an older reader is reaching past the data. The test was a word list, and the before and after counts come from the press release rather than the paper. Nothing here says the trick helps you follow an argument. Scanning happened in Munich, while the drilling ran at home on a website.
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A trainable skill, not a gift.
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Most memory advice sells an app and skips the paper.
I spend more than $20,000 a year on private research… the sort hedge funds pay for. Walled off from the public.
Then I check what the test actually measured.
My route runs the hallway to the back step. Ten stops, a fortnight in, and that is one man’s report so far.
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// Your Pick
What would you load into the palace?
Pick one and hit send.
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// Talk To Me
Which route did you pick for your ten stops?
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Stay primal,
Dex
Primal Code
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