What Memrise does to your brain

This is my attempt at estimating the effect of Memrise on your brain. Actual research to follow.

Is Apple's aesthetic fundamentally inhuman?

Somewhat foolishly, I recently fried my Macbook while strolling in a rainstorm. It's the kind of set-back that can seriously interfere with one's self-esteem, and it was several days before I found it possible not to scowl at the sight of children playing, at contented lovers or at other jarring signs of nature's bounty.

In the middle of this depression, I ventured to the Apple Store to see whether they might be kind enough to fix my computer. Someone quickly iPadded in my appointment with a Genius, and left me on a stool to marvel at the elegance of the scene. Everything in the store naturally shared the same breathless smoothness as Apple's storied hardwear. I basked in it as I waited, and was reminded of the atrium of my old Yoga club, where I felt obliged despite myself to strive for spiritual perfection as a basic concession to the sheer zen-ness of the people sipping herbal tea around me.

Once my Genius appointment came round, I explained my predicament at the counter to the grey-pony-tailed man behind. He responded to the story of my computer's death with a series of comforting "ahuhs", while looking clean through me as if he was savouring the taste of some delicious morcel of food. This would have been ok if he had been taking an order for a scented candle and the paperback version of The Power of Now for a healing-retreat I was off to on a Norwegian fjord. But I must confess I was expecting rather fewer approving "ahuhs" and rather more sympathetic "poor you"s. In any case, after a moment of calm reflection, he took my computer off out back to see what was going on under the hood.

After a surprisingly and indeed suspiciously brief period away, he returned and with perceptible jollity informed me that there were "no dice". I asked what he meant. He explained, as if having spotted a curiosity of nature that might be of interest to an amateur naturalist, that there was some corrosion on the centre-board. I asked if he could fix it. He smiled in benign condescension. Can anything be done? He related tenderly that the fix plan was 1450 dollars. I said that sounded like rather a lot of money. He responded with a look of beatific peace. I pointed out that the computer new would cost me less. He confirmed this to be the case as if this was the most logical thing in the world.

I asked whether, if I bought a new computer, he would perhaps as a matter of courtesy switch across the hard-drive from my old one. He said he'd need to check the hard-drive and went back out again into the void of the behind of the store. He returned in three minutes to inform me that the data was in tact. I repeated my question, and he informed me that there was a $99 plan that would give me full access to some convoluted Apple "Care" plan all year. I told him I didn't want Apple Care, I just wanted a simple transfer of my data, something that would, presumably, take him about five minutes. He proceeded, as if not having been present to any moment of the conversation thus-far, to blandly explain the pricing plan of the Apple Care plan. I began to feel like I was being punched repeatedly in the head by a giant first cut with lasers from a single piece of aluminium in an eastern sweat-shop.

Out of curiosity, I asked directly whether he saw how I might find Apple's level of service for someone in my position somewhat troubling. It was just too easy for him, though, to side-step my attempts at such human dialogue, as he entered this time into a cult-leaderishly empty stare into the middle distance that was in point of fact occluded by my forehead, and dreamily asked which would it be- would I rather have my computer fixed for slightly more than the cost of a new version or buy a new version?

The most awful thing about this, was that having entered the Apple store committed to the idea of not buying a new computer, I was now beginning to subside into an apathetic stupor. The cleanliness of my surroundings, the inability of my Genius to connect in any way to an actual human emotion, the atmosphere of complacent consumerism: all of these things were conspiring to channel me, a broken and degraded man, into ponying up the cash as a way of redeeming my sad day the Apple way: with the purchase of an expensive new computer. This is, of course, exactly what then happened.

Reflecting on this experience, it seems to me that the psychopathy of the Genius' behaviour and the design of Apple products more generally are intimately connected. Apple's integrated hard-ware, soft-ware solutions, which do not tolerate break-downs or hacks; their iron rule over their app store; the awesome control they have over all aspects of user experience; the cold and sterile minimalism of their design; all of these things have in common that they exclude any sense of the human in your interaction with the object. Apple makes products, including the Apple store, where your path is completely uncluttered by any sense of fragile, error-prone human endeavour.

And the scary thing about the over-whelming inhumanity of their overall aesthetic is that I actually like it.

