Mere Amateurs

How do amateurs compete with top memory athletes?

In the recent BBC Documentary: Make Me Smart *, Michael Mosley explored what intelligence is, and where it comes from.

He was tutored by Ben Pridmore (the world champion) in memorising playing cards)

After 3 days Michael could memorise a pack in 30 minutes, which would be about 0.1 Bits per second

After more practice he could do it within 10 minutes.

So performance at such a task does improve significantly with practice. This is not surprising as the task is not within common experience.

* Broadcast on the channel BBC1 on Tuesday 10th February 2009.