Discussion
Joshua Foer is a journalist for the New York Times. He explains in his TED talk about the feats of memory and how all the brains are similar but different in use. Joshua started his TED talk by requesting his audience to close their eyes and visualize a scene he was telling. After explaining his dramatic scene, he asked the audience to now open their eyes and listen to his opinion about the working of memory and about the people who are claimed to have brilliant memories.
Joshua illustrated that there’s nothing like a ‘brilliant, God-gifted and extraordinary memory’. It’s merely our perception because we don’t take things as those minds do. He once went to a memory competition to cover the event as a journalist where he asked a competitor how do you do it? And the reply was amazing. He replied that we just used the old techniques to remember the things the old Greeks and Cicero used to memorize their speeches and the same techniques scholars used to memorize the books. It’s not the competitors that are extraordinary, but the techniques that are good, and anyone can do it.
Foer then continued his talk that he started to experiment this way. He got that he can also do this, i.e. to memorize the numbers, phone number books, etc. He then covered the next few competitions as well. He practised this memory thing various times. One day, he entered the competition, and surprisingly, to his utmost surprise and shock, he won it. Foer illustrated that memorizing things is not a tough job; you just have to follow a technique, and that is VISUALIZING the scenes and things, making images in your mind. He gave an example by telling a story, and then he compared that if I ask you to repeat the scene, I started with closing my eyes and imagining, you’ll remember it. But, you’ll be unable to repeat this story accurately that I just told you. This is because you just listened to it not imagined it.
In my opinion, Foer is right in his evidence and proves that memorizing is not impossible for anyone if they do it accurately and attentively. The only thing that is required is attention and the will to do it. And, of course, practice makes a man perfect.
Replies To The fellows
Reply 1
Very truly said! Memory practices and making ourselves perfect in this particular field are in our hands. No one is born especially with this quality of instantly picking things and getting saved in their memory; it takes focus and concentration to do it; that’s why the research which Foer mentions says that we all have similar brains; we just have to use those areas which the competitors were using at the time.
Reply 2
Yes, it was a very constructive video, indeed! It makes many of the people realize that ‘yes we can do it too’. It gives a passion to the people about the idea that memorizing things is possible for us as well. We just need to imagine the things, picturize the content and feel the way in which things are happening. This technique has been used by many in the past and many in the present, and people know them as having ‘extraordinary brains’, but it is not like that. They have similar brains to us, but the usage is extraordinary.
References
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