Tedx Observer Talk

I did a Tedx talk a couple of weeks back at the Observer-organized event in London. It was all quite an adventure, which I'll write up another time. My primary intention on giving the talk was to make sure that noone left the room without knowing my nickname:

I spoke about memory-techniques, and about training Josh Foer and I also made a not entirely unsuccessful attempt to explain my "philosophy" on the matter. Here's the talk, in which you must forgive me for spending half the time wandering around for lack of a clicker for my slides:



And here's me enjoying my moment in the sun, embracing my new friends, Fields medal winning mathematician Cédric Villani and Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Palestinian doctor.

I agree I look a little yellow, but there's a good explanation for that, which I will detail along with some of the more comedic aspects of this adventure on another occasion.

Is reality increasing?

The idea that reality could increase sounds like nonsense. Common sense clings instinctively to a kind of "conservation-of-realness" principle, where reality changes all the time, but the total doesn't increase or decrease- it just tootles along.

Regardless of what is true here -and if you take seriously the idea that information is real, then maybe you'll agree that reality is on the increase- it's anyway worth booting common sense out of the way on this one, even just for a few seconds, in order to see what the idea feels like to try on. Do this, and you will be enjoying a remarkable shift in your perspective on the future and the past: the future will expand out vertiginously before you, while the past dwindles behind.

Just as reading about the early history of the USA can be mind-boggling, because of the tiny subset of a (relatively) small set of people who speculatively put into place institutions and ways of life that have radiated out to suffuse what is now the population of 350 million people who seem to run human culture, so too does a reality-is-increasing view bring an amplified sense of the absurd influence of what happens now on what will happen tomorrow.

I can't claim to be able to keep this thought in view for long enough to adopt it as a perspective (I might be able to fear environmental destruction more if I could) but I can certainly see that there's something inspid about how I normally think about reality being an unchanging quantity.

Can real learning ever happen in a classroom?

A month or two ago, I boarded a train at Bristol and wound up chatting to a lecturer in environmental science, who kindly offered me a glass of wine.  We soon found ourselves shooting the breeze, and ended up discussing what makes people really learn.

He told me of his experience that the only time any of his pupils seemed really to learn anything was when they were round a camp fire at the end of an energetic field trip. 

To my scientized ears, this all sounded pretty fluffy. Surely kids are learning all the time in school, after all. Indeed, the phrase "tree hugger" popped into my mind, without any of the positive feelings I get from actually hugging trees. But by the time I got off at Oxford, three glasses of wine, an hour, and twenty minutes later, I was pretty convinced he was onto something very interesting.

His main evidence was his own experience, but something like the following just about captures (I think) what he effectively argued: 

- Only changes to deep aspects of thinking (the 'paradigm' of your thought) count as real learning, because all other kinds of learning (factual retention etc) happen quickly if you actually care and bother to try. They're trivial by comparison with deep changes to your perspective. 

- Changing your perspective is difficult because it inevitably amounts to adopting a whole new emotional relationship between yourself and the world, and all of your social, bodily and intellectual habits resist such change.

- Habits cling to contexts, so familiar, comfortable contexts interfere with any attempt to change deep aspects of thought. In a classroom, you're just too comfortable, safe and inattentive to be stirred to make yourself emotionally available to learn anything deeply new.

- If this is right, then if people are to begin to change their thought in a deep way, it's vital for them to be taken into a new context, a new " emotional space". This seems pretty uncontroversial.

- That new emotional space has bodily, social and situational dimensions. Simply going to a new place isn't enough: if you remain in the same bodily and social habits, you bring your old context with you and you won't be able to change. 

- A change in social and bodily state takes at least two days to filter through and truly renew your mind (think how long it can take to unwind after setting off on holiday, or to begin really enjoying a music festival).

- Adding this all up, you need an expedition of at least two days length, with plenty of physical activity and a whole new set of social interactions before someone is going to be capable of assimilating any deep change to their perspective.

Here, specifically, was his method for making people think anew:

a) Take a three day field trip to a new and isolated place (in his case, normally a river-basin somewhere). 

b) make sure everyone gets vigorous physical exercise, that they have no mobile phones, that they collaborate with unusual intensity. 

c) Wind up round a camp fire on day three, with everyone relaxed yet tired, and miles distant from their normal preoccupations.

