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In 1956, George Miller, one of the founders of the then nascent field of cognitive psychology, wrote a rather peculiar paper. Perhaps indicative of the mores of the time, the paper starts off with a zany, sardonic paragraph that is a far cry from the kind of dry, soulless, prosaic prose that journal editors and cranky reviewers force us to write today: “My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. … There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing...... Read Full article on HadNews

What image does the number 693 produce in your mind? For Katie Kermode, who holds four world records in memory championships, the answer is a theatrical showman. She has a mental image handy for all numbers between 1 and 999. The number 522, for instance, makes her visualize red lentils “spilling everywhere.” And 711 conjures a cat.  These images aren’t arbitrarily selected. If you’ve ever wondered how it’s humanly possible for someone to recite 70,030 digits of pi from memory, as Suresh Kumar Sharma did in 2015, the answer is that they’re almost certainly using a mnemonic technique — a strategy that helps you remember and retrieve long...... Read Full article on HadNews