The Study Of Rajan Mahadevan (who Is A Memorist)

The Study of Rajan Mahadevan

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The Study of Rajan Mahadevan

Introduction

Many people in this world are blessed with a sharp memory. People can remember a large number of things at the same time. They can precisely remember faces, voices, digits, numbers and even smells. But there are very few people who have been blessed with a photographic memory. These people are gifted with the blessing that they can remember even the minute details about any person, event, thing, place or anything that they have seen even just once for some time. They can remember each and every second of an event and can recall it in the very same manner. One such man who had been blessed with such a type of memory is Rajan Mahadevan.

Discussion

Rajan Mahadevan is an Indian mnemonist or memoirist who has been blessed by an extremely sharp memory. It’s not like he developed this ability overnight or she made himself capable of doing so, he was gifted with this ability from the very beginning of his life.

Rajan Mahadevan was born in India in 1957. He moved to Mangalore with his family in 1959. Rajan’s parents always knew about his extraordinary capability and always paid special attention towards him to enhance his this capability. Rajan also had the idea that he was not an ordinary boy, which is why he started practicing various skills and brain exercises to boost up his knowledge and memory.

Rajan discovered his extraordinary intelligence, when he was just 5 years old, while he was playing at a birthday party, organized by his family. Rajan wandered to the parking lot and noted the license number plate from, the cars parked there. He intended to recite them later. Rajan tried to pursue a career in engineering but got bored with it and left the degree. Instead, he started memorizing the substantial parts of pi. In July 1981, he recited 31811 parts of the pi, for the very first time (Ericsson, et. al, 2004). This secured him a position in the Guinness Book of World Records, 1984. Moreover, he has also been featured in TV shows like Larry King Live and Reader’s Digest.

Thompson et.al. conducted a detailed study on Rajan Mahadevan along with the collaboration of the subject in 1990 and got it published in 1991 (Thompson, et. al., 1991). The researchers found out that the subject, Rajan Mahadevan, had an exceptionally sharp memory, especially in the case of digits. The researchers used a number of series of experiments to test the memory and the accuracy of the subject. The researchers concluded that Rajan Mahadevan followed the typical pattern of the memories as elaborated by Chase and Ericsson in 1982 in their book “The psychology of learning and motivation”. It was discovered that the Rajan made use of the retrieval structure, and showed consistency with the reduction in practice time of the study. But in contrast to this, Rajan uses a modified paired-associate method instead of pre-existing knowledge procedure. The results were consistent with the facts that although Rajan’s qualities and traits were not that much unique as there is quite a number of people who possess this kind of memory, his memory patterns were different from rest of them.

Conclusions

In short, the studies conducted on the great mnemonist, Rajan Mahadevan, was in consistency with the memory theories already developed by the researchers working in the area of psychology, especially Chris and Ericsson. They concluded their research on the same note that Rajan had an exceptional level of memory and showed extraordinary skills while performing in the area of memory, especially in the area of digits. The only difference was found between the method and the memory patterns of the memoirist.

References

Ericsson, K. A., Delaney, P. F., Weaver, G., & Mahadevan, R. (2004). Uncovering the structure of a memoirist's superior "basic" memory capacity. Cognitive Psychology, 49(3), 191-237.

Thompson, C. P., Cowan, T., Frieman, J., Mahadevan, R. S., Vogl, R. J., & Frieman, J. (1991). Rajan: A study of a memorist. Journal of Memory and Language, 30(6), 702-724.