Subscribe to our Blog
The Peg Memory Technique
Human short-term memory is extremely limited, being able to hold only about seven items at a time. However, humans have devised some ingenious ways around this bottleneck, including chunking items (for example, how you remember phone numbers) and linking things you need to remember to locations that you know well. Here's a third way, namely the peg technique, as outlined in a very cool book, Sleights of Mind, which reveals how magicians exploit vulnerabilities hardwired into human brains. As the authors write about the peg technique, "Why aren't children taught this technique to learn their multiplication tables or other lists of facts? If neurologists could harness these techniques, maybe they could teach Alzheimer's patients to remember better the order in which to don their clothing each morning, maybe enable them to live in their own homes for one more year."
The following excerpt (pp. 125-127) shows how a magician named Apollo enhances his memory. His increased ability to remember things allows him to pull off all kinds of stunts, from "mind-reading" to card tricks.
"Apollo explained that by mentally associating mundane numbers and objects (or people, places, things, activities, concepts, and so forth) with imagined wild caricatures of those things, he could retain the memory of a large number of those associations for an incredibly long time. So long that it didn't seem like memory at all, it seemed magical. He demonstrated by asking Susana to write a list of 15 items, in random order and hidden from his view, and to call them out as she proceeded. 'Number 6: wolf; number 11: market; number 2: roulette...' ...
"Apollo listened but did not appear to be concentrating particularly carefully. At the end of the list, Apollo said, 'Okay, now I'll say them back to you in order. Please check them against your list.' Susana ensured that Apollo could not see her written list as he proceeded to read them off from his own mental list as promised: 'Number one: tennis ball; number two: roulette...' He got them all perfectly. He then recited the list backward. Next he asked Susana to cross out seven of the items from the list in random order and to state, out loud, just the number of each entry as it was crossed out. The list remained hidden from Apollo's view as Susana crossed out her selections. Apollo then reported the remaining undeleted items, in numerical order.
"Apollo's performance was a straightforward and extremely impressive display of mnemonic power. We reeled under its implications. 'How did you do that?' Apollo explained that it was an easy trick that served to boost human memory capacity immensely. 'All I did was to associate each number-object pair with an imagined caricature of each object. But the real trick is that I have a list of standard objects that I use to represent each number. It's based on similar-sounding objects, or number homonyms. For example, the number one sounds like 'wand', so when I make the association between the object and the number, I'm really associating a wand with the chosen object. In this case I burned the image of a tennis ball holding a wand into my memory. Then when the time comes to recite the list, I take each number in turn (backward or forward), recall the associated number-homonym that I always use for that number, and then use that to jog my memory as to the associated object from Susana's list. To delete an item from the list, I imagine each object-number pair being destroyed graphically as Susana crosses it from her list. In the case of the wand-wielding tennis ball, I imagined the pair on fire and then the tennis ball exploding from the internal pressure..."