Memory
How do elite athletes perform dazzling feats, seemingly without effort? Jennifer Gardy joins a group of British "free runners" — adept at a new sport that originated in France. Along the way, she learns that much of athletic performance may be tied to how muscle memories are stored, allowing them to perform previously learned actions with almost no thought involved.
According to a recent study, North American university students immediately forget 90 per cent or more of the information conveyed in class lectures. Brian Fleck and Marc Huot team up with a magician to conduct a memory test on some unsuspecting students, with shocking results. Then Marc takes his memory on a test drive.
Meanwhile, Brian Alters meets Dr. Lawrence Farwell, the man behind "Brain Fingerprinting" — a revolutionary technology that measures the human brain’s electrical responses to previously stored information. Using this technology, future criminals could be ratted out by their own brain waves!
Did You Know?
- Our brain has over 100 billion neurons forming a matrix of 500 trillion connections where memory can be stored.
- Research in 1952 showed that short term memory had a capacity of seven plus or minus two items.
- 'Inattentional blindness' is the inability to remember seeing something that's literally right in front of you. Magicians take advantage of it when performing illusions.
- Brain fingerprinting confirmed that James B. Grinder murdered a young woman in 1984. Now serving life in prison, he's confessed to the murder of three more women.
- One way to improve memory is to increase the supply of oxygen to the brain through exercise like walking, swimming or riding a bike.
Further Reading
Urban Freeflow
http://81.27.111.36/A southern Ontario Parkour community
http://www.pkto.ca/Memory Man
http://www.memoryman.com/bio.htmlUniversity of British Columbia, Visual Cognition Lab
http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~viscoglab/Vancouver Magician, Alym Amlani
http://www.alym.com/Brain Fingerprinting
http://www.brainwavescience.com/
