Memory is a funny thing. Some people remember everything from a decade ago crystal clear. Others can’t remember where they parked their car an hour ago.

Of course a certain amount of memory can be trained. I read part of the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything“, where a journalist with an average memory spends a year training for the U.S. Memory Championship. It’s an incredible insight into what is possible if you have the right system – check out a Slate article he wrote for a quick overview.

But that’s only one type of memory and the author said he still loses his car keys. There is a completely different type of memory freaks that are even more interesting. There was an awesome 60 Minutes episode interviewing a handful of the rare people that have what they call “superior autobiographical memory.” If you ask them – “do you remember what you did on April 7th, 1973?” – they’ll be able to tell you exactly what they did that day, the day of the week, what they wore, and what they were thinking about.

Sleep is also crucial to your memory. I learned somewhere that the last few hours (5-8) of sleep are when most the transfer of memory from RAM (short-term) to hard-drive (long-term) happens. So if you don’t get a full 8 hours of sleep, you aren’t learning as effectively as you could be. The fact that people sleep less these days than a few decades ago can also be partially blamed for a whole bunch of other things, like getting fat. Maybe New York should mandate 8 hours of sleep a night rather than banning sugary sodas? Hard to tell which would be more effective, but one gets all the blame.

Inconsequential Childhood Memories

I got thinking about memory because of a couple memories I have from 4th and 5th grade. Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time with kids this age, so I’ve been going back into my past to see what I remember. Some of these things are so inconsequential, I have no idea why I remember them but not more important things:

• We did mental math problems every day in Ms. Barth’s class – “Start with 7 … multiply by 3 … add 4 … divide by 5 – what’s the number?” Well I remember one time we did it, we started with the number of hours you sleep in a night. So I started with 9. I got it wrong because we were supposed to start with 8.
• In Ms. Walker’s 5th grade class she read off everyone’s name and you were supposed to respond if you did your homework. One time I said “yes” and she thought I said “oven” (don’t ask me how). So from then on I would answer with a household appliance. But one time I didn’t do my reading and didn’t get to say an appliance. This was the start of my 15+ year run of becoming less cool every year.
• We read Babe – they sat us down to explain the word bitch and that we shouldn’t use it.
• The TV show South Park came out – I had a friend named Kenny and we thought it was funny he dies in every episode (even though we didn’t watch it, we just knew that it happened!)
• We had a Tic-Tac-Toe tournament in our class. I made the finals where I faced off on the overhead projector against someone that also figured out how to win or tie every time. After we tied a half dozen times I got bored and tried something different so we wouldn’t just tie for all of time. I lost.

Do you have any memories from 4th or 5th grade that are just as inconsequential?

The OK Plateau is that place we all get to where we just stop getting better at something. Take typing, for example. You might type and type and type all day long, but once you reach a certain level, you just never get appreciably faster at it. That’s because it’s become automatic. You’ve moved it to the back of your mind’s filing cabinet. If you want to become a faster typer, it’s possible, of course. But you’ve got to bring the task back under your conscious control. You’ve got to push yourself past where you’re comfortable. You have to watch yourself fail and learn from your mistakes. That’s the way to get better at anything. And it’s how I improved my memory.

Freediving is some pretty gnarly stuff. Basically you hold your breath, swim as deep as you can, and then swim back up to the surface. Simple right? Well the best in the world go 300 feet down and come back up four minutes later. If that’s not super-human I don’t know what is.

Here is a great article that takes an in-depth look at those pushing the limits in this dangerous sport. We’re talking torn larynges (plural of larynx), blackouts, and noses exploding into a bloody mess for those lucky enough to return to the surface. It’s a great read, but I thought I would point out a couple items I found particularly interesting that otherwise may not stand out in the article.

Powerful Psychology in Play

“Competitive freediving is a safe sport. It’s all very regulated, very controlled,” says William Trubridge, a 31-year-old world-record freediver from New Zealand. “I would never do it if it wasn’t.”

Cognitive dissonance much? Here is a closer look at the logic being applied: I wouldn’t do anything unsafe and I freedive, therefore freediving must be safe. Wow. Let me guess… he thinks of himself as a moral person so everything he does is perfectly acceptable.

Achieving Greatness

So why do you do this Mr. World Record Holder?

“To me, I don’t really have a choice,” he says in a soft voice. “There is an immortal peace confronting the underwater world on its own terms, with your breath at your breast. The ocean is just where I am meant to be.”

