Sunday’s New York Times’ Magazine had a neat article about memory training. The web site has a neat (flash) game to test your memory skill. A grid of 100 words, your mission is to memorize as many as you can in five minutes. Make sure you are in a quiet place.
I got 20 of the words. I did not try the numbers. So go ahead and take your best shot.
I got 35. My strategy was to try and combine the words in each line into a mental picture. The test mixes up the words on each attempt, but my first line was ‘television, magic, basil, pilates, family’ so I pictured me and my family watching Basil Brush (a British kids TV character) perform magic on television, and on top of the TV was a stack of pilates books. Unfortunately, this approach is rather time consuming, and if you don’t know the meaning of a particular word (for instance, I’ve never heard the word ‘copra’ before) then you have to improvise.
Oh! It mixes them up! Good I can try again!
That was [del]disappointing[/del] fun. I scored 23 on the words, 32 on numbers. I was certain I’d score better on the words, but here we are.