Overton's Baseball

Nature Neuroscience 6, 90 - 95 (2002)
Published online: 16 December 2002; | doi:10.1038/nn988
Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory
Eleanor A. Maguire1, Elizabeth R. Valentine2, John M. Wilding2 & Narinder Kapur3

1 Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience, Institute of Neurology, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK

2 Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 0EX, UK

3 Department of Clinical Neuropsychology, Wessex Neurological Centre, Southampton General Hospital and Department of Psychology University of Southampton, Southampton SO16 6YD, UK
Correspondence should be addressed to Eleanor A. Maguire e.maguire@fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk
Why do some people have superior memory capabilities? We addressed this age-old question by examining individuals renowned for outstanding memory feats in forums such as the World Memory Championships. Using neuropsychological measures, as well as structural and functional brain imaging, we found that superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain differences. Rather, we found that superior memorizers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus that are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular. These results illustrate how functional neuroimaging might prove valuable in delineating the neural substrates of mnemonic techniques, which could broaden the scope for memory improvement in the general population and the memory-impaired.

Original: craschworks - comments

Via Marginal Revolution

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07wwln_freak.html?ei=5090&en=2cf57fe91bdd490f&ex=1304654400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The Birth-Month Soccer Anomaly

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

What might account for this anomaly? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) winter-born babies tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in "none of the above." He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?

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