Is it possible John Von Neumann used memorization techniques, not raw neurological birth genius?

General Memory Chat
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What if John Von Neumann figured out a few key memorization tricks at an early age?

He could have snowballed those tricks with other tricks, and just heavily practiced these tricks. Mr. Neumann could have outperformed others not due to a raw neurologically monstrous genius, but simple will power and techniques the common human being with similar motivations and desires, would have achieved.

8-digit calculations near instantaneous by age 6?

Could be a Hindu long division trick, but well-practiced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmiRPHpJUh4

Reading a phone book page a few times and quickly reciting the names, addresses, and phone numbers by age 8?

Could be a mnemonic dictionary of 100 numbers associated with 100 people, 100 objects, and 100 actions, and a mnemonic dictionary of 26 letters associated with 26 people, 26 objects, and 26 actions, allowing for quick storage and retrieval of phone-book-pages of phone numbers, addresses, and names. Albeit, exceptionally well-practiced to the point of championship-level competition.

Sociability and relatability in spite of the neurodivergent obsessiveness typically required to get far in the scientific disciplines he was involved in?

In theory that happens a reasonable amount, but is better explained if he was simply a normal dude he just happened to be well-practiced at a set few techniques that caused him to rise above the mental lot he otherwise would have had.

Spending his whole life focused on data retrieval and storage, and just happening to be exceptional at both memorization-wise?

To me this screams that his work with computers was more-or-less an indirect explanation of mental techniques he may have loosely been engaged in.

At minimum, I think a re-analysis of John Von Neumann from the lens “he may have been subconsciously using memorization techniques normal people can copy” is at least worth performing in case we could effectively, copy-paste his memorization methods into our own. Whether on accident or on purpose, his brain had to be somehow storing this information, and chalking it up to merely “he was a genius” or “his brain was just wired better for it” to me brushes off reality for folktale-tier borderline lazy explanations of things we do not fully understand.

Thoughts?

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I am pretty well versed on Harry Lorayne methods but am pretty ignorant of memory tournaments and things like that. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot here. For instance, I don’t know who John Von Whatshisname is but I see no reason to chalk his abilities up to memory techniques. It seems more plausible to me that a young child can just remember things. It might even be harder to learn memory techniques. I don’t think a ‘normal’ person would do such a thing at an early age.

I say this because my father was such a person. He couldn’t do crazy math but he had phenomenal recall. He was born in 1929 and his mother would read to him something called a “little big book,” which was a small but thick book for children. After she read him the book he could recite it back to her. I have many such stories but I’ll close with this: Late in his life we discussed memory and memory systems. I explained how memory systems worked and that I could memorize a large chart of numbers that he memorized for fun (long story). He said, “Maybe so, but I can just remember it without tricks.” He could just see the numbers in his mind. He had other abilities most wouldn’t believe so I won’t digress, lol!

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Oh wow… and Einstein is a company that sells bagels? Manhattan Project ring a bell? Princeton or the Institute for Advanced Study? That computer, laptop, or phone you used to write this comment uses something called von Neumann architecture.

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No disrespect to the man intended. We can’t all be expert on everything, you know.

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Let’s wait for the movie in two years time… :wink:

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It’s no way to know for sure, but in my opinion, it is possible. John could have “rediscovered” some basic techniques while young. He also liked calculating large numbers mentally, which could have been practicing using those techniques for years. The average person today doesn’t know much or heard of mnemonics despite access to the internet. Back then, it must have been virtually unknown and forgotten unless you were explicitly searching for training memory at the library and if the library was lucky enough to have a historical book about it.

It’s also possible that maybe John’s brain was wired in a way he could use memory techniques naturally like Solomon Shereshevsky, but without any mental issues SS had.

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IMO, anything’s possible, but what is more likely? Based on what I wrote above, I think a very high IQ genius more likely can just “do it.” I think this is considerably more probable than John learning obscure memory techniques at such a young age. Maybe the techniques came naturally but I can tell you some people are just able to recall the numbers when they need them. Your phone number is there when you need to recall it. I think some can do the same thing after only seeing the information once, at least for a short time. It’s an interesting question.

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I really, really wished we had more on information on this, I say this because I for one have stopped to use memory palaces, simply because I can remember information more readily just by remembering , this happened after some time of intensive use of the technique, I do wonder if Von neumann just had this to a bigger degree and mastered some kind of tricks when younger. Specially since the man was “addicted” to thinking, it doesn’t seem improbable to me that this wouldn’t have happened.

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Or, like I mentioned above, he could just do it. My father wasn’t learning memory techniques at 4 years old but he could remember everything. Given that experience, to me, there’s nothing surprising that Von N. just did it.

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You said, “To me this screams that his work with computers was more-or-less an indirect explanation of mental techniques he may have loosely been engaged in.”

I think even with you doing that, there needs to be some level of creativity to create analogies to Microprocessor Architecture, nonetheless you need to have great understanding of Microprocessors also… I think, memory is the greatest gift that man has, everything stems from that, intelligence is ONLY AND ONLY pattern recognition, MATH ALSO is the same, the more effort you put into training the brain to find patterns in diverse fields, to make it creative and huge memory, so it can connect fields.I say diverse fields because each field has different ways of forming patterns, math memory and social studies memory is very different, we need to optimize that, that could be a way to be perceived as “genius” !..

When I was in my 10th grade, my memory was so sharp, I could memorize huge paragraphs of social study answers in a couple of reads and some in even 1 reads.The combination of understanding the topic, with visualization(creative vizualization), and memory can make you a beast. Naturally scored well. I could memorize page patterns, i.e where the answer exists on the page, after how many pages from the start of the chapter, I could keep all that in memory, and had a vague idea of where the answer was on the page and its length, after that I could somehow vizualize the page and see some keywords that I recognized during study.
This is power hungry method because to this with 2 reads takes huge amt of concentration, that too if you include understanding with page photographic memory.Some sort of photographic memory.So this helped me pinpoint the answer and the keywords, next step was easy, to just make sentences out of the keywords which is where the understanding part comes in.I could form a smooth flow of topics when I mastered the answer.It was FLOW

The problem was I thought this system was lesser/inferior to method of completely understanding the topic.
And now I cant remember short term stuff​:smiling_face_with_tear:.That was peak memory and mental prowess.
I think von Neumann somehow took methods like these to the max and included some creativity.
Now Im trying to get my photo-memory back!!