Counting Cards and Party Tricks.

Harry Lorayne, born 1926 and happily still with us, is a famous magician who featured on American television from as early as the 1950's. Like many who read his book I began by learning what I thought were 'tricks' to be used in social situations. For example, memorizing the order of a pack of cards, then multiple packs of cards, recalling long binary numbers, asking people their date of birth then telling what day of the week that was. Soon, however, I began to find more satisfaction in the educational side of these methods and I began to understand that there is no trick to memory. Almost all of us have great memories. We can recall stories from our childhood and how those incidents made us feel. We can sing the chorus to our favorite songs and recite dozens lines from our favorite movies. We can guess what's cooking in the kitchen from the aromas because we have smelt those aromas before. We can remember how it feels to stroke an animal and may even imagine what a living, breathing, crocodile's skin might feel like (perhaps some of you actually do know!). These skills that we take for granted require Gigabytes of computing brainpower second by second and yet we struggle to remember the couple of Bytes of information in PIN numbers and Login Passwords. The trick, if there is a trick, is to turn arbitrary information, like irrational numbers such a PI or dates in history, like words in a foreign languages, like chemical formulae and physics equations, into something we can remember, such as scenes in a movie or the words in a song.