Heather has an amazing ability to remember numbers.
Example: We ordered Girl Scout cookies a few weeks ago. When the young lady came to deliver them we weren't home, so she left a small note on the door with her phone number. That was over the weekend. This morning we were upstairs, well away from the note, we were discussing said Girl Scout cookies and Heather recalled the number in passing.
That's amazing to me!
My brain isn't good at remembering numbers like that. Heather does it all the time with phone numbers. She'll hear it once and then be able to call it weeks or months later.
I think I used to be like that. When I lived at West Point during 5th and 6th grades I had about fifteen friends and we were all hyper-connected via phone. I specifically remember not having trouble with their numbers. Being a military base, there was generally a lot of moving around, new people coming into the circle, etc. But I had no trouble keeping up.
Now, as I enter my third decade on the floating mud ball, I don't seem able to recall phone numbers nearly as well. Is it a dependence on technology? I read a study a couple days ago saying that people these days are much more dependent on their cell phone's address book than on their memory. Or was it those hubris-filled college years filled with drinking to excess? Did I damage my number memory potential?
Who knows.
So I briefly interrogated Heather. One interesting piece of illumination came when she said "yeah, but when we're in Florida I'm not as good at is... for example, when we drive by a bulletin board." She went on to describe that the area code and exchange numbers "weren't familiar."
Fascinating. Heather apparently iconifies, or codifies, the area code and exchange. The familiar 404, 678 and 770 area codes for the Atlanta area look like single digits to her... not three. I do this as well, when I write numbers down sometimes... I'll write 4/394-6102. This saves the memory space of remembering all three digits of the 404.
That's where my codifying stops. But apparently Heather continues to the exchange code... in the above example, my cell phone number, the 394. She described how she knows the exchanges for Tucker, Villa Rica, places her friends live, etc. So to Heather, my cell phone number looks more like 4/3/6102.
Which is a savings. It's six numbers versus ten. It's been shown that ten is very close to our mental capacity for number storage. In fact, in some cases above it.
And it may even be less than six. When she or I codify the 404, in our heads we don't codify it to a digit. We codify to something else... possibly emotional, visual or logical... for me I think of the center of the Atlanta skyline and the feel I had when I first moved to Atlanta and all numbers at Tech were 404. For me 770 represents the Smyrna area and a sense of green trees a little north of Atlanta... no kidding... the green is there in the memory. For me 678 is a picture of my first Nokia cell phone in my hand (it was my first 678 number).
Heather extends this mental model to the exchange code. She must have memories for the Tucker area and others that compress that exchange.
These recollections in our heads are likely much easier for the brain to store and recall than a digit.
All of this explains why Heather's not as good at recalling a number off a billboard in Florida... she has no mental codes to compress the number. She's forced to try to remember the long number.
Those people who go to memory competitions do the same thing. They're asked to memorize the order of a deck of cards in a minute. Or to memorize a random string of numbers in ten minutes. When interviewed, each has their technique to codify the data. Some make little songs. One created mental images of actors and united them to various numeric combinations.
For him the 30 digit number 876987587547654765447676835876 looks like: 876 987 587 547 654 765 447 676 835 876
There are 999 possible three-digit number combinations, so he practiced a number-to-actor map. He literally practiced, like you'd practice playing soccer. What this means is that to him, the list of numbers was actually: Dustin Hoffman Halle Barry Red Fox Tom Cruise Alan Alda Gillian Andersen Lauren Bacall Burt Lancaster Ray Liotta Joe Mantegna
He essentially compressed that 30 digit number into a 10 digit number. A compression factor of three. He relied on the brain's ability to recall faces and trained that ability to relate to numbers.
In and of itself, the number-to-actor map wouldn't allow him to remember thousands of random numbers. In fact part of the point of my example is to show how a mental trick can make a 30 digit number look like a 10 digit number... a standard phone number that we can all, usually, remember.
He wouldn't win at the competitions remembering phone numebers. So the next thing he did was he relied on the narrative capability of the brain. The brain is great at taking many pieces of information and uniting them into a story (now you see why that Episodes feature on Reger.com was so important to me, but more on that some other day). So what this memory expert did was he told a story to himself. For the above example it may have been: "Dustin Hoffman was sleeping with Halle Barry who had a strange erotic attraction to Red Fox who was an inspiration to Tom Cruise and Alan Alda, both people who would like to sleep with Gillian Andersen or Lauren Bacall. Burt Lancaster heard about the situation and recruited Ray Liotta to beat up Joe Mantegna."
Ok, so that's an example story and you can imagine making it much longer. The point is that the story is easier to remember because it relies on the brain's great capability to tell stories. This has always been fascinating to me since middle school when I learned about the memory crutches that people use. It cemented a belief in my head that we're all essentially equally intelligent, and that the way that we train our brains... the way that we think... is what gives rise to what we call intelligence in our society.
That notion of intelligence has changed over time. In the middle ages intelligence was akin to recollection. People could make a living memorizing things. It was thought that memorizing was a good measure of a person's brain potential. In truth, they were just employing the same mental parlor tricks that people do today.
In modern society intelligence means something more than recollection... it implies an ability to reason, analyze and conclude. This is certainly moving us up the mental food chain, but I still firmly believe that what we call intelligence has nothing to do with potential and everything to do with the way that each of our potential is applied.
Whenever I think of intelligence I think of the kid who's failing second grade. He gets pegged as not very intelligent. Put into special classes. Spoon-fed information. And then, after school with his buddies, he racalls every single statistic on every baseball card in his collection. He proves a mental memory capability and an analysis capability as he brings literally millions of statistical combinations together and concludes "I'm not trading so-and-so for so-and-so." The kid isn't stupid... his brain just isn't being applied to school.
This intelligence-equality thing is one of my core beliefs as a human. While I acknowledge that there are most certainly differences in mental capacity between two people, I don't believe that those differences can account for what we percieve as intelligence or a lack thereof. It's all in how you use the grey matter... not in how much of it there is.
So, in essence, Heather, without knowing it, acts like a world-class memory expert when she remembers phone numbers. Now where are those Girl Scout cookies?
Update, next day: Had a good instant messanger chat with Leon about this stuff. He points out that Heather, as a real estate agent, has a job that requires her to correlate phone numbers and locations frequently. He's exactly right. Missy brings up some other good examples of "chunking" and refers me to some interesting reading. Thanks Missy!
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