I have recently corrected a friend about the date I had last helped her with some work. She had said it was last summer and I remembered it was around Christmas time. She realized her mistake and then added that I had a good memory. I couldn’t do anything but to laugh at the compliment; that morning, I had memorized a deck of cards under 3 minutes using my very polished memory stems. (But I’ve never gotten a compliment about my memory for doing this or for anything else involving my memory). Ironically, it is what I remember without having made any conscious effort to memorise that earns my memory a compliment. Is this normal?
So, in this thread I’d like to know who has ever complimented your memory on what occasion, or if no one seems to have ever noticed anything about your trained memory, as far as you know. Thanks
Usually I get compliments on how oblivious I tend to be I have a great factual memory, intellectual things enter my mind and never leave. But when it comes to other things, my memory is about as good at memorizing as paper is at being fireproof.
Though using my mnemonic system, I now do manage to remember a lot of names and numbers, especially numbers, which often amazes people when I remember a bunch of phone numbers or ages. When it comes to names, I never get compliments, people just say that I am “good with names” and they are “bad with names”. In reality, I am terrible with names >.< I would most likely even forget my own name if it wasn’t yelled as many times as it was when I was young… (I had a tendency to wander off and get lost just about everywhere).
I do get some compliments for my knowledge of a lot of things, though I never used mnemonics to remember those things.
While not really a compliment, I went to play poker for fun with some friends this weekend. I had never done it before, got the rules explained, and won quite some times, now they won’t play with me again.
I may or may not have been memorizing every card that has been in play to see what the odds are of a good hand Didn’t work out all the time, but well xD
I used the image of a person I once met on a few occasions that had a convenient name, Laurie, in my memory castles as a peg. 2-3 years later, I met that person and called her by her name right away. She complimented my memory at that point and wished me a very good day. Maybe she thinks I think about her all the time. But it’s only when I think of that 7574 number! I guess can’t tell her that.
Mayarra, I think you have the nicest compliment with no one wanting to play with you. Congrats.
I recieve thanks for my memory more then compliments.
Like : "Wow, really? Your memory is terrible for someone who knows a toughsand pi digits! xD
Hahahahahahah… hahahaha. Thanks for the laugh, and for making me feel better with myself xD "
Yeah, my familly and friends are not going easy on me… =_=
But yeah, when I remembered the 10 digits wifi password of my friend’s house and shared it with all the next guest, then I got a few compliments at least xD
Edit: Ha ha, more like an observation than a compliment. I wish I could meet everyone interested in memory improvement, but there are only so many hours in the day …
Last month I was a groomsman at a wedding. I knew there would be lots of people there who I hadn’t seen for a long time. I didn’t want the embarrassment of being stuck for names. So I asked the groom for the guest list and memorised 120 names.
I did it just for my own benefit and didn’t expect anything to come from it. Later my mother asked who was going to the wedding. I said I had the guest list and she asked to see it. Instead I just sat in the chair and listed all the names. She was super impressed. People and names and social things are important to her so she was very complimentary.
My natural semantic memory is as strong as my autobiographical memory. As a child, I had a reputation as a walking encyclopedia. There was also a case when I conducted a show with cold reading, where I gave out a lot of information about a person’s personality for elementary grades. I asked for the name and date of birth. In addition, I displayed data about a person during the session. What was my surprise when even the course later, when I spoke with these children, I could restore 90% of the information about them, given the name, date of birth, their location regarding me and the elements of clothing that attracted my attention. Same. when they decided to test me, I was able to virtually accurately determine who was not in the classroom that day and announced the date of May 21st. Due to the abundance of such cases in my life, I have gained a reputation as a truly memorable person. True, this does not concern my everyday life at all. My mother often cooked me because I forgot the shopping list, my duties for the day, and also I always lose things. I was very pleasantly surprised when the mnemonics solved my problems from forgetting the shopping list.
Your post is quite interesting, because I think about that often.
Sadly, I am rarely getting compliments for everything I do.
Interesting was a scenario in which my old math teacher was asking someone how many digits of pi we could remember. I hesitated, but after one answered with “[m]aybe four?”, I answered with 100. In this time I was memorizing pi till 200. By the way I even posted my journey how I memorized them.
And the whole class was like: “Wait, what…?” The math teacher did not believe me and asked me to recall all of them. I stand up, walked into the front of the class and recited all of them without any error, but I was nervous. The class, completely shocked, staring at me and I just felt like I won a Marathon. After that my table neighbor said, this was impressive.
