Ich danke dem Autor, denn jetzt bin ich total nervös
::: Tired of the Olympics? Try the Mind Olympics!
writes Michael Johnson of the International Herald Tribune
Watching Olympic athletes throw things, lift things, run till they drop or float upside down in a swimming pool is not to everyone's taste. Most of us could never compete, so we can't really relate. In fact, physical exertion of any sort gives me a headache.
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Instead, I am settling in for a good flex of that other muscle, the brain, by watching the Mind Sports Olympiad and the World Memory Championships, timed to coincide this year with the Athens Games.
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The Olympics have their value, no doubt, but I marvel more at people who can remember things. That's hard, too, and it gets harder as you get older. We over-50s can just about recall what day it is, but don't ask us the month or the year or, at least in my case, even the century. As each year wears on, we forget more appointments, names, faces, phone numbers, PIN numbers, passwords and where we parked the car.
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There's an upside, too. I reread "Doctor Zhivago" recently after an interval of 35 years and realized that I had forgotten every one of Boris Pasternak's twists and turns of plot, every brilliant line. It was a fresh, new novel to me.
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A psychologist friend of mine tries to make us feel better by saying memory problems are normal. We take in so much new information every day that some of the old stuff has to fade out to make room. The Sunday edition of The New York Times contains more information than a 17th-century Frenchman absorbed in a lifetime, he says.
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So nature has invented forgetfulness to help us cope? I don't believe it. I think we're just slowly decaying.
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But the performers heading for the World Memory Championship and the Mind Sports Olympiad, to be staged jointly in Manchester, believe they have found a solution to this sorry decline. They counsel mental workouts. That's my kind of exercise - you don't have to get out of your chair to do it.
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Figuring out the crossword or the daily chess problem in your morning paper is enough to irrigate your brain. Some people practice more intensely by starting the day memorizing poetry or learning a string of numbers. “This is every bit as useful as going down to your local gym,” said Tony Buzan, the British IQ specialist who created the annual memory competition.
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Contestants from about 23 countries, all winners of national qualifying events, will contend for memory honors from Aug. 28 to Aug. 30 at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. The broader Mind Sports events go from Aug. 19 to Aug. 30, and include such challenges as speed-reading a book in one hour and mentally multiplying six-digit numbers by six-digit numbers.
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Top seed in the memory category this year - the mind to beat - is Astrid Plessl, 20, of Murzzuschlag, Austria, who distinguished herself last year in the world championships in Malaysia by scoring well across all 10 memory disciplines. These included poetry memorization, remembering the order of cards in as many as nine decks, and the binary sequencing test - committing to memory hundreds of 0s and 1s.
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Half a dozen television crews are expected to be on hand from Europe, Asia and the United States to capture the tension and the tears in Manchester.
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Buzan, a writer and consultant, is a former editor of the Mensa International Journal. He links memory directly to IQ and believes anyone can get an approximate fix on his or her IQ by asking a friend rattle off a series of numbers and trying to repeat them. If you can master nine numbers you are said to be exceptional. I peaked at seven.
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Real performers have confounded psychologists who only 10 years ago said the limit of the human memory would be about 30 numbers. This year's contenders are aiming to break 200. "Any human brain can do things that previously were the territory of genius," Buzan said. “We are resurrecting memory from its deathbed."
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He blames edcuations systems in most countries for harming memory skills by boring students. "We have trained them to forget, and they have done it perfectly," he said.
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Buzan also sees a clear relationship between a healthy mind and a healthy body - a concept that dates back to Plato. One can overcome weaknesses of the other. He believes, for example, that the cosmologist Stephen Hawking would have died long ago if he had not kept his mind active.
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That worries me. I had a few other points to make in this article, but I can't remember what they were.
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Michael Johnson is a former correspondent for Business Week and The Associated Press.