There's a bigger story hidden behind the achievements of memory champions. The groundbreaking result from the past few decades is not that there is a way for a human to memorize a thousand numbers, or that a particular method of memorization (say, memory palace) is the way to do it. It's nice, but not that relevant for everyday life and not applicable to most life problems.
The true achievement is recognition and verification, across many disciplines, that:
1) there are better and worse ways to improve skill
2) anyone can improve any skill [if they do it the right way]
3) mental representations are key to high performance. Some are better than others.
4) one should study how to learn a given skill, or get someone who knows that to teach, e.g. to study people who are best at something - to find out their training regimen, their way of structuring the information/skill/work/memory/... - this is likely to work everywhere
5) If that doesn't help, i.e. little progress is made, one can still figure out, discover, create their own ways of practice to advance.
6) the upper limit of skill is way way higher thank we think
7) Many fields don't have clear criteria for success, so little feedback is available on low-level performance details, which limits the progress of training methods.
If you're interested in all that, I recommend reading the book of a renowned scientist who actually discovered a lot of this stuff and who worked with early memory champions, provoking them to push the boundaries of what was thought possible -- Anders Ericsson, "Peak: Secrets from New Science of Expertise".
> At your left, there’s a map of Minnesota, dangling precariously from the wall. You’re certain it wasn’t there this morning. Below it, you find a plush M&M candy.
> If none of this makes sense, stick with us; by the end of this piece you’ll be using the same techniques to memorize just about anything you’ve ever wanted to remember.
No, it won't ever make sense and it may continue to come as a surprise to many that not all of us have the ability to form visual based imagery in our minds. A common term for this is Aphantasia.
Not everyone thinks the same way. Any attempt at mass producing some means to know something better/faster is probably not going to work on a subset of the population.
I was able to use the Memory Book's number to letter technique a few years ago to memorize short lists of objects, but my recall for that is pretty good anyway so it's not worth the time taken to memorize stuff using the process (which itself requires memorizing certain objects for the numbers). For those who visualize, I would imagine such techniques could be quite useful.
I've had stronger and weaker Aphantasia at different points in my development and in different learning/work situations.
Given that styles of learning has largely been debunked, I would suspect that the vast majority of us actually have roughly the same capabilities and they are just unexercised, exercized to fitness or from too much stimulus to exhaustion by our specific environments, diets, motivation levels, etc.
(3) is fascinating and begs the question of how we discover these representations. I imagine - like science - it's a bit of theory, a bit of empiricism. Constantly tinkering with our theories and our data to evaluate if new models improve and reliably predict performance.
(7) is also interesting. Ambiguous success criteria is one problem. I'd also include delayed feedback and multivariate feedback loops. The longer the feedback loop, the more likely confounds can enter into the training regimen, rendering it harder to discern whether the new training ("treatment") actually has a significant effect. This is a problem in all fields: when we are trying to measure long-term results, it gets very difficult to decide whether any proposed intervention (new diets, new exercise regimens, new marketing campaigns) have any effect.
3 sounds to me like mental models. I'm fascinated by the idea of how we can learn/teach using mental models directly, rather than expecting the learner to build the mental model over time by working through rote memorisation and experimentation until it "clicks". I strongly believe that opening up mental models would make learning new skills vastly quicker and more accurate.
The true achievement is recognition and verification, across many disciplines, that: 1) there are better and worse ways to improve skill 2) anyone can improve any skill [if they do it the right way] 3) mental representations are key to high performance. Some are better than others. 4) one should study how to learn a given skill, or get someone who knows that to teach, e.g. to study people who are best at something - to find out their training regimen, their way of structuring the information/skill/work/memory/... - this is likely to work everywhere 5) If that doesn't help, i.e. little progress is made, one can still figure out, discover, create their own ways of practice to advance. 6) the upper limit of skill is way way higher thank we think 7) Many fields don't have clear criteria for success, so little feedback is available on low-level performance details, which limits the progress of training methods.
If you're interested in all that, I recommend reading the book of a renowned scientist who actually discovered a lot of this stuff and who worked with early memory champions, provoking them to push the boundaries of what was thought possible -- Anders Ericsson, "Peak: Secrets from New Science of Expertise".