5
The word you’re trying to remember is
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Which is not to say that no human being could do better. A number of people, far more dedicated to the cause than I ever was, have managed to learn thousands, even tens of thousands, of digits. But it takes
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Google for “change blindness” if you’ve never seen a demonstration; if you haven’t seen Derren Brown’s “person swap” video on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFaY3YcMgiT), you’re missing something special.
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I’m speaking, of course, of Steven Spielberg.
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The trick — the same goes for using search engines — is to employ as many distinctive cues as possible, thereby eliciting fewer and fewer extraneous memories. The more specific your cues are (“where I left my car last night when the street was full” rather than “where I left my car”), the greater the chance that you’ll zero in on the fact you need.
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Similarly, if you study while stoned, you might as well take the test while stoned. Or so I have been told.
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Several other studies have pointed to the same conclusion — we all tend to be historical revisionists, with a surprisingly dodgy memory of our own prior attitudes. My own personal favorite is an article called “From Chump to Champ” — it describes the one instance in which we all are happy to endure ostensibly negative memories about our own past: when it helps paint us, Rocky-style, as triumphing over adversity.
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The principals involved were Tonya Harding, Jeff Gillooly (her ex-husband), and Nancy Kerrigan; Gillooly’s hired goon went after Kerrigan’s knee on January 6,1994. Bonus question: When did the Rwandan genocide begin? Answer: April of that same year, three months after the onset of Tonyagate, which was still a big enough story to obscure the news from Rwanda. In the words of the UN commander on the scene, Romeo Dallaire, “During the 100 days of the Rwanda genocide, there was more coverage of Tonya Harding by ABC, CBS, and NBC than of the genocide itself.”
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Animals often behave as if they too have beliefs, but scientific and philosophical opinion remains divided as to whether they really do. My interest here is the sort of belief that we humans can articulate, such as “On rainy days, it is good to carry an umbrella” or “Haste makes waste.” Such nuggets of conventional wisdom aren’t necessarily true (if you accept “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” then what about “Out of sight, out of mind”?), but they differ from the more implicit “beliefs” of our sensorimotor system, which we cannot articulate. For example, our sensorimotor system behaves as if it believes that a certain amount of force is sufficient to lift our legs over a curb, but nonphysicists would be hard pressed to say how much force is actually required.) I strongly suspect that many animals have this sort of implicit beliefs, but my working assumption is that beliefs of the kind that we can articulate, judge, and reflect upon are restricted to humans and, at most, a handful of other species.
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Due to the effects of memory priming, adventuresome is the answer most people give.
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Nobody’s ever been able to tell me whether the original question was meant to ask how many of the countries in Africa were in the UN, or how many of the countries in the UN were in Africa. But in a way, it doesn’t matter: anchoring is strong enough to apply even when we don’t know precisely what the question is.
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When did Attila actually get routed? A.D. 451, if you’re aware of the process of anchoring and adjustment, you can see that why it is that during a financial negotation it’s generally better to make the opening bid than to respond to it. This phenomenon also explains why, as one recent study showed, supermarkets can sell more cans of