At this point, people should be ready deeply to feel and accept that a change in their thought is something they can permit themselves, they're ready to cease self-identifying with their opinions. Once this is done, you just:

d) Let conversation flow

e) Observe beginning of shifts in perspective (although they may take several months or even years to play out, he said).

This makes sense. I imagine it takes quite a teacher to pull it off, normally this happens among friends without a teacher present. I can see that a teacher would help, though. 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the field-trips I went on at school (and which ever happen at schools) involve too many people, too little time, and no unpoliced camp-fire denouement.

And when you think of the disastrous social, emotional and bodily dynamics in the classroom, of the accumulation of negative habits in those stale contexts, you really begin to think that a years school would be very effectively replaced by a handful of well-designed expeditions.

Is this why waiters forget your order?

For many years now, I've been fascinated by the difficulties waiters and waitresses have remembering that you ordered a glass of water. They rarely forget a coffee, they never forget a bottle of wine, but about 50% of the time, if you order a glass of water it'll never appear.

Now I gradually developed a theory about this, and I loved my theory. My theory was this: water is a difficult thing for a waiter to remember because it is see-through. After all, the sensory imagination and memory are closely entwined: things are approximately as easy to remember as they are to visualize.

And the thing about visualization, is that it relies on rich sensory detail. We can all visualize brightly coloured, sensorily striking objects with ease. But abstract concepts, numbers and the whereabouts of our keys are difficult to picture in the mind's eye because they don't fire the imagination: there's no vivid detail to grasp onto, no emotion that's evoked and that might serve as a handle.

Returning to the glass of water, it was, as I say, for a long time my belief that waiters were so persistently forgetting my orders thereof because water is see-through. It's quite difficult to visualize. When you imagine it, your mental eye often looks straight through the glass and lands on an object behind. This is one of those theories that has the great merit that if it were true, it would be wonderful. But that isn't necessarily a decent guide to truth.

And indeed, I have come to the rather more banal conclusion that waiters forget my water-orders because water is free. The insight came to me when I noticed that they are as likely to forget an order for bread as they are for water, that they don't forget sparkling water, no matter how translucent the bottle, that neither do they don't forget orders for vodka; the final nail in the coffin came while ordering at a café on a peat bog, where the local water is yellow: the waiter returned to the table with my coffee but with not a drop of water.

Reality, how disappointing you can be! Waiters, you capitalist schmucks!

How to Spring from Bed in the morning

I like to spring from bed in the morning. Like many others, I have a gift for multiple snooze-presses, the net result of which is normally to make me more tired, less happy and catastrophically late. I aspire to be like those people who are enthusiastic about life and whose first seconds of consciousness are accompanied by energy and movement, not self-deceit and dream-clinging.

A killer solution to my difficulties in this area came to me quite by chance. At some point, traveling from Europe to the UK at the same time as a time change that served to amplify the normally one hour time difference, my alarmc-lock ended up two hours fast.

When I woke the next morning, the time, according to said clock, was 10 a.m. My first meeting of the day was at nine. Of that particular appointment my rudimentary consciousness remained unaware, but the news that 10 a.m. had come to pass was nonetheless accompanied by a sharp sense of horror. ("Uuuuurgh, schucks").

Having then leapt from bed like a startled egret, it took me more than a minute to realize it was in fact eight a.m. and that everything was in order. By that point, though, I was dressed and ready to go. Ideal. I could use this every day, I thought.

And who would have guessed: the next day, the same thing happened as I woke at 8 a.m. staring at 10 a.m. And my reaction was just as vigorous and dynamic. As soon as my eyes cracked open, overcome by the horror of my probable lateness (a microcosm of the ongoing dissolution of my youth) I was in action-mode in a flash. Boots on. Flower in my button-hole. Flannels creased. Ready for action.

I assumed that the trick I was letting my alarm clock play on me would only work for a while, but that I would gradually adjust to the trick, discount it and resume snoozing, knowing better than to think it ten a.m, having been fooled in the past. But that adjustment never came. The trick seemed to work just about every time. The first few seconds of operation from my muggy morning brain, it turns out, are quite incapable of accessing the memory of the clock's persistent treachery: I see the 10 a.m. blinking at me, swear at myself, and launch myself into action.

