Dan Deacon, True Thrush: Participants Attempt to Re-Create a 13 Second Sequence From Memory

The setup to this video is remarkably simple and awesome:

It’s a 13-second video, and it’s pretty fun to try to be part of the challenge. That is: to see how much you can remember, as though you were going to have to recreate the set from memory yourself.

There’s an overwhelming number of things and details that seems to make it impossible to remember quickly, and so the mind kind of makes these quick “I’ll remember this detail, but I’ll forego that over there” moves. It’s a lot of fun to watch, and enjoyable to see how much stuff breaks down and changes, over time. Like, for example: Pasta Poo-Poo Time!

In a weird way, it’s kind of uncanny how much this video resembles the Recursive Google Image Project by Sebastian Schmieg.

I wonder if a challenge like this would be child’s play for hard core mnemonists. The world record for memorizing a deck of 52 cards was somewhere in the neighborhood of 1:40. Having only 13 seconds seems like a fraction of that time, but on the flip side… there were definitely fewer than 52 different actions or details in the room.

Or… were there? I can’t remember.

Music is by Dan Deacon, who co-directed the video with Ben O’Brien (they’re the two guys at the start of the video).

[via MetaFilter]

Related:
Recursive Google Image Search, Starting With A Transparent Image
Secrets Of A Mind-Gamer: The Story Of An Unlikely Mnemonist