There’s an article in today’s New York Times about a 15-year-old kid who memorized the first 8,784 digits of pi. Leaving aside the question of “why,” I have heard it asserted that such intense feats of memorization are actually harmful to the intellect in some sense. But I have to note that the assertions I’m referring to are made specifically about those who spend years memorizing the Koran.
Is there any scientific validity to this notion, or can it be dismissed as anti-Muslim prejudice?
There is actually quite a bit of evidence that memorization may be helpful for the brain - to keep it active, so to speak, particularly for older individuals. Use it or lose it.
However, I’ve heard a rumour (and sadly, that’s all I’ve got) is that Einstein, generally recognized as a smart guy, DIDN’t memorize things such as phone numbers, and wore the same outfit every day (one of 7 versions of it) specifically to leave his brain power for other things, like relativity.
I suppose the answer depends on the person doing the memorization - Joe Shmo - it’s probably actually good for the brain. The next Einstein - maybe that person should use their brain power for other stuff.
As to if memorizing the Koran is bad for you, I would be inclined to say no from a neurological standpoint. From a philisophical standpoint - well, I won’t even go there - that’s a subject for a totally different thread.
Well, a couple of articles that I have read on savants indicates that they didn’t possess very good generic categorization and pattern-matching skills, but knew the rulesets of their obsessions very well.
I suspect it’s like most recreational activities that people do- it depends how much time you’re spending on it, and whether the time spent doing it is negatively impacting other areas of your life. Probably not psychologically healthy to spend all your time memorizing digits of pi (or physically healthy if you’re doing it instead of sleeping, eating, or exercise), but that’s true of most other activities, too.
Of course, people always use cultural attitudes toward activities when they’re thinking about whether someone does something “too much” or not. The threshold at which most people would say someone has a problem with, say, working too much or watching too much TV is much higher than the one for less culturally accepted activities like playing computer games or memorizing the Koran. Another culture, of course, would have different ideas of what constituted spending too much time on any given activity.
8.8k is not really that much. I once memorised 1000 digits, and it didnt take me that long.
The discussion about what is good for the brain is very interesting, though. I doubt that we have any useful research on the area yet. But hopefully a lot is coming.
My guess is that everything that requires concentration is good for the brain. (While it should be allowed to relax sometimes of course.) Additionally, if I had to make a guess, I would say that memorisation is somewhat good for the brain, in the sense of making it more effective. But stuff where you make strategic evaluations of complex situations, like chess or go, are probably better.
1oo digits of Pi are more that anyone can find a real use for. It is just another form of MM!
IMHO memorizing anthing by rote and without real understanding is useless and falls in the same category!
So this can be thrown away as garbage (I hope)
http://www.zazz.fsnet.co.uk/adtheo.htm
Lots of big words. But hokey right?
Alzheimer’s disease causes proteins in the brain to denature (like cooking – the disease eventually results in a characteristic “baked ham” smell), and memorizing things doesn’t. Therefore Alzheimer’s disease has nothing to do with memory overload (except that Alzheimer’s disease decreases the capacity for memory, along with just about everything else).
If that explanation was accurate, you’d expect Alzheimer’s to disproportionately afflict those who spent a lot of time memorizing things and had a lot of knowledge. But it doesn’t - people who get Alzheimer’s are more likely to have avoided mental activities during their youth. Though I wonder if this might actually be a very early and very subtle symptom of the disease rather than a cause - but either way, it suggests that Alzheimer’s is not caused by “overfilling” the brain.
Considering the emphasis some Christians place on memorizing Bible verses (being able to quote “chapter and verse”) it sounds like an especially bizarre and ignorant form of anti-Muslim prejudice. I guess this isn’t really a GQ type of answer, but it would be something to ask someone who is throwing out the belief the OP is questioning.
Cite? Or is this a joke?
“MM”?
On the off-chance that you mean “mental masturbation”, well what do you think the SDMB is? It’s just a hobby for these people to memorize pi to the nth digit, and hardly deserving of your disparaging tone.
Are we not allowed to disparage others’ hobbies now? Because memorizing thousands of digits of pi sure makes me want to put on my disparaging pants.
Enh, it’s a pretty pointless hobby, but aren’t disparaging comments what the pit is for? it’s not on-point with the OP.
“disparaging pants” 
That makes me want to put on my laughing pants.
To return to topic, my understanding is that many devout Muslims memorize the entire Qur’an. And while the Qur’an is shorter than the Christian Bible, I don’t think many Christians memorize nearly as much of it word-for-word, so the criticism makes some sense (though it strikes me as founded on pretty thin evidence.)
Some very first rate mathematicians have had some form of senile dementia, sometimes at a relatively young age, so I doubt this explanation has much traction. A Quebec art film maker, presumably also not averse to mental activity, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s (or probable Alzheimer’s since only an autopsy can confirm the diagnosis and he never got that) in his late 50s and one November day walked into the St. Lawrence and his body was not found till spring.
On the other hand, there was a study of nuns, some of whom died of Alzheimer’s and some didn’t and they had their school records going back to HS. The claim was that Alzheimer’s victims were using simpler sentences even in their HS papers. I wonder if this was a careful, blind study or just someone’s impression who knew which was which.
Not an answer to you question, but kind of interesting.
The longest Pi has been calculated to is 2,260,321,363 digits. It was deemed the most boring 800 page publication ever created.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. Surely the study wasn’t so incredibly badly designed (do you have any evidence that it was badly designed at all?) that a few meaningless anecdotes about how smart people get Alzheimer’s too don’t somehow disprove its results.
Your whole post seems to be “I have anecdotal evidence that disproves this entirely!” which suggests that you need to learn more about how to find and evaluate evidence.
MessyPaint writes:
> The longest Pi has been calculated to is 2,260,321,363 digits. It was deemed the most boring 800 page publication ever created.
A page with 100 characters per line and 75 lines per page is pretty crowded. 800 pages could then have at most 6,000,000 characters. You’d need nearly 400 such books to hold that many digits.