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The Great Memory Show
The Great  Memory Show Ostensibly The Great  Memory Show was an event in which memory performers were invited to demonstrate their skills in front of a live audience and TV cameras and to explain to the audience how they performed such impressive feats. The show had a hidden agenda, though, as its primary purpose was the elicitation of data that had proved elusive by any other means. More than a novel entertainment event it was actually a novel data collection solution.

The Great Memory Show ran in parallel to Tony Buzan's Mind Sports Olympiad, but not in competition. The purposes underlying both were different. The Mind Sports Olympiad was competition orientated the laudable motive being to urge better and better performance to demonstrate the potential of memory training. The real motive behind the Great Memory Show was to attract a pool of outstanding memory performers together in the same place and screen out from them subjects for memory research at London University.

Most memory research seeks out people with poor or damaged memories, but the other end of the scale is just as important, as it is by rare or extreme cases that new understanding is found. It was this end of the spectrum that the research in which Dr Marshall was involved focused. The trouble was that people with naturally superior memory quality (as opposed to trained memory quality) are as difficult to find as needles in haystacks and after searching among the various populations where they would most likely turn up - Oxbridge history scholars, taxi drivers, Mensa members - and finding very few he hit upon the idea of rather than looking for them let them look for us. And that was the motive behind The Great Memory Show. Memory performers would get their day of fame and the research project would get its data.

The 5x5 System The 5x5 System is a memory system invented by Dr Peter Marshall for the purpose of research at University College London. Research by Dr Marshall and colleagues at Royal Holloway discovered that by 1997memory quality had replaced IQ as the dominant predictor of school outcomes. A research project was then planned to test the efficacy of providing memory training in schools, in which samples of schools would be tested. One subgroup would be given memory training, a second set group would be given study skills training of the same amount of time, but without memory training. A third group was to be a control group which would receive no special treatment. A scientifically validated memory system had to be created that could be taught in exactly the same way to the pupils of schools in the test group by any teacher and each sub-group would be given the same amount of time as the group receiving study skills training without memory training..

The 5 x 5 system combines five principals of memory maximisation and each contains five subsidiary principals

Principle 1. An image formation tactic for a very short term memory Principle 2  A shape building tactic for chunking Principle 3  Chaining for more complex long-term memorisations Principle 4  for enhancing consolidation Principle 5  for overcoming forgetting.

The 5 x 5 system has since been published and written upon by a variety of authors.