The greats in any discipline will likely have a similar answer. They were made for it and can’t imagine life without it. Since it isn’t really a choice for them, the risks and endless devotion aren’t viewed in the same way everyone else sees them.
 

Oh the foolishness of youth! How far I have come. You know the saying “it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there”? Well I used to think it was “it’s a doggy-dog world out there” … what the heck does that even mean? I don’t know, but as a kid there are so many saying that don’t make sense, this was just another one.

But sometimes mistakes like this can come from too much thinking. For example, when a kid learns that Santa Claus isn’t real, she will correctly assume that elves aren’t real, but incorrectly assume that reindeers aren’t real. In fact they are a real animal and the kid might be an adult before finding out.

What other examples do you have, either from your childhood or someone else’s?
 

Photo: Eric

The web is an extraordinary place. Anyone that has had a conversation with me has probably received an earful about how awesome the internet is. One of the most incredible things about it is the diversity. Most people have their own little corner they know well and are completely unaware of the multitude of ways other people are using the internet.

Example: it might seem unbelievable, but some people search YouTube when they want to know something rather than Google. It depends upon your preference for consuming information – watching video or reading text. Or put another way, if you didn’t grow up using old school search engines, and instead have spent hundreds of hours watching videos on YouTube, where are you likely to go when you need information?

This isn’t your grandpa’s internet – the scale of YouTube is absurd. 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly 8 years of content uploaded every day. Over 3 billion videos are viewed a day, which is more than 1 video for each person in the world that has internet access. And it is only going to get bigger, growing at 40 or 50% since last year. Wow.

These kinds of numbers made me want to give creating YouTube videos a shot. So I did a little experiment – I made a couple videos answering simple questions:

I’m intrigued to find out if anyone actually watches these videos. Will they show up in Google search results on the first page? Will they even be the top result for a Google video search? How about a YouTube search? Will I like posting videos and make this a part of my internet life?
 

Statistics source.

Photo: Sven Seiler

The Bell Curve is a controversial beast of a book that tickled my brain by examining a number of taboo subjects. Since collective intelligence is superior to mine, I’ll quote Wikipedia: “Its central argument is that intelligence is substantially influenced by both inherited and environmental factors and is a better predictor of many personal dynamics, including financial income, job performance, chance of unwanted pregnancy, and involvement in crime than are an individual’s parental socioeconomic status, or education level.”

The book also draws a number of insights into the class structure in America – the land of opportunity is no longer a meritocracy. A large percentage of the population doesn’t stand a chance. If trends don’t reverse, we are on a path to a welfare state with an enormous divide between the wealthy and poor (similar to many Latin American countries today).

A few bullet points for you to ponder:

• Our country has become extremely efficient at identifying intelligence and grouping the similarly minded together (without trying to). A hundred years ago there was a wide range of smarts on the assembly lines of factories. Today there is an extremely high correlation between IQ and income, largely due to our university system’s ability to identify the brightest and deliver credentials. This results in a self-perpetuating clumping of similarly intelligent individuals – every generation it will become more pronounced.

 

• 20% of children in the United States are born to single mothers of below average intelligence. We know dual parent homes are better at raising kids and that brains are inherited (to some extent). Those kids head to the plate with two strikes already.

 

• Small shifts in the average IQ of the population have shockingly large effects on things like crime, unwanted pregnancy, divorce, unemployment, and welfare. As in a 2% shift of the bell curve in IQ yields a 15% difference in some of the aforementioned categories (causation not guaranteed, but with those kinds of numbers it must at least contribute). This is particularly important as it is estimated the average IQ is currently dropping by a point every generation.

 

• Education spending is heavily weighted towards the underprivileged (no child left behind), rather than gifted – 50 years ago this was not the case. If the goal of education is to help each child reach his or her full potential, this unbalanced allocation of resources is not ideal.

 

• It is a big no no to look at the average intelligence of individual races in America. Here are the numbers they quoted: African Americans 85, Latino 89, White 103, Asian 106, and Jews 113 (if you are a Jew does that mean you aren’t counted in the other categories?). Considering the exodus of the best and brightest from inner cities, the average IQ of those left behind is shockingly low.

 
Pretty interesting stuff, what do you think? Are these things you have thought about before?
 

Photo: xlibber