Wednesday, September 2, 2009

If you could memorize anything, what would it be?

Let's say you had unlimited amount of time and motivation and brain power to memorize anything in it's entirety. What would you memorize?

I found this a pretty hard question to answer. Besides foreign language vocabulary, I can't think of much I'd want to memorize. Things like the 50 states and their capitals fall into the parlour trick category.

Someone once told me they'd memorize all the street names and locations in their city, then 5 seconds later they changed their mind because they realized we have maps.

In fact, we don't need to memorize much of anything nowadays. But back to the question: it would be nice to learn how to memorize playing cards and their locations in a pack of cards. You'd quickly become an ace at most card games.

It would be nice to memorize a dictionary as well. Yet most of the words you would never use. What about 100 Shakespeare quotes? You'd be annoying to hang out with.

An encyclopedia? Again, seems a bit pointless. The Bible? Pointless and parlour-tricky.

What about one interesting fact about each every day object? For example, key. You could memorize a fact like "they used wooden keys in Egypt 4,000 years ago". Then you just collect a fact for say 1,000 objects.

I guess it would make you interesting to talk to.

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