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” … They memorize numbers much the same way. Cooke converts every two-digit number from 00 to 99 into a familiar object or person, so that every six digits form a sentence. When he sees 342102, Cooke imagines Frank Sinatra crooning the Britney Spears’ song ” … Baby One More Time” to an obelisk. When he’s doing well, this translation is happening instantaneously. At his best, he can store about 300 digits, or 50 sentences, in his head in five minutes. To keep all this information in order, memorizers have to link their images together in a chain. Some, like Cooke and Amsuess, use what’s called the “journey method.” They place their images at predetermined points along a route that they know well. Cooke’s route begins at his favorite Oxford pub and ends at a nearby hotel. When it comes time to recall, he simply takes a mental stroll through his old college town and is able see each of the images in the place where he put it.” “… One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read. Continue reading the main story The alien test An extract from the Princeton University test The text at the top is in Arial; the bottom is in Comic Sans MS Volunteers were able to remember more when the information was written in the bottom font, or in the Bodoni MT font Source: Princeton University The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale. The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember. Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more. They believe that presenting information in a way that is hard to digest means a person has to concentrate more, and this leads to “deeper processing” and then “better retrieval” afterwards.” 
Anger / Fear / Anxiety (via thedailyfallout) ” More specifically, this is the tendency to react to horrible misfortune, like homelessness or drug addiction, by believing the people stuck in horrible situations must have done something to deserve it. The key word there is deserve. This is not an observation bad choices lead to bad outcomes … You want the world to be fair, so you pretend it is.” “Scientists have for the first time found powerful evidence that genius may be linked with madness. Speculation that the two may be related dates back millennia, and can be found in the writings of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates. Aristotle once claimed that “there is no great genius without a mixture of madness”, but the scientific evidence for an association has been weak – until now. A study of more than 700,000 adults showed that those who scored top grades at school were four times more likely to develop bipolar disorder than those with average grades.” “My lecture attempts to open the door onto a dialogue between psychology and neurology the mind-science of the humanities and the brain-science of neurobiology. If we actually look at how human beings behave when they involve themselves in more complex activities [thinking, communicating, investigating, observing] they slow down, even hesitate.” |
