Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy!

by Bob Harris

  4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.

  5. Admit you don’t know squat as often as possible.

  6. Everything connects to everything else.

  7. You can often see only what you think you’ll see.

  So the night I came home from my first game, Annika and I actually had a pleasant evening. The undercurrents of mutual dissatisfaction stayed where they were. I convinced myself that clarity was not worth noticing.

  I told her of my exciting day dodging intellectual bullets. I’m not sure if I even asked about her day, which for all I know may have involved dodging real ones. We ate burritos and laughed reassuringly and went to bed convinced everything was fine.

  But neither one of us went back to discussing the furniture.

  Next up: gathering study materials.

  Fortunately, between the time I passed the test and Jeopardy! startled me by actually calling, I had stumbled across a book called Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions by Mark Lowenthal and Chuck Forrest, both of whom had impressive successes on the show.

  Chuck, you recall, had spooked the crap out of me when I was still sitting on the couch in the small white house in the Snow Belt, watching the show with my silent parents and hoping someday to become a functional grown-up. Chuck was a better player than I could ever hope to be.

  Part of what made Chuck memorable was his pure bravado. In September of 1985 he pioneered a technique (still called the “Forrest Bounce”) in which he selected clues not in simple vertical lines but by hopscotching back and forth across the game board, continually changing categories.

  At the time, the Bounce was a surprising move. Contestants aren’t required to play straight down the board, but it’s easier for the camera and graphics people to follow, not to mention the folks at home whose viewership pays for the whole shebang. So the contestant wranglers always give the players a little pre-game chat in which the show’s technical preferences are made clear. Besides, playing in straight columns is also easier for most players, since responding to a simple $200 clue eliminates one possible answer for the difficult clues to come.

  Chuck was the first player to defy convention, careening wildly about the board, with devastating results. His confidence in his own mental agility to change topics every twelve seconds distracted his competitors enough that they never once found their footing. Five wins later, he was $72,800 richer.

  Accounting for inflation, that would be over $125,000 in current dollars. (Suddenly the recent doubling in value of the clues seems merely a cost-of-living adjustment.)

  Chuck accomplished all this while he was still just a law student.

  Meanwhile, I was sitting on a couch in the Snow Belt, my own college years and original plans for adulthood receding from sight.

  I played along a few times. Chuck responded to almost twice as many clues as I could.

  I could never acquire access to Chuck’s education, but dammit, I could still crack his book and cram like hell. Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions was filled with long lists of stuff Chuck said I must learn, and fast. And it was still right there on my shelf, intact, and ready for immediate use.

  This was to become my new Concordance of the Bible: words and facts stripped of context, yet all impossibly significant in mysterious and hopeful ways.

  I was ready to receive the holy knowledge within.

  I took a deep breath, flipped through the pages, and hoped for wisdom.

  Chuck told of U.S. PRESIDENTS and CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS and KEY SUPREME COURT DECISIONS. NATIONAL CAPITALS and RIVERS THROUGH BIG CITIES and HIGHEST POINTS ON EACH CONTINENT. FAMOUS DRAMATISTS and AMERICAN NOVELISTS and POETS OF THE WORLD.

  Yes, I said out loud. Thank you, Chuck, I said.

  So Chuck kept going. I flipped a page, and then flipped three more. Chuck reeled off BRITISH ROYALTY, SPANISH EXPLORERS, and FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST PAINTERS. GREEK SCULPTORS and ITALIAN COMPOSERS.

  OK, this is good, I said, flipping ten pages, then twenty. Don’t hold back.

  Chuck picked up speed. 18TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHERS, 19TH CENTURY INVENTORS, 20TH CENTURY POPES. GERMAN INVENTORS, JAPANESE GENERALS, OTTOMAN KINGS.

  I can do this, I said, though my eyes were beginning to tire. I can do this.