In this way, i've found that by having my clock two hours fast, I'm able consistently to wake up at an exceptional velocity. I'm able to start the day as a winner. That's how I like it. That's how the Memrise team likes it.

Why sexual imagery can be helpful for remembering things

It's a recurring theme on this blog that happy remembering always, and without exception, involves finding things interesting and meaningful. This can mean many things: knowing enough about the domain that you're remembering from that everything is automatically imbued with meaning; and the other extreme, knowing so little that you need all the help you can get to engage with the material.

It's at this extreme that sexual imagery can be useful for remembering. When you really have no emotoinal relationship with the material you are trying to absorb, you have to bring it to life by means of the imagination. And of course, the sexual imagination has an unusual power to bring things to life.

I was recently approached by Tracy Clark-Florey of salon.com to give my thoughts on the subject. The resultant interview begins with a very pleasing, and somewhat misleading, intro:

"I went to Cooke for a deeper understanding of how sexy images helped him and Foer become reigning memory champs -- and how you can put that dirty mind of yours to better use."

In any case, for your convenience, here is the interview whole:

Why do sexual thoughts and images help with memory?

Most of the difficulties people have with memory are not that they forget completely, but that they find memories difficult to find. The key to finding a memory is to make it bright and attention-grabbing in the first place. Sex, of course, tends to grab our attention.

In this way, it can very useful to add a little bit of sexual imagery to whatever one is trying to remember, since it will make the resultant memories more attention-grabbing, and easier to find.

As an example, if you are trying to remember that the French word "interloqué" means "taken aback", it may be useful to imagine being taken aback when your dining companion interlocks her fingers round your thigh. The link between the French word and what it sounds like in English is given just enough personality by the hint of sexuality here, that it will stick in one's mind far better than a mere repetition.

How would you go about training someone to incorporate sexual images in their memorization routine?

Shockingly, it doesn't take a lot of training to get people to have dirty thoughts. That said, reminding yourself that your imagination is a zone without laws or restrictions can be liberating: no-one else knows or cares about the details of your mental life, so you may as well let your imagination go while learning things, especially if it helps you have fun, learn faster, and remember longer.

The trick is to notice when what you are trying to learn is boring you and to re-inject interest with the choice addition of some sexual imagery. Find chemical formulae difficult? Re-imagine them as elaborate sexual configurations. Find your pin number -- for example, 3198 -- difficult to grasp? Re-imagine it as a 31 year old man with his 98 year old lover. With a little bit of freedom of mind, almost any piece of information can be recast in sexual form, greatly increasing its chances of being remembered.

Are certain kinds of sexual images more helpful than others? What elements are most critical?

This is a whatever-floats-your-boat situation-- the incorporation of eunuchs to imagery would work for Emperor Nero but might not be the thing for you. Or maybe it is? Again, no judging. For my part, I like my sexual imagery suggestive rather than explicit. But remember that the point of this sexual imagery is to encode useful information. The critical thing is that your image, whatever it is, helps you recall whatever you are trying to learn.

Is there a point at which the imagery can distract from the thing being memorized? Do the images have to be kept in check so that they don't overwhelm?

It does occasionally happen that an outrageous or unpleasant image gets in the way of recall. For instance, I once learned that the French word "saucer" means to "wipe with a piece of bread" by imagining my saucy lover wiping me with a piece of bread. When it came in conversation to trying to use this word, though, I was distracted by the weirdness of the image and stuttered. On rare occasions, this effect can be extreme. In the finals of the World Memory Championship one time, it so happened that in the course of the spontaneous imagery I was using to help remember a pack of cards, the sight of Frank Sinatra receiving fellatio from a cow caused me to choke on my coffee. I cursed the four of spades that day.

In terms of assisting in memory exercises, how does erotic imagery measure up with other sorts of edgy and taboo material?

An excellent question. Variety is the spice of life, so one always wants a good range of imagery to excite and energize one's mind in the course of memorizing something. Violence is of course very memorable, as is (for the English, at least) queue-barging, anything expensive or illegal, Germans, humor, and items of exceptional beauty or ugliness. The sexual imagination is just one small part of the gift we have for making the world more vivid, interesting and memorable.

Would you mind sharing an example of a sexual scene that could be used in a memory exercise?

Good god no. Make your own sexual images!

