Cars, Guns And Telephones is a website set up by my friend, Jonny Lowndes. It was my pleasure to know and teach Jonny at Marlborough College (where, in another life, I was Head of English), and I watch with admiration and pleasure as he takes his deep interest in film ever further. Jonny describes Cars, Guns And Telephones as 'an online film journal … and the point is to stimulate discussion of the way films are made, but not necessarily in an academic way. … Essays already written are about: how hats influence 70s cinema; the practical and aesthetic purposes of dirt in space films; and why DVDs make it okay to feel alienated. You can contribute your own original material if you want (screenplays, treatments, even completed films); and there is a library of scripts that you can look at. Some of them rule, some suck, and I want you to tell me which are which. There's also a game you can play, called Pantheon, where we rate films on their use of cars, guns and telephones, and pit them against each other. The point being that saying one film is better than another is bullshannon anyway, so we might as well choose a totally bogus system.'
And now, via Jonny, comes news of another friend and ex MC student (and my former tutee), Ed Cooke. Ed is a memory Grand Master and came 11th in the 2004 World Memory Championships. He is the co-founder, with Lukas Amsuess, of Oxford Mind Academy — which offers courses in memory training. Ed was recently in New York, for the eighth annual US Memory Championship, where he and Amsuess competed unofficially.
They thought the competition would be a good spring training for this summer's world championships in London, which both hope to win. They had also always wanted to see New York. (They visited the Empire State Building, where Amsuess successfully memorized an entire deck of cards on the 53-second elevator ride to the observation deck.) Though every competitor has his own unique method of memorization for each event, all mnemonic techniques are essentially based on the concept of elaborative encoding, which holds that the more meaningful something is, the easier it is to remember. The brain isn't built to remember abstract symbols like numbers and playing cards, but if one can translate those symbols into vivid visual images, even the dullest series of binary digits can be made as memorable as your own address. The key is to develop a system that allows quick encoding and easy recall. … For example, when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor. The more vivid the image, the more likely it is not to be forgotten.
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. According to Harvard memory researcher Daniel Schacter, this method of using visual imagery as a mnemonic device was first employed by a Greek poet named Simonides in 477 BC. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the guests at a large banquet he was attending. He was able to reconstruct the guest list by visualizing who was sitting at each seat around the table. What Simonides had discovered was that people have an astoundingly good recollection of location. In his book Searching for Memory, Schacter explains that this same technique was later used by Roman generals to learn the names of thousands of soldiers in their command and by medieval scholastics to memorize long religious tomes. During the 15th and 16th centuries, European mystics created elaborate "memory theaters" consisting of hundreds of fanciful locations in which mystical facts could be deposited. Slate
Slate concludes: 'Though Amsuess and Cooke's scores weren't officially tabulated, it was clear that Cooke would have destroyed the American competition. In the random words event, he managed 150 words in five minutes, 50 more than the best American score. In the speed numbers event, he memorized almost twice as many digits as the next best American competitor.'
And their time in New York was all being filmed by … Jonny. Stay tuned!