  CHEMISTS and PHYSICISTS and ANTHEMS and ANTONYMS. FLORA and FAUNA and SLOGANS and PSEUDONYMS. TONYS and EMMYS and OSCARS and PULITZERS. DEITIES, DEMONS, and DEMIGOD dammit, Chuck.

  I was breathing heavily. The room was beginning to spin.

  Give me a second here, OK? Bright lights and loud noises were starting to swerve through my head. I think I may need to lie down.

  Chuck didn’t hear me.

  JURASSIC ANATOMY, SOUTHERNMOST VEGETABLES, TRANSGENDERED ANEMONES. Chuck, please. HINDUS NAMED STEVE. TINY DUTCH ASTRONAUTS. For the love of God! Stop! ALTERED STATES, INNER BEINGS. No, please! I’m scared! BLACK HOLES, BOUNDARY PHYSICS, STRING THEORY, STATE SECRETS…

  Chuuuuuuuuucck!

  Finally…silence.

  The Forrest Bounce had claimed another victim. I made a drastic concession.

  I would need at least another week of studying memory books first.

  CHAPTER

  9

  FUN WITH HOWARDS END

  Also, I Kick William Shakespeare’s Ass

  It would be nice if we were taught as children a bit about how to actively use our brains, instead of just carting them around like spine-mounted lint rollers, hoping a few things stick.

  Unfortunately, like me, a lot of you were told what to learn, but not how: here are your textbooks—plop!—and good luck. No operating instructions, no owner’s manual, and if you can’t figure out where the On button is, then it’s your own fault for getting a bad unit.

  We all know what often happens next: a staring contest with an inanimate object. The book usually wins. We’re reduced to repeating words and formulas like religious chants, hoping that the brute weight of time will somehow crack open our foreheads and allow the information to seep in.

  Rote repetition does work somewhat. Repeating any neural sequence over and over will eventually cause the synaptic connections to strengthen, much as flowing water will eventually cut through solid rock. Since this works eventually, a lot of us just get used to learning this way and assume that’s the best we can do.

  Worse, since we’re taught using books with numbered pages, it only seems natural to try to remember things in a fairly linear fashion, connecting the information only to what came on the page before. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, this runs counter to your brain’s physical architecture and chemical mechanisms.

  Now let’s try learning some stuff the fast way. (Incidentally, some of what follows has been known for centuries, while some is the result of relatively recent research. Some of this will be found in the self-help section of any bookstore, and some is my own personal amalgam of everything I’ve read and put into practice concerning memory, neurology, and snickering quietly under your breath in a library.)

  We’ll start with something very Jeopardy!-like, a list of novels by E. M. Forster:

  E. M. Forster novels

  A Room with a View

  Howards End

  A Passage to India

  Where Angels Fear to Tread

  Maurice

  Then we’ll up the ante with a different task, a series of items you need to remember in a specific order. In this case, we’ll use the seven main ranks usually used by biologists to classify living things in a big giant diagram:

  The hierarchy of life

  Kingdom

  Phylum

  Class

  Order

  Family

  Genus

  Species

  And just to enjoy a brutal little challenge, let’s complicate things with something horribly arcane, hard-to-pronounce, and downright dull enough to resemble the sorts of things we often have to know in school, even against our will:

  UN Secretaries-General

  Trygve Lie

&nb
sp; Dag Hammarskjöld

  U Thant

  Kurt Waldheim

  Javier Perez de Cuellar

  Boutros Boutros-Ghali

  Kofi Annan

  Those of you who still advocate rote learning, please repeat all of the above, over and over, until you’re certain you’ll remember it all perfectly in a week.

  Feeling confident already? Good. Close the book. I’ll see you in seven days.

  Everybody else, prepare to be as childish as possible.

  Since anything can be linked to anything else, we can always free-associate from the stuff we want to remember, looking for sticky images involving visceral issues of rapid movement and bright color and bodily functions and food and threat and sex and danger.

  Take Howards End, for example.