When your mind is all over the place, try this game

I found myself this afternoon in a kind of paralysis of inattention. Between a new and exciting context, jetlag, a things-to-do list half a mile long and a gnawing worry or two, my mind was bouncing round like a shoe in a tumble-dryer, entirely unable to stay in one place. I was touching down upon a hundred tasks, and nailing none of them. Such a state is a perfect recipe for all sorts of bad mental stuff. It was making me feel like a worthless fool. I needed to do something about it.

So I played the following game with myself, a variant of something I picked up from an introduction I once read to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. It’s a simple exercise for regaining control over an over-active attention. The technique works by quickly reminding you of the difference between focus and unfocus, and it has the effect of re-calibrating your sense of normal attention, and allows you to regain control over your mind.

Here’s how the game works in a nutshell: you pay no attention for a minute, then you pay attention for a minute, then you switch back to not paying attention, and then back again to focus. You go back and forth like this for ten or twenty minutes. By the end, you somewhat magically reassume control of your mental ship.

I began, then, by spending a minute deliberately letting my attention wander. Rather than fighting and being exasperated by my somewhat manic mind, I endorsed its many movements, welcoming them. So my mind hopped and skipped between Skype updates, to Tweets to Facebook, to new emails, back to tweets, to emails, to my things to do list. I savoured the feeling of utter distraction.

Then after a minute, with great conviction, I did the exact opposite. I paid exaggeratedly good attention to a single thing. This happened to be nothing of any great interest, just a short email I needed to write. But I deliberately threw my mind at it as if it was a rare gem, a velvet flag in the desert, something utterly enthralling. Now because it was just a minute, and just a game, there was no sense of the weight of all the things I would have to be doing next. No sense of worry, no self-consciousness or self-criticism at all. Nothing was weighing upon my sense of control. So I easily and impishly kept my attention exactly on the task at hand for these sixty seconds, and playfully repelled any motions of my mind that threatened to fizz it off at a distracted angle. The minute passed at a level of truly zen focus. The email, several hundred words long, poured out seamlessly. But before it was complete, the minute was up.

The game dictated that I should switch back to exaggerated inattention, accepting any offer my mind made to fly off from my focused email to whatever object of attention my computer could present to me. That’s what I then did- and there is no lack of possible distraction on my computer. So I flicked and flittered and flapped my way between multiple tasks for a minute. I observed my distraction with indulgence. For the record, this second minute of distraction encompassed a friend’s holiday snaps, before I saw a new email had come in, so I checked it, but it was an offer in cheap duvets 3,000 miles away, so I hopped instead to live cricket updates, became bored, went back to email, nothing new, so back to a gnawing worry. A minute passed in an unhappy broth of such choppy mental nonsense.

I then returned to the email I was writing. A minute of zen composition duly poured out. Then back to distraction. Then back to focus, and so on and so forth. Twenty times back and forth I went between total distraction and an absolute, aggressive purity of focus.

By the end of twenty minutes, my mind knew the difference again between confusion and clarity. I had regained a subtle sense of whether my mental foot was still or hopping around like a cat on a hot tin roof: the difference between the two, oddly enough, can actually be really easy to miss.

After this little exercize had finished, I was able to concentrate again with great calmness on a rapid sequence of things-to-do. The list quickly halved, I’d over-estimated its length. I was back on track again.

The back and forth game can be played in conversation, while contemplating a log, while on the bus, while going to sleep. It’s I guess little more than a really unsophisticated version of beginner’s meditation, but it’s good fun, easy to try, and can get a wayward brain back on track in short order.

How does the mind go?

I don't know if this is true of anyone else, but my default way of understanding what goes on in my head is that different kinds of mental process go at different speeds.

So I typically think of perception (seeing, hearing etc) taking place really fast; and thought being a bit slower, and emotion being slower still.

And because when something happens fast, I intuitively figure that it can then happen more often, I tend to think of there being loads of experience of sights and sounds in my mind, then not quite as many thoughts, and then still not quite as many emotions.

But I think that's wrong. I think that our thought and emotion and perception are so interwoven that it's impossible, and maybe even incoherent, to think of one happening quicker or more often than the other.

I was reminded of this just now when I had what is quite possibly the weirdest and most entertaining 1/2 second of facial perception in my life.

