A Memory For All Seasonings Essay

Memory is one of the well-nigh important functions of the mind. Without our memories, we would have no identity, no individuality. The pastime article is whatsoeverwhat a mnemonist, a mortal with an extraordinary power of remembering. The title includes a pun, a form of humor based on a play on run-in. The usual accent to describe something constant and dependable is for all seasons here the phrase is changed to for all seasonings. (Seasonings is another word for spices, such as salt, pepper, and curry.) What hint does this give you about the mnemonist? (Early in the article you will find out.) wiz evening two courses ago, Peter Poison, a member of the psychology department at the University of Colorado, took his son and little girl to dinner at Bananas, a fashionable restaurant in Boulder. When the waiter took their orders, Poison noticed that the teen man didnt write anything down. He honorable listened, made small talk, told them that his name was John Conrad, and left. Poison didnt think this was exceptional There were, after all, whole three of them at the table. Yet he found himself watching Conrad closely when he returned to take the orders at a nearby table of eight. Again the waiter listened, chatted, and wrote nothing down. When he brought Poison and his children their dinners, the prof couldnt resist introducing himself and telling Conrad that hed been observing him. The young man was pleased. He wanted guests to notice that, unlike other waiters, he didnt use a pen and paper. Sometimes, when they did notice, they left him quite a large tip. He had once handled a table of nineteen complete dinner orders without a single error.At Bananas, a party of nineteen (a bill of roughly $200) would normally leave the waiter a $35 tip. They had left Conrad $85. Poison was strike enough to ask the waiter whether he would like to come to the universitys psychology lab and let them run some tests on him. Anders Ericsson, a young Swedish psychologist r ecently involved in memory board research, would be joining the university faculty soon, and Poison thought that he would be interested in exploring memory methods with the waiter. Conrad said he would be glad to cooperate. He was al styluss on the lookout for ways to increase his income, and Poisontold him he would receive $5 an hr to be a guinea pig. Conrad, of course, was not the first person with an extraordinary memory to attract attention from researchers. Alexander R. Luria, the distinguished Soviet psychologist, studied a Russian newspaper reporter named Shereshevskii for many years and wrote about him in The Mind of a Mnemonist (Basic Books, 1968).Luria says that Shereshevskii was able to nab a series of fifty words spoken once and recite them back in perfect order fifteen years later. Another illustrious example of extraordinary memory, the conductor Arturo Tos stopini, was cognise to have watchd every note for every instrument in 250 symphonies and 100 operas. For d ecades the common belief among psychologists was that memory was a resolved quantity an exceptional memory, or a poor one, was something with which a person was born. This point of view has come under attack in recent years expert memory is no longer universally considered the exclusive gift of the genius, or the abnormal. People with astonishing memory for pictures, musical scores, chess positions, business transactions, dramatic scripts, or faces atomic number 18 by no means unique, wrote Cornell psychologist Ulric Neisser in Memory Observed (1981).They may not even be very rargon. Some university researchers, including Poison and Ericsson, go a mensuration further than Neisser. They believe that there are no physiological differences at all between the memory of a Shereshevskii or a Tos dopeini and that of the mean(a) person. The only real difference, they believe, is that Toscanini trained his memory, exercised it regularly, and wanted to cleanse it. Like many mountain wit h his capacity to remember, Toscanini may also have used memory tricks called mnemonics. Shereshevskii, for example, employed a technique known as loci. As soon as he heard a series of words, he mentally distributed them along Gorky Street in Moscow. If one of the words was orange, he might visualize a man stepping on an orange at a precise location on the well-known(prenominal) street. Later, in order to retrieve orange, he would take an imaginary walk down Gorky Street and see the image from which it could easily be recalled.Did the waiter at Bananas have such a system? What was his secret? John Conrad would be the subject of Anders Ericssons second in-depth study of the machinations of memory. As a research participator at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Ericsson had spent the previous three years working with William traverse on an extensive study of Steve Faloon, an undergraduate whose memory and intellectual skills wereconsidered average. When Ericsson and Chase b egan testing Faloon, he could remember no more than seven random digits after hearing them spoken once. According to generally accepted research, almost everyone is heart-to-heart of storing five to nine random digits in short-run memory. After twenty months of working with Chase and Ericsson, Faloon could memorize and retrieve eighty digits. The important thing about our testing Faloon is that researchers usually study experts, Chase says. We studied a novice and watched him grow into an expert. Initially, we were only running tests to see whether his digit cross could be expanded.For 4 days he could not go beyond seven digits. On the fifth day he discovered his mnemonic system and then began to improve rapidly. Faloons intellectual abilities didnt change, the researchers say. Nor did the storage capacity of his short-term memory. Chase and Ericsson believe that short-term memory is a more or less fixed quantity. It reaches saturation quickly, and to overcome its limitations o ne must learn to link new data with material that is permanently stored in long memory. Once the tie-ups have been made, the short-term memory is free to absorb new information. Shereshevskii transferred material from short-term to long-term memory by placing words along Gorky Street in Moscow. Faloons pastime was long-distance running, and he discovered that he could break down a spoken list of eighty digits into units of three or four and associate most of these with running times. To Faloon, a series like 4 , 0 , 1 ,2 would translate as four minutes, one and two-tenths seconds, or near a four-minute grayback 2, 1, 4, 7 would be encoded as two hours fourteen minutes seven seconds, or an excellent marathon time.When running didnt provide the link to his long-term memory, ages and dates did 1, 9, 4, 4 is not relevant to running, but it is near the end of World War II. Chase and Ericsson see individual differences in memory performance as resulting from previous experience and me ntal training. In sum, they write, adult memory performance can be adequately described by a single specimen of memory. Not every student of psychology agrees with Chase and Ericsson, of course. Im very suspicious of saying that everyone has the same kind of