  Yes, definitely. Let’s start there.

  Aha! You’re getting ahead of me already, aren’t you? Yes, yes, I thought so. Very good. (An aside to the prudish or easily offended: go away. Go away right now. We’re studying British Literature here. We shan’t be disturbed.)

  I’ll bet there’s someone you know named Howard. I’ll also assume, for the sake of argument, that your Howard has buttocks.

  If not, get another Howard.

  If you don’t have a good Howard handy, just use someone else’s: Howard Hughes, Howard Stern, Howard Cunningham (the fictional father from Happy Days), Howard Alan O’Brien (novelist Anne Rice’s real name), or Moe, Shemp, and Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. You can even use Howard University, although this will take some organizing.

  Pick a Howard, grab him or her or them by the gluteus, get a good clear mental picture—complete with as much detail as you can stand—and now let’s attach that Howard’s particular End to the rest of the list, one by one.

  Let’s imagine A Room with a View.

  Of, obviously: Howard’s End.

  (I’ll be misspelling Howards End hereafter, including the possessive apostrophe for clarity’s sake. Thirty-foot buttocks often require such flexibility.)

  So let’s picture ourselves in a big empty room with a floor-to-ceiling bay window, and then mentally shove our Howard’s End into view, filling the window completely, a giant throbbing thirty-foot-wide buttocks of doom.

  Do not continue until you see it clearly.

  Didn’t take long, did it? Notice that “memorable” and “logical” are different and often contrary things. Now we should do something sticky with the room itself.

  Let’s look at Where Angels Fear to Tread. For this, we can use a member of the Angels baseball team (or the halo kind of angel, or Charlie’s Angels, or any angel image that pops into your head; it’s usually best to trust your own first instinct), and now create a circumstance Where Angels really would Fear to Tread.

  Thumbtacks, maybe. Or—much better, because it involves unexpected motion and danger, always interesting to our inner beast—let’s imagine an enormous sucking force threatening to pull our Angel helplessly up and away if he dares set foot in the room. The Angel is now filling with Fear of this whole Treading thing. Excellent.

  This is good and scary and odd. So now our Angels Fear to Tread in A Room with a View. And what is the source of this vacuum-like force?

  Howard’s End, of course. Whooosh!

  That wasn’t so hard, was it?

  If you’re feeling a little guilty about being amused by thoughts like this, don’t. It’s utterly human, just your brain doing what it’s wired to do. In fact, if you’re smiling right now, that’s how you know you’ll remember it. Laughter is a visceral reaction that means your brain is going into Record mode.

  Laughter provoked by visceral imagery is even more memorable. Ask any drunk to tell you a joke, and you’ll get instant proof that even pungent alcohol can’t overcome the most primitive neural connections.

  So. That leaves just one question: If we let ourselves be pulled along with the fearful Angel, and we turn and focus our attention from the Room with a View, what do we see in the distance, in our thirty-foot Howard’s End? What, pray tell, are we being pulled so forcefully toward?

  A Passage to India.

  In fact, if you’re in the Room with a View and looking at Howard’s End from just the right angle, you can just barely glimpse the Taj Majal.

  OK. There’s a chance now that you’re just appalled. So cover the whole thing up in your mind with a forest—one built by a “forester” himself, in fact—and never, ever go back. Oh, the shame of it all.

  Unless a week from now you want your Forster to pull back the trees and reveal A Room with a View where Angels Fear to Tread because Howard’s End sucks everything in sight toward A Passage to India.

  Two or three damn minutes, that took. With a bit of review in the next day or two, you’ll probably remember most of it for years.

  I swear this on my own eventual grave: If you get good at this, learning the driest subjects can quickly turn into endless outbursts of childish giggling.

  If you ever saw me play Jeopardy! and wondered why I was smiling at odd moments during clues, now you know why. The other players might have been intensely focused on RUSSIAN BATTLES or FRENCH ROYALTY or ASIAN CITIES or whatever. Me, I was mostly remembering a lot of naked people throwing things on fire at each other’s butts.

