Originally Posted by AlexsMom
And my point was, that for memory in particular, there appears to be no point beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent. If you read the article, there's scientific evidence that top memorizers aren't people with inherently good memories - they're average people with training.

Hmm. I don't think the answer is quite so cut-and-dried.

When I did a search for the Nature article mentioned in the Times, I found other papers on the subject. The first one I looked at was Wilding & Valentine (1994) Memory Champions British Journal of Psychology May 1:231. The authors studied winners of the same memory competition and found evidence that their memories were superior outside of the use of mnemonic techniques. They also had very good long-term retention and relatives with good memories (last trait self-reported). I didn't look at any of their other papers.

The Nature Neuroscience paper (Maguire et al; (2003) 6:90-95) had some intriguing results about self-teaching. It implied that the subjects all had average IQs, yet they didn't do full IQ tests. They just did an assortment of subtests. I'm not in the field and can't judge the validity of these results as broad measures, though using a test of reading ability, for example, seems a bit odd to me.

The reigning world champion of memory is a guy named Ben Pridmore. He has said that his IQ is 159. The literature has many references to IQ being correlated with short-term memory.

Maybe people with average memories can learn to memorize a deck of cards in 30 seconds by using mnemonics, but I'm not sure. to answer the question, you'd have to run tests on two groups: those with high IQs and those with average IQs. If both use mnemonic techniques, can the people with average IQs beat the high IQ group? Dunno.

What I do know is that it's super-frustrating when the media oversimplifies a complex problem and writes a report implying that some broad idea has been definitely proven by a single study, when reality is way more nuanced.