memory, says Matthew Erdelyi, a psychologist at Brooklyn College. In my research, he says, I find that people have very different memory levels. They can all improve, but some levels remain high and some remain low. There are dramatic individualdifferences. It is unlikely that there will be any agreement among psychologists on the conclusions that they have thus removed drawn from their research.The debate about exceptional memory will continue. But in the meantime it is interesting to look deeper into the mind of a contemporary mnemonist. Ericsson and Poison, twain of whom have tested Conrad over the past two years, believe that there is nothing intellectually outstanding about him. When they began testing Conrads memory, hi s digit span was normal about seven numbers. His grades in college were average. Conrad himself says that he is unexceptional mentally, but he has compared his earliest memories with others and has found that he can recall things that many people cant. His first distinct memory is of lying on his back and raising his legs so that his mother could change his diapers.As a high-school student he didnt take notes in classhe says he preferred watching the girls take notesand he has never made a list in his life. By never writing down a list of things to do, and letting it think for me, he says, Ive forced my memory to improve. Conrad does believe that his powers of observation, including his ability to listen, are keener than most peoples. Memory, he says, is just one part of the whole process of observation. Im not extraordinary, but sometimes people actualize me feel that way. I watch them and realize how many of them have disorganized minds and memories and that makes me feel unusual . A good memory is nothing more than an organized one. One of the first things Conrad observed at Bananas was that the headwaiter, his boss, was a very unpleasant woman. He disliked being her subordinate, and he wanted her telephone line. The only way he could shrink it was by being a superior waiter.He stayed up nights trying to figure out how to do this the idea of memorizing orders eventually came to him. Within a year he was the headwaiter. One of the most interesting things weve found, says Ericsson, is that just trying to memorize things does not insure that your memory will improve. Its the active decision to lay out better and the number of hours you push yourself to improve that make the difference. Motivation is much more important than innate ability. Conrad began his memory training by trying to memorize the orders for a table of two, then progressed to memorizing larger orders. He starts by associating the entree with the customers face. He might see a large, heavy-s et man and hear Id like a big Boulder Steak. Sometimes, Peter Poison says, Johnthinks a person looks like a turkey and that customer orders a turkey sandwich. Then its easy.In memorizing how long meat should be cooked, the different salad dressings, and starches, Conrad relies on patterns of repetition and variation. John breaks things up into chunks of four, Ericsson says. If he hears rare, rare, medium, well-done, he instantly sees a pattern in their relationship. Sometimes he makes a mental graph. An easy progressionrare, medium-rare, medium, well-donewould take the shape of a steady ascending line on his graph. A more difficult ordermedium, well-done, rare, mediumwould resemble a mountain range.The simplest part of Conrads system is his encode of salad dressings. He uses letters B for blue cheese /-/for the house dressing 0 for oil and vinegar F for French T for Thousand Island. A series of orders, always arranged according to entree, might spell a word, like B-O-O-T, or a nea r-word, like B-O-O-F, or make a phonetic pattern F-O-F-O. As Ericsson says, Conrad remembers orders, regardless of their size, in chunks of four, This is similar to the way Faloon stores digits, and it seems to support Chase and Ericssons contention that short-term memory is limited and that people are most comfortable working with small units of information. One of the most intriguing things about Conrad is the number of ways he can associate material. Another is the upper with which he is able to call it up from memory.Ericsson and Poison have also tested him with animals, units of time, flowers, and metals. At first, his recall was slow and uncertain. But with relatively little practice, he could retrieve these orders almost as quickly as he could food. The difference between someone like John, who has a trained memory, and the average person, says Ericsson, is that he can encode material in his memory fast and effortlessly. Its similar to the way you can understand English when you hear it spoken. In our tests in the lab, he just gets better and faster. What John Conrad has, says Poison, is not unlike an athletic skiil. With two or three hundred hours of practice, you can develop these skills in the same way you can learn to play tennis. (1945 words)I Comprehension QuizChoose the best way of finishing each statement, based on what you have justread.1. The psychology professor discovered John Conrads incredible ability to memorize a. in school b. on a test c. in a restaurant2. Conrad agreed to let the professor study his memory because a. Conrad was interested in psychologyb. Conrad wanted to increase his incomec. Conrad needed to improve his memory3. The famous Russian mnemonist Shereshevskii used a memory trick called loci to remember objects by a. associating them with events in Russian historyb. imagining them placed along a street in Moscowc. picturing each one in his mind in a different color4. The memory trick used by Steve Faloon was the associatio n of certain numbers with a. running times b. important datesc. both the above d. none of the above5. Conrad had beena. a gifted studentb. a below-average studentc. an average student6. Part of Conrads motivation for developing memory tricks to aid him as a waiter was a. his desire to get his bosss jobb. his great admiration for the headwaiterc. his fear of not finding any work7. Imagine that four customers have requested that their steaks be cooked in the following way well-done, medium, medium-rare, rare. According to John Conrads mental graph technique, this order would be remembered as a. a steadily ascending lineb. a steadily descending linec. a mountain range8. From this article a careful reader should infer thata. everyone has about the same memory capacity and can develop a superior memory through practice and motivation b. a good or bad memory is an ability that a person is born with and cannot change to any great degree c. there is still no conclusive evidence as to whethe r outstanding memories are inborn or developedII Finding Support For or Against a HypothesisAs the article points out, some psychologists today believe that extraordinary memories are only the result of development through hard work and the application of a system. According to them, an average person could achieve a superior memory if he or she tried hard enough. Find evidence from the article to support this hypothesis. Then find evidence from the article that goes against this hypothesis. What is your opinion of this controversial question?