In the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,” journalist Joshua Foer describes how he came into contact with “memory athletes” for Slate magazine in 2005. These are people who have developed a phenomenal memory through training. For example, they are able to remember the random order in which 52 cards are placed on the table in a row in 21.90 seconds. They can then recall this sequence in the correct order. Even backwards.
Is he dealing with the new Rainmen ? Or is it a trick that anyone can learn? Eventually he even goes so far as to be mentored for a year by the English Grand Master of Memory Ed Cooke, and a year later he enters the American Memory Championships himself and wins it.
At the beginning of the book, Foer examines various cases. For example, he considers the problems new zealand phone number list of the chicken industry: how do you distinguish a chicken from a rooster? With chicks, the sex of a bird can only be determined a month after birth. And this is an expensive business. You have to feed these birds for a month and roosters are a cost item, because they do not lay eggs. How can you reduce this period of a month to the day the chicks are born?
In Japan, they have come up with a solution for this. By gently squeezing a chick, you can make the intestines and genitals protrude slightly. An experienced chick watcher can then determine the sex within a few seconds. You don't just become such an experienced chick watcher. Every chick looks different from below. Only after two years of training at the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School are you able to distinguish the hen from the hen. The expert chick watcher is thus able to determine the sex of 1200 chicks per hour with a certainty of 98 to 99 percent. In Japan, there are even a few super professionals who can examine two chicks at a time. They can thus achieve around 1700 chicks per hour.
Several scientists have studied this phenomenon. How are these experienced chick watchers able to determine the sex of a chick within seconds? The chick watchers themselves cannot answer this question. They just “know”. It is intuition. What does determining the sex of a chick have to do with memory? According to Joshua Foer, everything.
In his search for the workings of human memory, Foer also comes into contact with chess champions. Research by the Dutchman Adriaan de Groot shows that chess grandmasters are in reality no different from the average person. Their brains show the same capacities. Why can they play chess so well? Perhaps the biggest surprise from de Groot's research was that chess players do not think ahead. They see the right move at a glance. They do not consider the 32 pieces individually, but take in the entire board at once and react to it with lightning speed.