The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Hi!
It’s been a busy week. Last Tuesday I had my assessment for the Aan de Slag voor de Klas”-program, hosted by the University of Amsterdam. Kinda important, of course, because it determines part of the next two years of my life. I’m happy to say that I’ve passed the assessment, which means I can start the program this January! I’m very excited to embark on this new journey and will take you along on it. You can read about my earlier experiences on my website (written in Dutch).
Since last Tuesday was December 1st, Advent of Code started. Two programming challenges every day until Christmas. I decided to tackle this year’s challenges in Python, a language that’s quite new for me. That means a lot of research on how to do things in Python, but of course, that’s the whole point. I’m pushing my progress to my GitHub where you’re welcome to follow along.
Finally, I’ve finished the book Moonwalking with Einstein, about the “art and science of remembering everything”. While that title might be a bit too pretentious, it does introduce an interesting technique that can help you remember specific things better. More on that below in “Book of the Week”.
Tweet of the Week
Video of the Week
You will always meet your match with anything, programming included. For Advent of Code, I follow a few people who make videos solving the daily challenges. One of them is Jonathan Paulson, who, like me, uses Python. On one hand, it’s a humbling thing to see the speed with which he solves the assignments, but mainly it’s nice to compare my solutions to his and learn from it. As an example, check out his solutions for the third day below.
Book of the Week
This week I finished the book Moonwalking with Einstein, written by Joshua Foer. Apart from it being a nice read (the book follows the journalist Foer in his preparations to compete in and ultimately win the USA Memory Championship), it explains the concept of a “memory palace”. This palace can be any building you know by heart. The core of the technique is to create extravagant images for things you want to remember, and put them in one of your palace’s rooms. For example, if you want to remember a shopping list that contains milk, bread, and cake, you can imagine a waterfall of milk flowing from your bathroom’s shower, a baker baking purple bread using your oven, and Madonna blowing out the candles of your birthday cake on the dinner table in your living room. The brain is very good at making and understanding relations, the more original the better, so these absurd images are easier to remember than just those three words alone.
As an example, I can see this technique do its magic when you need to remember some topics you need to present to a group of people, without the help of a slide deck. No more looking over your shoulder to see what you wanted to talk about next. Sounds good, right? Challenge accepted!
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!