Tag: Memory

You Guessed It!

 

Being good at trivia contests or general knowledge quizzes requires an excellent memory every bit as much as having learned widely. Without a memory capable of storing and retrieving vast amounts of information, a person cannot have learned well, though he or she may have studied widely. A strong capacity for memory is dependent partly on genetics and partly on the interest a person has in learning a thing. The lack of one factor or of both explains why some people can go through 16 or more years of schooling and not appear to have retained much knowledge beyond what would allow them to pass the next exam, while others can cite obscure facts from their reading years later, with or without having picked them up in a formal school setting.

 

The latter skill is often dismissed as nothing more than a parlor trick by jealous people who don’t possess the skill themselves. They are unwilling to give credit when credit is due by recognizing that some or all of the ability to recall bits of knowledge from a large store in memory may come from studious application of the individual to the hard task of learning, and that may be in addition to, or without benefit of, the gift of a genetically strong memory. These personal dynamics can be evident during a gathering of friends or family to play a game like Trivial Pursuit.

Trivial Pursuit
The board and pieces for Trivial Pursuit, the 1981 classic game. Photo by Pratyeka.

The flaw in a game like Trivial Pursuit, as popular as it has been since it made a splash in the board game market in 1981, is that in a contest between unevenly matched opponents, as is often the case in informal gatherings of friends and family, time and again there will be the same winners and the same losers. The winners may think there’s nothing wrong with that, but in a short time they will probably have trouble getting a game up, and then only with dispirited and half-interested opponents. And the losers go away either feeling stupid or defensively rationalizing that being able to dredge up trivia is merely a cheap parlor trick and doesn’t indicate true intelligence. That’s no fun!

There may be a kernel of truth to the opinions of all the players, and yet there should be a better way for everyone to shine and have fun. The habitual losers of a board game like Trivial Pursuit, or of home viewing play along sessions while watching the television quiz show Jeopardy!, are not necessarily stupid people, any more than the habitual winners are geniuses. A good game dynamic should welcome in a variety of personal strengths so that most players can be competitive. It appears former Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, along with game development partner Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, have recognized the flaw at the heart of many trivia games and tried to overcome it in their new game called Half-Truth.

A scene from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

Half-Truth calls on a player’s capacity for deductive reasoning and strategic thinking as well as the usual ability in trivia games of being able to tap into a personal well of knowledge. Expected release for the game is this year’s holiday season. Like all but a few trivia board games and pub trivia nights, using smartphones to look up answers will probably be against the rules. Leveling the playing field by incorporating more ways for more players to remain competitive rather than relying on the one and only way available in standard trivia games seems like a good plan for a game that will become popular and get played more than a few times and not soon forgotten on a closet shelf like many other trivia board games, and that will lead to sales of additional sets of question cards, the great recurring source of revenue for trivia game makers. In the old days, a player could cheat by memorizing the information on cards played over and over again; now they cheat by sneaking a peek at their smartphone, the handheld virtual encyclopedia.
— Techly

 

Entertainment , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Heaven Smells of Bread Baking

 

“The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water, is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight.” — M.F.K. Fischer (1908-1992)

Supermarkets are often not the most appealing places, despite the efforts of the owners to entice buying by using attractive layouts and presentations, but the one biggest sales pitch they can offer is a byproduct of their work, and it is the alluring smells emanating from the bakery section, early in the morning especially. It is an amazing occurrence that in an otherwise stale, uninteresting place, the aroma of bread baking should catch our noses and take us to a comforting place of memory or imagination and draw us toward it, if not to buy, to at least inquire of the baker what is in the oven at the moment that is wafting toward us such heavenly smells.


Bread-Baking (Charlotte Mannheimer) - Nationalmuseum - 21782
Bread-Baking, an 1895 painting by Charlotte Mannheimer (1866-1934).

The sense of smell is more closely and directly tied to the sense of taste and of memory than are the senses of vision, hearing, or touch, and that is understandable when we consider that it is a chemical sense which cuts to the essence of things quickly. No one, after all, has suffered intestinal distress from eating something merely because it looked unappetizing. Should I eat this? It looks okay and doesn’t feel strange other than being a bit soft, and of course it doesn’t sound like anything, but it smells a little off. No, I will not eat it. Useful information to have before putting the substance in one’s mouth and possibly ingesting something sickening. It’s why smell is tied so closely to taste that people who have lost the sense of smell, as can happen in old age, also lose the sense of taste, and therefore appetite.

Why smell and memory should be linked tightly together is more of a mystery. An American who has visited France and smelled the aroma of freshly baked baguettes might have memories of that visit elicited unbidden simply by walking past an excellent bakery in this country early in the morning as various breads are baking in the shop. The nose will pick out the one particular smell and, with its direct link to memory, evoke that long ago trip anew. What evolutionary purpose could that serve? It perhaps rings back to a time when we weren’t the highly visual creatures we are now, and instead relied on smell to tell us whether something we were encountering currently had positive or negative connotations in our memory.

Bread for sale at Granville Island Markets
Freshly baked bread for sale at Granville Island Markets in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Photo by Schellack.

It’s helpful to realize that the connection of the sense of smell with the brain takes place at the core level, whereas the sense of sight was layered onto the brain later in our development. That should also help explain why the inextricable connection between smell and memory often eludes our ability to describe it in language, a much later cognitive development even than sight. Smell, it seems, bypasses our more sophisticated powers and goes directly to our emotions, the core of our animal being that we share with millions of other creatures on Earth. When we smell good bread baking, we don’t need to intellectually analyze our reactions our wax poetic about it, describing the situation in a million flowery words, because our brains, nervous systems, and our entire bodies take care of telling us what we need to know. For many of us, our involuntary reactions of mouth watering and imagining of savory yellow butter melting into warm slices of bread will lead us into the shop to make a purchase, staving off for the day the hunger of the beast within us, and rewarding us with pleasant memories for days in the future when that heaven-sent smell wafts our way again.
— Izzy

 

Food , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,