  Years after first creating that image, I learned that E. M. Forster had written a novel called Maurice as well.

  No worries. I just tossed Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees into Howard’s End—thwup!—and sent him on his merry way toward New Delhi.

  Took all of two seconds. Whoosh, glurk, new knowledge.

  Obviously this has absolutely nothing to do with knowing anything about Forster himself or his novels or his place in literary history. Not one bit.

  But it is extremely useful for connecting together and learning any pile of stuff that doesn’t have to be in a particular order. And that can often be a real foothold on any subject.

  What we’ve just done, incidentally, is also an example of “chunking,” the fancy word for remembering stuff by grouping things together. You do this every time you use a telephone area code or consider a chorus as one refrain instead of four lines or thirty-odd words. You don’t need to know the term, but you do want to get in the habit. Organizing and grouping information together so it all sticks at once can be amazingly powerful.

  How cool would it be for our world if a first-grade class could quickly learn the names of all the states and their capitals, and laugh in the process? If junior-high kids could buzz through the Bill of Rights and major Supreme Court rulings, making the time spent in the classroom more about discussion and understanding?

  In the short term, of course, all I had in mind was only one purpose: getting me through Jeopardy!

  Long-term, I had no idea how my own world would start to change as a result.

  Sometimes you need information in a specific order, as when trying to memorize how scientists divvy up life. No worries.

  Given a list, you’ve probably looked at least once at the first initials, hoping they might spell out a recognizable word or an acronym. Unfortunately, this almost never works, beyond FACE for the notes between the lines of a treble-clef music staff, NAY for the world’s longest rivers (Nile, Amazon, Yangtze), STD for the three most senior U.S. cabinet positions (State, Treasury, Defense), and a few dozen others I’ve come across. You’ll make that work perhaps once more in your life, and even then you might have to rearrange the letters a little.

  A slightly better tactic is to make up a sentence using the first letters of the desired sequence. The treble-clef music staff is often remembered as Every Good Boy Does Fine. (Inspired, I taught myself how to tune a guitar with Every Bad Girl Does Assorted Extras.) The seven colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) are often taught in England as “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain,” which I mention despite the great unlikelihood that Richard III will come up later in the story, over and over.

  Better still, just make up your
own sentence: “Rabbits On Yo-yos Go Bouncing In Vegetables” or “Radio Orator Yelps: Got Balls In Vinegar” or whatever makes you smile most. You’ll probably store it as part of the process. As a rule, if you can make yourself laugh, you’re halfway to long-term memory.

  If you’re dealing with things more complex than individual letters and familiar words—Latin phrases or strange names or foreign words, say—the solution is still simple: cheat harder. Just change the words slightly until you can make a recognizable sentence, preferably something visual. My own chunky mnemonic for the biological classifications of life—

  Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

  —is one mental picture of a minimalist composer with a crown on his head enjoying a good meal with his loved ones:

  King Philip Glass Orders his Family a Generous Special.

  If you’re not familiar with Philip Glass and his music, use something else:

  Keith in First Class Orders a Flunky to Genuflect Spastically.

  Ken Fights the Clap by Offering Frauleins a Gentle Spongebath.

  Whatever works best for you. (And no, the “Ken” here isn’t Ken Jennings, much as he enjoys volunteer work.)

  What if you have a spectacularly long list to memorize? Still, no worries. Just glue each piece to an existing list you already know—anything from the streets in your neighborhood to something as simple as the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., themselves.

  When I first passed the Jeopardy! test, I had no idea what order the presidents came in, other than the first few and the recent ones since World War II. Somewhere in between was an enormous void containing William McKinley and Martin Van Buren and even Millard goddam Fillmore. I did, however, know how to count (although if I had thought more about the mathematics of probability, I would have stopped taking the Jeopardy! test long before passing).