Sunday, January 17, 2010

You already think I'm crazy

I remember reading this article a while (ehh, maybe six months?) ago about this guy who published his novel while he was in hi!school and then went on to go to some Ivy League university. The novel had done pretty well, but it wasn't the reason he got into the school or anything. Does anyone remember this article? Does anyone remember his name, or the name of his book? I feel like it was an interview with the college newspaper.
This is like the time when my APUSH teacher mentioned Frederik Law Olmsted, and I remembered him from an article in National Geographic a couple years ago. He designed parks. It's the inverse situation of the time when someone mentioned that there was a guy who died from radiation a year before. His name was Alexander Litvinenko, if you were curious.
Isn't it great when you remember useless little things, but you know a total of three phone numbers?

6 Fab Fans:

Aeromax said...

GOATS HAVE RECTANGULAR PUPILS

Aaron said...

Numbers are easy to memorize; just split them into small groups.

If you think you have better audio memory, pronounce the numbers in your head.

If you think you have better visual memory, take a picture in your head of the numbers and their surroundings, on your phone or something else.

Samantha said...

Aaron, this may be true for you, but it is not true for me. We think differently, we are good at different things.

Aaron said...

A memory is best retained if an emotion is tied to it. This may be difficult to do sometimes, but music can help. It may act as a trigger, linked to the real memory. Triggers are what you need to use if you can't directly remember something.

You can also put things to the tune of a song. Try memorizing my favorite chemical's formula, C8 H10 N4 O2, by substituting it for the lyrics in Carol of the Bells. It's in 4/4 (sometimes 6/8) time, so it will fit in nicely.
(SEE eight h TEN enn four oh TWO)

Keep in mind that I have not tested any of the methods in this post. I just made them up.

Aeromax said...

in my experience the best way to remember something is to connect it to something else; the more ridiculously arbitrary the relation, the better. For example, "коричневый" is pronounced "korichnyeviy" and means "brown", so I've got to find some way connect "korichnyeviy" to "brown".

1) "korich" sounds kind of like "college".

2)Colleges sometimes have affirmative action.

3) Affirmative action has to do with people with brown skin.

It sounds incredibly stupid, and it is, but it works a lot better than just saying the word eighty times while looking at a brown marker.

Samantha said...

Couldn't you go straight from College to Brown University?