To my left, I was vaguely aware of a middle-aged man. At some point my eyes flicked over to him, and in the half second or second that followed, something like the following sequence of thoughts, emotions and percepts was included:

First, I mis-recognized his bearded, somewhat prognathic face, as that of Harold Shipman (the infamous, and now deceased, serial-killer); the resulting admixture of thought and emotion -surprise, horror, "it's impossible" were dominant- was almost instantaneously dispatched by the looming sense that it was Robin Williams with Good Will Hunting beard before me: a sense of rich recognition, fuzzy warmth and a clear aura of general wholesomeness arose in my mind; but this was just as soon replaced by a bemused neutrality when I realized I didn't know the person; and that fresh neutrality was then shattered when the man made eye-contact with my somewhat astonished-looking face, and registered a horrified surprise of his own, which naturally amplified my horrified surprise, and I averted my eyes and continued on my way.

These kinds of kaleidoscopic mish-mashes of perception, thought and emotion happen the whole time, but in such speedy, automatic, microscopic form, that I don't readily recognize it and can spend weeks at a time not noticing. But when it happens in this kind of extreme form, it really brings home just how much thought and emotion and perception intermix, how quickly they travel, and how enjoyably they interrelate. Such fun being a human!

What does the word 'torrid' mean?

What defines a word's meaning? The dictionary? How people use it? Its history? The imagery people have in mind when they hear or utter it?

As an amateur experiment to explore these questions, I recently sent a text to my educated friends (or so I thought..) asking them to define the word 'torrid' for me. It's a low-frequency word, but one which everyone will hear used a few times a year. Before you read on, try defining torrid yourself. Try to think why you think that it means what you think it means. Explore the nuances of feeling around your conviction. Then make a note of your thoughts.

Back to the experiment. Unusually for one of my text messages, I got some speedy responses. Here they are:

"Uneasy, bothered, out of comfort zone, stormy"

"Gleefully, morally disgusting"

"Hot, short and kind of dirty"

"Emotionally exhuasting, stormy".

"Dunno but sounds viscousy... my friend's saying it's connected to a river, but I think she's confusing it with torrents"

"A state of being frequently beset by anxiety of difficulty"

"no ideas here... maybe violent, or dirty"

"Bad, stormy: coming from the same place as torment, tornado"

"A bit sleazy, dirty and possibly morally wrong"

"Ok, uh oh, well it rhymes with horrid, and sounds like torrent- is it a gritty, under the counter kind of nasty mess?"

"Harsh, difficult, tough, abrasive"

"Storm-tossed; terrible; the sense of "having-been-through-it"

The torrid Saharan sands

For the record, torrid means "hot, parched". Its secondary meaning is "ardent, emotionally charged".

Some observations:

1) None of my friends had the slightest notion of torrid's first meaning.

2) They all to have correctly picked up on the dimension of emotional intensity which is there in the secondary meaning.

3) A sense of negativity and of the illicit is apparent in almost all of these spontaneous definitions (the influence of nearby "horrid" and "torment"?)

4) The notion of sexual illicitness is all over the place. No doubt connected to the common occurrence of the phrase "torrid affair" (which one hears often, despite the fact that no-one I know has ever claimed to have had one).

5) The influence of "torrent" is apparent in references to fluidity, gas, storminess. Perhaps "tornado" and "torment" also play a role in the generally storm-tossed feel of these definitions.

A torrid affair

It's a fascinating insight into how a word's meaning, once disconnected from its essential root (in this case the Latin word 'torrere', which means 'to parch') is coloured and distorted by the meanings and emotional connotations and coincidental overlap among similar sounding words (torrent, horrid, torment, tornado) and also contexts of over-use (in this case, presumably, phrases of the kind "they conducted a torrid affair in a Casablancan Hotel").

If a word is defined by how it is experienced and used, then my friends aren't wrong. And the current meaning of the word 'torrid' cannot therefore be found in dictionaries.

A last thought: since learning the original, primary meaning of "torrid" I've had a fresh affection for the word, even when I hear it used by people who don't have that meaning in mind. It's similar to the feeling I get when a founder I'd not been aware of comes back to a company he'd been forced out of years before: the whole feel of the word, like the company, gains a feel of authenticity and potency.

How to build a satnav that doesn't make you stupid.

