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0 pointsphpnode5y ago0 comments

I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger, and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally got ten heads in a row.

I think that kind of brute force approach would have been excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row, then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the "explanation".

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piyh5y ago· 2 in thread

He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20 word series that I can recite forward or backward after spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey. Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging sausages to the point of absurdity where he's swimming through sausages.

You just created a mental linked list that you can traverse from either direction, and that you'll remember for as long as you want to. Push it to the extremes, build up your method of loci to arbitrary lengths, build your memory palaces and become Hannibal Lecter.

thr0w__4w4y5y ago

I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden.

When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall, then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique simply doesn't work, as much as I try.

phpnodeOP5y ago

The book covers both techniques (though not in great detail), Memory Palaces are another term for Method of Loci[0] - in my experience it is actually much better and faster, but requires habitually revisiting rooms in order to remind yourself of their contents (this is as quick as mentally walking through a door into a room and glancing around it from left to right). This is easy and fast but it's also easy to forget to do it and then the contents do start to fade. I use the layout of the first house I owned as my "palace", so it's a real place but no longer somewhere I actually go to in real life which helps avoid confusion.

The linked list idea works well and arguably lasts longer, but it's also much more time consuming to "set up" (for me at least), and suffers from O(N) time complexity just like a real linked list (i wonder if it would be possible to construct a mental skip-list!) and if I forget a single association then the whole remainder of the list is forgotten.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

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