One time the teacher wanted us to memorize a poem from a book (I still remember the name and page of the book). Most of my classmates chose a simple one. My table neighbor challenged me to memorize a poem that is pretty long. It is named “Die Birkschaft”. He joked if I memorize this poem he will eat his dog. The teacher gave us a week. An exhausting week later I memorized the whole poem. The teacher asked me to come in front of my class to recite it. My neighbor did not believe me that I memorized the entire poem. So, I went in front of my class and recited it. The class was shocked and after that I had a reputation of being “eine Maschine” translated “a machine”.
In a new class I had a reputation of being a living dictionary, because I knew every word in the german language. This was very funny, because in one lesson our history teacher gave us two piece of paper we had to read and discuss in a group preparing for a presentation. The teacher left the classroom, because she had to keep an eye on another class. The teacher went and my group was literally asking every two minutes what this word means. And I answered all the questions.
So, these are times I got compliments. There were more times I did interesting things without getting any compliment. One funny thing was that every time a teacher asked the class a question maybe about a topic we had covered in the past, I raised my hand, gave the teacher the answer, also saying the date when we had covered the topic and how many classmates had been absent on this day and how the weather was and what the teacher wore that day if I could recall that. Most of the time, this completely upset all teachers, but every time it was funny for me. I do not know what my classmates thought about that, but they sometimes laughed at that hard.
I haven’t had as many compliments about my memory as surprised faces after a quick mental calculation.
In January we had a meeting at work about last year’s progress. At one point the topic was about averages and how important it is to check the average content of the products. They showed a few examples of good and bad averages and what you should do in certain cases to get the ideal day average. While they were talking I saw that in order to get the right day average you would need to either quickly calculate what the next amount of content in the products should be or be able to see the current day average after checking the amount of content. I suggested that it might be a good thing for us to be able to see the day average on the workfloor. I gave them a few examples of possible bad measurements I calculated while they were talking to show them what I ment. A few weeks ago they implemented my idea
My memory also doesn’t go completely unnoticed. I sometimes help the people close to me by learning quickly about things that could benefit them, if they ask me to. I would watch videos, read articles, look at maps and sometimes calculate costs, profits or something else and in a short amount of time I would turn myself into a point of reference for them. The information stays in my head for a couple days or a week unless I review all the information then it can remain longer. In moments like these my memory feels like a super power haha:)
Just incredible feats of memory! There really was something to write about. I just asked one question: did you remember the poem with the help of mnemonics or with the help of your natural memory?
Quite the opposite. I have a poor memory and I forget appointments, places, tasks, and I often lose my phone, keys, umbrella, etc., etc., etc. People notice that.
I rarely show memorization skills, unless I am sharing those skills with someone.
On the other hand, I keep a “bullet journal”, which is some kind of cult in fashion these days
Everyday I register the things that I want to do, and the the things that I actually did. So, sometimes I say things like “yes, we met on April 5 at 5 pm”, or “this thing happened on June 25 at 11:45 am”. So some people might think I am very organized. But it is the opposite. If I survive the chaos it is because of the journal. And still most people would say I am chaotic.
During college I was very fast at arithmetic calculations, probably the fastest in the batch (but not calculus ), because I like maths very much and I enjoyed it. But I did not use any tricks or technique. I used to calculate by approximation, not by precision, and still sometimes I was able to calculate with some precision to few decimal points. Now that is lost, I became slow.
To your question, I think it’s a bit of both, because I memorized the poem in a time, in which I did not know about mnemonics, but I used visualization.
Since childhood I am a visual learner and I cannot stop, because it’s like a natural process.
So, I visualized everything, as well as the poem.
I visualized the words or whole phrases (poems are mostly written in a picture based language) and converted them into images in my mind, while also including all the senses.
As a child, I had the idea to experience things like they were real, but it’s just imagination. I even thought about how to “experience” math. This was weird, but interesting.
At the end it was like a movie playing before my mind’s eye and I am a part of it.
However, I also rely a lot on my natural memory, because it does not fail often.
I have a great factual memory, intellectual things enter my mind and never leave. But when it comes to other things, my memory is about as good at memorizing as paper is at being fireproof.
Simply knowing/remembering people’s names can improve a relationship with them by the millions