Dear members—
Could you memorize this string of numbers? 16180339. If you tried, would you be able to remember them in an hour? In a week?
Memory champions—people who win memory competitions and can memorize a deck of cards in just seconds—have a strategy for this, one that viewers of BBC’s Sherlock series might recognize. It’s called a “mind palace,” and it works by turning hard-to-remember information, like a series of digits, into a story.
Quartz’s Arielle Ray and Michael Tabb have created an augmented reality experience just for members that teaches you how the mind palace technique works. You can read about it here, and if you have an Apple device running iOS 13, you’ll be able to try it out. (If you don’t, there’s a preview in the link above.) I tried this technique myself, after reading a book about memory competitions, and I can confirm that it works.
This project came out of Michael’s reporting for our member-only show Exceptional Humans. If you haven’t seen it, check out the episode on memory competitions.
THE BUSINESS OF WATER SCARCITY
In this week’s presentation for members, Dasia Moore provides an introduction to water scarcity around the world and the role that businesses play in it. Water scarcity is an intensely local problem, and it manifests itself in different ways in different places. That makes solving it particularly difficult. For multinational corporations, there’s no one-size-fits-all response.
In many places where scarcity is most acute, businesses exacerbate the problem through industrial pollution and excessive water extraction. But some companies are also tackling this issue, from better understanding their water footprint to investing in technology to make their operations more water efficient.
If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, we have two field guides on water scarcity here and here. And you can view all of our presentations, which we produce exclusively for members, here. They’re designed to give you a quick introduction to a topic, and you can reformat and edit them as you wish.
Best wishes for a relaxing and restorative weekend,
Walter Frick
Membership editor, Quartz