Satnav is making us stupid. You often read of people doing things like traveling 400 miles in the wrong direction, or driving into rivers, or turning disastrously onto train tracks- all by too credulously following their satnav's directions.

But these are only the extreme cases. Anyone with a smart-phone knows how even under normal conditions using satnav tends quickly to atrophy your ability to remember and navigate places and routes by yourself. You just don't need these skills anymore.

It needn't be that way. Here's seven ways satnav could be re-designed to positively assist in making you learn about your environment, while still getting you easily to your destination. 

1.) Point out interesting things

Satnav is designed to save us the bother of noticing the outside world. But if you don't notice it, you don't remember it. 

Memorable satnav would be like a chatty companion, always pointing out objects of interest as they passed, giving you a generous shot at remembering them.

“We're driving through the town of Wem. Notice that the buildings are all pretty new. That's because the Great Fire of Wem destroyed most of the town in 1677. Began when a 14 year old girl knocked over a candle. Anyhow- here's the town hall, for what it's worth"

2.) Make all routes unique

Satnav makes all journeys the same, yet each is unique. Memory adores what is unique. Memorable satnav would make each journey completely unique- sometimes meaningfully, sometimes by appealing to amusing trivia- a job for which the internet is almost designed. E.g.

" Here’s an interesting piece of trivia. Your journey begins at an altitude of 145 metres, and ends an hour later by the sea. That’s a fall of…

“145 metres.”

“Correct. One point. At that rate, you would reach the centre of the earth if you carried on going for...

" 23 years?”.

"Correct"

3.) Demand active recall

Directions go in one ear, and out the other when you use satnav: you only need them for as long as you are making your next turn, after all. But without any repetition, memories don’t get formed. 

Memorable satnav would prompt you to recall the places you’ve just been. There’s no better way to form memories than by being forced to recall them.

“ok, just now, we passed  through which 14^th century market town in order to join the A458?

“Shrewsbury”

“Correct. Ten points. You now have the Mr. Moustache achievement."

4.) Help you make connections

Satnav doesn’t notice when you’ve done a route before- and quite often, as a result, neither do you. You just don't need to make any connections. But memories are connections, so you don't end up making any memories as a result.

Memorable satnav would notice when you are nearby something you know, and it would help you make the connection. 

“You’ll recall that last time you passed through here, you stopped at the Coach and Horses, and ate dinner there. Here’s a message to your future self you took the time to record “Mate- glad you’re still alive. Whatever you do, don’t eat the Butternut Squash”

5.) Vary experience creatively

Satnav typically takes you on the same route, even if there are other interesting possibilities that would take only fractionally longer. 

Memorable satnav would creatively vary the routes to give you a broader and more interconnected experience of places you pass through frequently. As with all learning, the broader the range of examples, the more powerful and flexible the understanding that results.

“Ok, last time we were on our way to Burnley, as you no doubt recall, we went straight on at the approaching junction. This time, for badness, we’ll take a left after the postbox, and go cross-country. There are some lovely views, and we’ll pass St. Thomas’ church, where the poet Silvia Plath is buried”.

6.) Remind you of past routes

Satnav forgets about the trips you’ve taken in the past as soon as you have. But if you’re going to remember anything, then you need to be reminded of it, not only as you’re learning it- but after a week, a month, a year. This is called spaced repetition. Intelligent satnav would give you just such optimally scheduled reminders of the routes you’ve taken in the past.

“Where were we going when we passed a chimney last week?"

“The giant one?”

“Yes"

"Doncaster"

"Wrong. Minus five points. We were going to Peterborough."

7) Make geography socially relevant

We’re social beings. Facebook has taught us that we like to “share information” with our friends. 

To make our journeys more memorable, satnav should draw attention to our friends’ travels in the past.

“Your friend Dan had a breakdown a year back just on the right here, right in the middle of nowhere.  And get this- his mobile ran out of battery, and he had to wade through a river to get to a farmhouse where he could call a breakdown crew. I’ve taken the liberty of auto-dialling him now, actually, so that you can help him re-live this painful episode"

I'd actually really like to make an app that does this. Easily done by scraping Wikipedia and Facebook for geographically tagged info, and using collaborative filtering for popular directions etc, a bit of AI to narrate the stuff, and yadadadada all the techno babble I hear round the office all day.

