Intersections: A different method of storing contacts
Recently, I drove to San Diego to document the triumphs and tribulations of a team of Mongolian memory athletes at a tournament that tests extreme memory, focus and recall skills.
For 10 hours, I sat in a room with the Mongolians and a host of other contenders, including memory athletes from Germany, the Philippines, Sweden and the United Kingdom as they battled it out on giant screens to see who would walk away from the competition with a grand cash prize and the ability to boast about their amazing mnemonic skills.
While they recalled hundreds of names, numbers and images in the span of a few minutes, I tried to play along and failed miserably.
My memory is embarrassingly bad, and I blame the Internet for its demise.
Ever since our world has turned into an endless cycle of “likes,” “shares” and “retweets,” I have felt my focus diminish significantly over time with no remedy in sight to gain it back. When there is a lull in conversation, most of us go straight to our phones. We even do it while we’re having conversations, desperate to fill the empty spaces and voids of self-reflection and actual human interaction.
There is no one I know of in this day and age that can fully concentrate on one task and manage to get through it without “checking” something, even though there is nothing to actually “check.” I don’t even want to admit the amount of times I’ve looked at my social media accounts while writing this.
It has gotten bad enough that once, when I saw a news report about a technology detox retreat, where you lock away your phones in a box for the full duration of a few days as you reflect, I wanted to sign up immediately.
At a time when the rapid progression of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are so worrying, this inability to concentrate feels especially dangerous.
So, as I watched the memory athletes compete, I wanted in on their secret to being able to match 80 faces to names they had only seen just a minute before. It turns out that they use a special technique called “memory palaces” or, more formally, the “method of loci,” which was used by Greeks and Romans.
The fascinating method uses geographical places that you’ve already built in to your memory — the drive to and from work, for example — and adds new information to them, thereby linking a new memory with an old one.
The method is traced back to Simonides, the Greek poet who was having dinner with dignitaries when the building they were in was destroyed. He was able to reveal the names of the unidentifiable victims by recalling where they were sitting prior to the accident.
As I watched many of the athletes compete and only a select few make it to the finals of the tournament, I was told that anyone can train themselves to do these methods and participate in memory competitions, which have been ongoing as a steady subculture around the world for decades.
I met one young competitor who had memorized the numbers of 200 friends and family members in his phone’s contact list. I couldn’t even recall 10% of the numbers I have stored.
So, the first thing I did when I left San Diego and the memory athletes I was in awe of was turn off my phone. It was a small gesture, but I wanted to be shut off from the noise, from the incessant need to “check”’ things and from the chaos of the world around me, so that I could be inspired to create something meaningful — or remember — in the absence of it all.
My stark confrontation with my own shortcomings reminded me of a quote by Dr. Elias Aboujaoude, director of the Impulse Control Disorders Clinic at Stanford University, and it turned out to be more than apt: “The more we become used to just sound bites and tweets, the less patient we will be with more complex, meaningful information. And I do think we might lose the ability to analyze things with depth and nuance.”
--
LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.