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May 24, 2013
May 22, 2013
John Thorne:
They launched the 'Arab Spring' but now yearn for the good old days of a strongman
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Richard A. Serrano: Is Meir Kahane's assassin now a changed man?
Melissa Healy: Genetic copies of living people from embryos no longer science fiction
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David G. Savage: Church-state, literally? Supreme Court weighing public school graduation in a church
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Rabbi Berel Wein: Be all that you should be
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Peter Ford: Why China is welcoming both Israel's Netanyahu and Palestinians' Abbas
Warren Richey: Obama administration quietly backs out of appeal over new contraceptive mandate
Fred Weir: At Kerry-Putin meeting, US-Russia relations thaw --- a tad
The Kosher Gourmet by Leela Cyd Ross : Almost too pretty to eat, this colorful salad with Sicilian inspiration will tickle the taste buds and delight your visual sensibility
May 6, 2013
May 3, 2013
Kids, kittens the Same? With employee perks at struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! it's hard to tell
Sandy Kleffman: Artificial kidney offers hope to patients tethered to a dialysis machine
April 29, 2013
Roy Gutman: Poland's new Jewish museum celebrates life, doesn't revisit Holocaust
Mark Clayton: Terrorism in America: Is US missing a chance to learn from failed plots?
Kim Murphy: Boston Bomber's 'Svengali' Revealed
Pete Spotts: Tiny satellites + cellphones = cheaper 'eyes in the sky' for NASA
April 26, 2013
Clifford D. May: Defense in the Age of Jihadist Terrorism
Sharon Palmer, R.D.: How to feel your best -- with plenty of energy, a healthy weight and optimal mental and physical function -- without driving yourself batty
April 24, 2013
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Jewish World Review
You must remember this…
By
Jim Mullen
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I have a terrible memory; I can't remember names, can't recall dates, can't recollect what I'm supposed to pick up at the supermarket, can't bring to mind where I parked the car, can't remember that I can't remember. It's not a new thing -- it's been going on like this, well, as long as I can remember. And I'm not alone: my friends complain about their poor memories, too. Who hasn't forgotten an anniversary or a birthday? Who hasn't neglected to pick up their wife's mother at the airport? Who hasn't forgotten the car windows were down until after the onslaught of a thundershower? Or that there's a pie in the oven? Or to undergo that vasectomy you had promised to get? Which is why I was fascinated by an entertaining new book on the best-seller list called "Moonwalking With Einstein," which is about memory and how you can, and probably should, learn how to remember things -- shopping lists, phone numbers, epic poems, the names of people you meet, and French verb forms -- for longer than, say, 10 seconds.
Joshua Foer, the book's author, says he once had the same memory troubles as the rest of us, but after doing a story on memory champions -- people who can remember the order of a shuffled deck of cards after glancing at them once, -- he learned the techniques, the tricks, the science and the art of evading the mists of the mind. After only a year of training, he competed in the U.S. Memory Championship and won.
One of the things he discovered is how visual our memory is. Once you've seen Lady Gaga in one of her over-the-top outfits you will never forget her, yet I doubt I could pick country music star Brad Paisley out of a lineup -- and I've seen him honky-tonking on TV at least a dozen times. When you see disaster survivors on television picking through the rubble of a tornado or a flood, almost the first thing out of their mouths is: "We lost all our family photographs." Photo albums are the first thing people grab when they have to evacuate their homes, because losing a photograph is like losing your memory, like losing your mind. Our brains seemed to be hardwired for pictures.
The memory champions become adept at making memorable mental pictures out of names and numbers. And like all magic, it is a trick. It must be learned and practiced, but you don't have to be a genius to do it; any person of average ability could learn most of these tricks pretty quickly.
One question Foer poses is why these very simple, very effective memory techniques aren't taught in school. "Study class" may be the biggest oxymoron ever invented.
Plopping kids in a room and pretending they're studying is not the same thing as teaching them how to study. We tell kids to study, we make them study, we watch them study, but we never teach them how to study. Most of us can't teach them because we don't know how to do it ourselves. Yelling, "Turn off your smart phone and study!" seems to be our best tactic. It is good advice, but as Foer points out, the art of memorizing has been around since ancient Rome, when politicians were expected to memorize two-hour speeches word- for-word and remember the names of everyone they had ever met in their entire lives. When did we forget how to do that? It takes more than turning off the digital devices.
Foer also asks if we still need to remember things at all. When I was a teenager, I knew all my friends' phone numbers. Now I know none of them -- my phone remembers the numbers for me. I can Google the dates of the Norman Conquest and look up Pippa Middleton on Wikipedia. Why should I bother to remember when it's all done for me? But try Googling "Who was that guy I met at Sal's party last night who said I should call him about a job?" and see what kind of answer you get. And Google didn't help me pay the 50-cent fine for forgetting to return Foer's book to the library on time.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment by clicking here.
Jim Mullen is the author of "It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life" and "Baby's First Tattoo."
Previously:
TV experts and real news
Hey caller, where's the fire?
My sad cushy life
Pacemaker, don't you mess around with me
Big Brother is skinny
Flight of the snowbirds
This HDTV needs child support
Dear Future: Where's the dome?
Not so elementary, my dear Watson
A vacation revolution
Your call is very unimportant to us
Life: There's no app for that
Bam! Practical kitchen magic
Poisoning myself
Ban Huck Finn in schools --- even the sanitized version!
$38,000 for traffic and weather updates
2011 Predictions: Nostradamus was a hack
2010: A year of annoying junk
Why do bad things happen to stupid people? Moving on from movie theaters
Money never sleeps, but it does pass out
President Trump kept it classy
Stalking your college kid won't change a thing
Putting my life in Jeopardy
Mo' government, mo' problems
iLostIt
Dressed for excess
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The mysteries of Jersey
You are a toilet, where am I?
Don't we all cheat at the game of life?
What happens when I forget where Google is?
Don't let the doorman hit you on the way out
Picasso fiasco
Purple (hair) Daze
Let me hear your body talk
Working from work
Babies deserve clean restrooms, too
3-year-old bear-killers are a thing of the past
Money-making ideas on the fly
Collecting and hoarding
Chain of fools
Please come pick up your acting awards, ESPN commentators, you've earned them
You've been superpoked by the U.S. gov't
e-Readin', e-Writin' and e-Rithmatic
A pose by any other name
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He loves only gold, only gold
Think about direction, wonder why …
Flushing your money down a diamond-studded toilet
More like wack Friday
The good, the ad and the ugly
The desert of the real
Let books be large and in charge
I was insulting people way before the Internet
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Butterfly in the sky, you make winds go twice as high
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You don't light up my life
Fair or not: Country living is far from Little House
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Green dumb
A developing story
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A really big show of generation gaps
When pigs flu
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Stuck in Folsom Penthouse
Collecting karma
Setting loose the creative juice
It's all in the numbers
You're damaging your brain with practical skills
The real rat pack
The unspeakable luxury of the Park-O-Matic
Gross-ery shopping
© 2009, NEA
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