Scientists find new way to vastly improve memory

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Most memory athletes credit their success to hours of memorization-technique practice. One lingering question, though, is whether memory champs succeed by practice alone or are somehow gifted. Research suggests there may be hope for the rest of us. A study published in Neuron provides solid evidence that most people can successfully learn and apply the memorization techniques used by memory champions while triggering large-scale brain changes in the process.

A team led by Martin Dresler of Radboud University in the Netherlands used a combination of behavioral tests and brain scans to compare memory champions with the general population. It found that top memory athletes had a different pattern of brain connectivity than controls did but also that subjects who learned a common technique over a period of weeks, not years, greatly improved their memory skills and began to exhibit brain-connection patterns resembling those of elite memorizers.

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In the first part of the study the researchers matched 23 elite memory champions with control subjects based on age, gender and IQ. Both groups underwent a series of brain scans, including anatomical scans and functional MRI during a resting state—one in which subjects were not doing anything—and during a memory task. The researchers found the memory champions did not differ from the controls in any particular brain region but rather had different patterns of brain connectivity during resting-state and task-based fMRI scans. To Dresler, these results suggested “there’s not a sort of general hardware difference in memory champions that allows them to reach these memory levels but that something subtler is going on,” which spurred the team to investigate further.

Next, the researchers took 51 subjects who had never previously engaged in memory training and divided them into an experimental group and two control groups. Experimental subjects underwent six weeks of intense memory training for half an hour each day using the centuries-old method of loci strategy still popular with memory champions: They learned how to map new information such as numbers or names onto familiar spatial locations such as those in their homes. The active control group trained for a working memory task called the n-back that does not train long-term memory. Meanwhile the passive control group received no training.

After training, the experimental subjects improved significantly at memory tasks (whereas neither control group improved) yet did not exhibit any structural brain changes. Their brain-connection patterns during resting-state and task-based fMRI scans, however, became more similar to those of memory champs, a change that correlated positively with memory improvements.
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Original article: Don’t Forget: You, Too, Can Acquire a Super Memory

Original study: Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory - ScienceDirect

Technique mentioned in article:
 
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ogc163 said:
That shyt takes up too much time, from a cost/benefit analysis it's usually not worth it imo. I use it to remember large number sequences but not much else.

Spaced Repetition has much more utility, and it's the main tool I used to pass the Bar exam.

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One of my professors taught me about this when I began PA school :ohhh:
 
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