In the book Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, author Joshua Foer describes how he trained for and competed in the U.S. memory championship in just one year after previously covering the event as a journalist. It’s a great read and one of my favorite books of all-time, entertainingly depicting what it takes to create a memory palace, a place in your mind’s eye where you can store images to better help you remember just about anything from decks of playing cards to long strings of random numbers.
In the book one of Foer’s fellow memory competitors was lamenting the fact that we collect stamps and baseball cards and lots of other things, but no one really consciously collects memories. We just rely on our brains to store recollections of key events, but anyone who has ever had a word stuck on the tip of their tongues, knows how fallible memories can be. What usually jogs them is someone else giving us a clue. A keyword that can spark a new connection in our minds. For instance, if you are having trouble remembering a party you were at and someone says it was the party where your sister threw up on your best friend, suddenly the images come flooding back in, usually in vivid detail. Isn’t that weird? For the longest time you were unable to access a memory even though it was lying somewhere in the recesses of your mind. Inaccessible due to a weak connection that hasn’t been exercised since the events unfolded decades earlier. Wouldn’t it be great then if there was a way that we could help each other remember? If there was a way that we could help each other collect memories? Help each other remember trivial things that we have long since forgotten?
What I’m envisioning is a phone app that would link to our Instagram and Facebook accounts to find pictures of us and then show those pictures to our friends, who would then have to come up with a word or two to serve as a future clue for us, in case we ever need it, when looking back at those pictures later in life. Sure we could do this chore ourselves. Take copious notes and describe what we thinking or feeling at the time the picture was taken. But that’s a tedious exercise that no one is going to want to do for every picture that they have. Especially on days when they take hundreds if not thousands of pictures. But what if you were to gamify the act of quickly labeling someone else’s photo? Well, that might actually be fun. A time-suck that would actually benefit society. Think of it like a cross between Candy Crush Saga, Instagram, and Words with Friends. An addicting game, involving pictures, with a social component. Perhaps the more pictures you comment on, the more points you’d get. Points that you could exchange for prizes.
I’d call this game, Jolt, because we’d be jolting each other’s memories, and aside from the monetary motivation, people might actually enjoy playing this game on merit alone. If for no other reason than the fact that they would be jolting their own memories along the way. Reminiscing and taking a stroll down memory lane, strengthening the connections of their own neurons, every time they swipe through a picture. Surely, there are worse uses of someone’s free time. Like every other mindless task we currently do when we’re bored. With Jolt at least we’d be giving something back to society, helping our friends relive their glory days, one memory at a time.
Is Jolt the Greatest Idea Ever?
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