Originally Posted by AlexsMom
Originally Posted by Val
Others wouldn't be able to recall 14 digits backwards, regardless of effort.

Memory appears to be something extremely susceptible to improvement-by-training. I found the article here to be very interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/02/20/magazine/mind-secrets.html
Absolutely. But... Backwards recall is sometimes said [citation needed] to be very different from forwards recall in the cognitive skills it exercises; to reverse a sequence you (supposedly) have to hold it in memory and process it at the same time. In a naive, un-memory-trained person (me!) that feels true. Forward recall I do essentially by audio memory, perhaps with a little mathematically-based pattern spotting. Backwards recall does seem much harder (and one has less occasion to practise it!)

Still, my guess would be that these trained memorisers would not have that much more difficulty with the backwards than with the forwards task, even though the article doesn't speak to it. I would guess that the walking through a house trick would be easily adapted to "placing" numbers on a forwards walk through the house and "retrieving" them on a backwards walk. What that trick does is to turn the memorisation task into a simple matter of repeated association, with the sequencing, forwards or backwards, parasitic on a sequence one already knows well.

Of course, the effectiveness of the recall task as part of a cognitive test - the correlation between how good someone is at it and how good they'll be at other tasks - is not in contradiction with the idea that it can be trained. That's why IQ tests are secret. This is one part that can't be secret, and should training memory ever become a popular pastime, doubtless this part of the test will have to be removed because it will no longer be predictive.


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