It's probably worth mentioning that Memrise is currently providing something pretty damn close to the vocab-equivalent of this experience. Check it out

Doing Violence to your Memories

When you learn the meaning of a new word, it often happens that over the next few days it magically pops up everywhere you look and listen: on the radio, in conversation, in the things you are reading.

This common experience can seem like cosmic coincidence, as if the world is helping you practise your new bit of vocab. In fact, it’s elegant evidence that what you know (your memory) determines what you notice (your perception).

The influence of memory on perception is everywhere, but it only shows itself when things go awry, or change suddenly.

Examples abound: when you take a swig of latte only for someone’s tea to arrive in your mouth, it tastes disgusting- even if you love tea. The expectation (memory) of coffee blended with the reality (sensation) of tea makes that tea taste different. A related process is at work when you recall that the girl you’re looking at is the sole heir to the Argos fortune- and she suddenly looks more symmetrical.

The key point to realize here is that most of the time we assume we see the world just as it is; but these examples suggest that we’re highly constrained in what we experience by our own memories. It’s a bit like the world is rehearsed.

By confusing your memory, however, you can counteract this tendency, and perceive the world anew.

Which can be interesting. It comes down to breaking from the comforts of routine. Here are four suggested ways you might commit violence against routine, and thus memory, so as to see the world more clearly.

1) Sleep with your head at the wrong end of the bed: on waking up, your memory will be lost for words and give you a half-second or so of pure perception- where you may notice, for instance, that your curtains are ugly and need replacing.

2) Eat dinner at breakfast time: it’ll be weird, but fun: you’ll perhaps notice that your sense of the difference between morning and evening is based mainly on the distinction between corn flakes and macaroni cheese.

3) Re-arrange your furniture: the room may feel exceedingly different; your bad habits may not recognize the situation any more, so may have difficulty getting going. So you’ll, for instance, actually notice that 80% of the house cup-population is on your bedside table.

4) Go nocturnal, and check out commuters in your new (7 a.m.) evenings. You’ll perhaps notice that they are very strange, and you may reconsider your career on a more permanent basis.

Try one of these activities out- they rarely fail to amuse and inform.

Memorable Dreams

It isn’t just because our dreams are more interesting than our actual lives that they’re so worth remembering. There’s a further advantage: detailed dream-memory fosters the understanding that can enable us to recognize our dreams as they occur. If we can do that, then we can have the pleasure of taking control. And lucid dreaming, as this is called, is about the most entertaining private activity known to man.

What makes dream-recall difficult is the way memories are stored in contexts. To recall a memory, we re-activate the state we were in when we first stored it. If you learn something when diving after jellyfish while wearing a false moustache, for instance, you’ll recall it best when re-submerged, re-moustachioed and back chasing the jellies.

The problem with remembering dreams is a kind of Catch 22: you’re either in a dream-state, and therefore too asleep to be doing any remembering; or else you’re awake, but outside the dreamy context where dream-memories cluster. To escape this bind requires tactical nous: you need to begin your dream-recall before your dreams have entirely finished.

Fortunately, our dreams are very punctual: they tend to fit our sleep schedules exactly. So by setting your alarm as little as ten minutes earlier than normal, you can reliably wake during a dream, not after it. Here is your opportunity: it takes a few moments fully to exit dreaminess. Get recalling with pen and paper during this period, and you’ll be thrilled with what you can remember.

And by practicing dream-recall like this daily for three weeks consecutively, you’ll find an almost surreal extension to your powers of recollection. You’ll remember multiple dreams- and in astonishing, filmic detail. Why such improvement? Because you’ll have come to understand the thing you’re seeking, you’ll know the quirks and foibles of your dreams.

This honed sense of their characteristic style will then allow you to spot your dreams for what they are- when you’re inside them. While dreaming, as you get down to installing a swimming pool in your E-Type Jag, or whatever, you’ll no longer find it it all very sensible, as one generally does. Instead, you’ll think to yourself “this sort of nonsense happens only in dreams”. Such a realization will allow you to draw the conclusion “this must therefore be a dream”. And once you know that, you can begin exercising control. The delights that follow are up to you.

The perfect 100!

The spoken number event at the world memory championships. I believed at the time that Memory Championships needed more public emotion.