Appropriately, this is the second time for me to write this post. I don't know whether to blame my mother-in-law's computer or Squarespace (or myself) for ironically erasing a post about memory. I'll try to fight back impatience and frustration and craft a cogent argument.
I often play Memory in my kids classes. This is the game where players turn over cards and try to match them from memory. I usually play with a set of cards depicting colors and shapes (such as yellow octagon) or a set of cards depicting letters and animals (such as G, Goat). When I first started playing Memory in my classes, I used only twenty cards arranged in a four by five matrix. I found that such games typically lasted between five and ten minutes, and students very seldom forgot the positions and identities of any of the cards. If there were four players, the final score would be something like 4-2-2-2. Whoever went first or whoever was lucky enough to be last when there was only a few pairs left would often be the winner. This unfairness usually didn't bother me, since the primary goal of the activity was to memorize English objects, and the beneficiary of structural unfairness - that is to say the winner - seemed to rotate each class in random, egalitarian fashion.
Nevertheless, my class of seven-year-olds soon insisted that we use all the cards. As a decidedly non-micromanaging, hippy teacher, I complied and began to arrange fifty-four cards in a six by nine matrix. I found that this bigger version of Memory took anywhere from twenty to thirty minutes to complete and changed the nature of the game completely. The advantage of going first or last was relatively minimized, and so was the egalitarian distribution of winners. The same students won every time we played.
In the fifty-four card version of the game, winning seemed to be a function of not raw memory skill but how fundamentally-limited memory capacity was employed. Of course, in terms of raw memory, some students were superior to others; but for the most part this difference was marginal: Susy could remember eleven cards; Nancy could remember thirteen; Jimmy could remember ten; Johnny could remember twelve. It couldn't have been this small difference in raw ability that was driving the emergence of lopsided final scores like 15-6-3-2.
Instead, winning seemed to be based on the approach students took to the game. Students with no strategy - who drew at random - were at an extreme disadvantage in the fifty-four card array, whereas students who made and followed some sort of rule - whatever it was - always seemed to win. This rule could be, for example, always drawing new cards from the bottom left of the board, always drawing cards in clockwise order around holes, or always drawing in a counterclockwise spiral from the middle of the array.
Students who employed some sort of general rule for drawing new cards only had to memorize the rule, the card, and the order - one constant and two variables; students who drew at random had to memorize card, x-position, y-position, and order - four variables. Efficiency gains resulted in overwhelming victories for rule-following students, since these rules effectively reduced a game played in two-dimensional space to a game played in one neural dimension.
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Russian scientists have acheived what's being called the moon landing of our generation:
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 9:25PM | tagged 
