Perfect Memory.. A Skill developed or a gifted super natural ?

 In the previous post i discussed about the importance of developing a most important gift a human has inside his brain.... the memory.

In this world we have externalized most of the important stuff to external digital world. In a way it has made things evolving faster. We are gathering much more knowledge than earlier. Wait.. Is it knowledge or knowledge pointers?

The most suitable word is knowledge pointers using which we can retrieve knowledge easily. Imagine a world without internet or any other form of knowledge reference. How far can we survive.? We are loosing our capability of retaining information in our brains day by day and making the external storages cost effective at an similar pace.

I am striving to regain that capability if i have lost and see how far i can succeed. Because following video will be one of your eye openers if you are one of the crazy people how would like to travel back to history and master one of the key aspects of a perfect Human being.

This is a Ted talk which you will be fascinated to watch.

"There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique — called the memory palace — and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him"

Do we need to master memory in Google's Era ?

 If you need any information you just type Google. Simple is n't it? So do we have to bother about memorizing anything this world? Is there a pay back for what you memorize? Can we rely on internet and only just learn how to search and can we be successful?

 I am sure most of the people have forgotten the importance of memorizing things in this information age. But the people who master memorizing things excel more often than people who do not. The simple reason is you can apply only what you know.

As a Software Engineer and as a Masters student in computer science we often think for any problem we can just Google and find answers. But how fast? You may say within seconds you may have thousands of results before you.

But... You need to type go to the first answer and if you are lucky you have a hit.. If not repeat until you find the correct answer. Imagine you have things in memory.... It will not take fractions of a second to retrieve. It will be simply comparing to a cache retrieval to a Hard disk access.

People often think there are lots of information how can we memorize all these things? Yes it is true that in this digital world content is being produced super faster. But you have to be super smart to filter out what is important to you and memorize those things. We often underestimate the capability of retaining information in our brain and lazily forget techniques to master memory.

If you have not read following book is a great source of encouragement as well as a learning tool by a
Memory Champ Kevin Horsley.

Following video is one of his world record breaking videos [Successful World Record attempt in Pi matrix memorization]

Learning Math and Science - Genius Mind

 Do you think learning math and science is something alien from outer universe ? Do you struggle to solve complex mathematics or science problems? If you keep on adding questions there will be a lot to add on. Because even i have some of those problems in my mind.

I excelled in college and was able to get into the top engineering University in Sri Lanka. At present i am reading for my Masters Degree in Distributed computing in Europe which involve Science and Mathematics heavily.

If you read my post Want to Learn anythin faster was a spark to ignite my habit of learning. Often i was comfortable at Theoretical subjects which needed rote memorization or comprehension. I wanted to understand the reasons so anyone who suffers the same can be benefit of it.  Further there is a common misunderstanding that maths is hard and complex even before attempting to realize the beauty of it.

As Human beings we are computing machines. We can do lot of maths in our head to survive in this world. To measure the distance by contrasting with other objects, Cross a road safely without being hit by a vehicle and the list is endless..So then why we cannot do it in the class room?

I often find the way we approach math and science is wrong. There are several observations that i have made why we think maths is complex.

1) If we relate a story to a problem and try to solve it will be easier than denoting it with x,y or any other mathematical notation. When we have a story we have solid mapping of the problems in our mind so understanding a problem and working towards a solution makes more realistic. Good mathematicians or scientists create problems more vivid in their minds. They live in it as real worlds. Symbols are just notation to express what they understood in common language.

2) In classroom or tests we try to rote memorize concepts. Maths and science is super easy when you understand the fundamentals about it. You need to feel or live with the concepts to solve problems. learning an equation will not give you the ability to solve problems unless it is just a substitution.
If you clearly observe an equation, it is a complete story. It is a story of how incidents of left side will come to a common agreement on your right hand side.

3) Connect what you learn with what you know. Our brain is structured as a web. If you do not want to lose newly learnt concepts you have to link and bind with what you know to avoid loosing them. Isolated memory islands disappears soon. Try to relate to whatever the concept you have really understood and try to construct on top of that. If you find anything hard at once try it repeatably in different ways but always have a break. Our brain needs to digest and it takes time to assimilate.

I am still researching and try to apply those concepts in practice to see how they work in real world. But it has been producing interesting results so far. I find myself learning more complex math or science problem than before as i changed the approach.

I am currently reading this book which is an excellent resource for who wants to develop a "mind for numbers". Happy learning.

Mind for Numbers