This week’s book learning is from ‘Talent is Overrated’ by Geoff Colvin.
Champion chess players have always thought to have amazing memories thanks to their ability to play whole chess games blind folded. So, an interesting experiment was conducted with champion chess players one group and non-chess players/normal people another.
Round 1: Both groups are shown a chess board with 20-25 pieces set up in actual game positions for 5 seconds and then asked to recall positions of the pieces.
As expected, the chess players recalled nearly all pieces while normal people recalled 4-5 pieces.
Round 2: The chess board now had 20-25 pieces set up in random positions.
The normal people still remembered 4-5 pieces. The chess players, on the other hand, could only remember 6-7!
Similar such experiments have shown that chess masters do not have an incredible memory – they just have the ability to remember real chess positions. And it’s same with masters in other fields.
The science of memory has shown that memory is largely determined by the retrieval systems. So, next time you forget a name, don’t curse your memory – curse your retrieval system! :-)
And, conversely, if you are bad with names, it’s all about building a nice retrieval system. I cannot agree more…
Here’s to building good retrieval systems this week!
A Learning a Day 
