[ExI] jarring change

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] jarring change

 

For a long time the pro basketballer Jerry Lucas had a book on memorization.  If I were 50 years younger I would have every class buy it…

 

bill w

 

 

 

BillW, you made my day with that comment.

 

Someone gave me the book you referenced, and without even looking it up, I can tell you some cool things about that book.  It was given to me almost 50 years ago because I was in seventh grade at the time, so about 1971 or so.

 

I read it and used some of the techniques.  I remember some of the stuff in there: Jerry was a pro basketball guy and clearly very bright.  He met a guy who was a memory-tricks performer named Harry Lorraine (as I recall, not looking it up.)  On the cover of the paperback were the two authors, Jerry being about… mid 30s perhaps and Harry about mid 50s, hair graying, combed back.

 

Jerry wrote about an odd habit he picked up in his childhood: he memorized words spelled in alphabetic order.  Harry could toss him a word and he could give it back spelled alphabetically.

 

Harry explained how he was able to memorize long strings of numbers, asking audience members their names, telephone numbers and such, then he would do his show, then at the end, walk around and greet them by name and recite the number.

 

He explained how rote memorization is fine for stuff like the Scout Law, where it hasta be fast, but not so great for many other things such as names, whereby you can think of some characteristic of a person’s face and find a link to a mnemonic for remembering their name.

 

I read much of the book on the way to a sax repair shop in Orlando Florida where we had my sax re-padded by a man named Mr. Digerolama whose shop was over on Alafaya Trail.  All this was in 1971.

 

In that astonishing book, Lorraine introduced me to a technique for making words with numbers, using a system where T is for 1, N is 2, M is 3, R is 4, L is 5 and so on.  You can invent your own or use his.  I used a version of his, and memorized a bunch of my friends’ phone numbers and did some circus tricks with it.

 

If one can still buy Lorraine and Lucas’ The Memory Book, I can assure you, those techniques work.  Were I a professor, I too would have the students buy that book and read the hell outta that thin volume.

 

spike

 

 

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