Cognitive NueroScientist to Game Show winner

--amadeus--

Does understanding how your brain works make you smarter? If you know your memory can you manipulate it?

And if you are a neuroscientist will that give you an edge in a general knowledge quiz?

Step in Seed magazine...

Boston University’s doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience prepares students for a career in brain modeling, robot design, or biomedical engineering—or for winning cash on the television quiz show Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?

Read what happened here...

democrates

You don't need to qualify as a neuroscientist to achieve such feats of memory, the techniques can be understood and applied by any person of sound mind.

An extreme example is this chap who resembles Mr. Bean's evil twin : http://www.memorablecarvello.co.uk/memoryworldrecords.htm

Many howto books and websites exist if you spend some time on google. In short the more pathways to a memory the higher the chance of recall. Victorian illusionists weren't up on neuroscience but knew that they could recall more easily if more things reminded them of a given fact.

I agree with democrates, you obviously don't have to be a neuroscientist to use such techniques, but that's not what amadeus, nor the article was saying.

It's a good article, I've often used the technique of priming myself (although I didn't know it was called that) when I needed an answer to a question.

studiorat

democrates wrote: »

An extreme example is this chap who resembles Mr. Bean's evil twin : http://www.memorablecarvello.co.uk/memoryworldrecords.htm

Wedding photographer and memory man cool!

Here's a link to a film about a guy who can recite pi to something similar and perform calculations to over 100 decimal places. His case is a little different, his is a result of a head injury during childhood. Giving him 'naturally' occuring emotional connections to numbers. He also learned Icelandic in a week!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662#

democrates

studiorat wrote: »

Here's a link to a film about a guy who can recite pi to something similar and perform calculations to over 100 decimal places. His case is a little different, his is a result of a head injury during childhood. Giving him 'naturally' occuring emotional connections to numbers. He also learned Icelandic in a week!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4913196365903075662#

Thanks, awesome video! It's great that his abilities are not at the expense of being able to experience the full gamut of social life.

Daniel Tammet seems to be disconnected from the core mechanism his brain uses, he perceives the numbers and calculation instruction as shapes, then up pops a landscape which he interprets as numbers that are the correct answer. You can see why the math researchers are excited, I'm no expert but it seems to suggest that aside from classic computation there may be an as yet undiscovered geometric method.

The Japanese kids trained on the abacus and then able to do huge calculations by imagining an abacus just shows the potential ordinary people have. I think it makes sense to put effort into researching human potential, and that attempting to create an AI should be outlawed.