Tricks of the mind

TV. I spend a lot of time giving out about it. That soul-eating suckbox sitting in the corner, dominating all your senses. Slowly eating your life. Hours where you could be making, creating, living, loving. Or even depleting the long list of depressing chores, to live a more clutter-free life. Not just ridding the pile of unironed clothes but the cobwebs in your head. A night on the sofa, wasted life-hours, ending with a fat gut, laden with guilt, like the soiled sock hidden under the bed of a teenage boy.

Woah. I'd just intended to post that I read Derren Brown's book recently and I'm looking foward to his Trick or Treat show again tonight and all that bile just spilled out. What I'd intended to say is that while I do loath the tellybox at times and would love to see it in the bin, I do love good TV, rarity that it is. I've a few heroes I love to watch on the box; David Attenborough, Roy Mears, Richard Dawkins, Armandi Ianucci, Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry. And I love a good film, or a good quiz (not to be confused with a gameshow).

I just hate when we end up sitting in front of the stupid thing watching crap as if its some kind of domestically social event. And I hate that late night plastic soap plaguing the screens; neither serious nor funny. Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty, Plastic Polly, Fucking Funty. They're all the same shallow numbeties. And I despise the kind of TV programming designed to reel you in and suck on your very soul, either for the rest of the night (Top 100s) or the rest of your robotic life week after week (soaps). And Fridays are the worst, just when you're too tired to do anything else, they lay on the thickest excrement from the bottom of the barrel.

Woah. Let's try again. Derren Brown's Trick or Treat is on tonight. I like Derren Brown and I find his work intriguing. He could so easily be dismissed as an annoying magician, and he often is. But he doesn't do magic. Psychological tricks, amazing memory feats, and general head fucking but no magic. And he'll be the first to admit, nay shout from the rooftops, that anyone who claims to read your mind or predict the future is nothing but a shyster.

I read his book, Tricks of the Mind recently and it's highly entertaining. Actually it starts off a little bit puerile, with the kind of bad jokes and puns, that people new to writing haven't learned to resist yet. Like people dabbling with electronic music using too much reverb, or budding design enthusiasts using too much drop-shadow. Resist! But the silly puns are gone by the end, as are the silly tricks, from the start of the book. There are fascinating insights into lie detection, cold reading, hypnosis, NLP and memory. Not that showing you the tricks of his trade makes it easy, or possible, to do likewise. Could you fly a plane after reading the manual? The second half of the book is a scathing attack on all forms of mumbo jumbo, from fortune tellers and psychics to healers and religion, which puts him into hero ranks for me.

I'm suddenly reminded of an otherwise clever young guy who constantly regurgitates a line that I reckon some lecturer told him and he thought it was clever. He reckons that Irish Atheist are just rebelling against the Irish Church and it doesn't reach any further than that, which is the biggest load of cock I've ever heard repeated. Like most Atheists, I despise all forms of superstition: fortune tellers, mind readers, lucky black cats, unlucky magpies, psychics, mediums, the number 13, prayer, heaven, hell, god, afterlife, auras, amber beads, luck, souls, ghosts. It's all the same mumbo jumbo to me. Catholic or Muslim, Jew or Gentile.

Woah. Let's try again. Derren Brown's Trick or Treat is on tonight. It's an entertaining little show. Last week was a 'Treat', a guy was shown how to add facts from hundreds of books to his short-term memory and kicked ass in one of the biggest pub quizzes in the UK. In tonight's episode, a girl picks the 'Trick' card and has to wrestle with her conscience over the torture of a cat. I'm guessing that it's Brown's version of that famous obedience to authority experiment carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Trick or Treat

10.00pm. Channel 4.

Then turn it off and play some scrabble, or bake a cake, or see what fun you can have with some facepaint and a sleeping child. Or... maybe... just watch Peep show on straight after Derren Brown. Then if you've had a few cans, Balls of Steel might seem like a good idea. And then before you know it, it's 2AM and you're woken by the stale beer spilling onto your lap in a cloud of self-loathing on another wasted night.

The Persistence of Memory

A few years ago I got sick of having a terrible memory. I've since nailed it down to a slighlty bizarre portion of bad memory in that I can't for the life of me remember proper nouns. So I can't remember names of pubs, shops, roads, restaurants, people etc. However, like most people I'm better with faces, much better though, I could see a bloke walk by in the street and remember that he was two people ahead of me, in a queue in a chipper, in Dun Laoighre, eight years ago. So I have a good visual memory and when I came across a book called Master Your Memory by Tony Buzan, I scanned the back cover and saw that it had a system to improve your memory through your visual memory. So you could remember long numbers as images in a story for example. But it didn't really make any sense without it's precursor Use your memory. So I bought that and spent every morning on the bus to work practising the techniques in both. And they are fairly amazing techniques. Definitely a step above your average self help book.

The first thing I memorised, just for practise, was Pi to 500 decimal places. The second half of Master Your Memory contains lists of trivia to memorize so I went to work on them.

• All the countries of the world - including their capitals and currency
• The periodic table - including atomic number, atomic weights etc
• 100 most frequently used words in Spanish
• 100 Painters - including a famous work, its location, the artist's lifespan, nationality and school of art

For the list of painters, I tracked down all the paintings on the web to make it a bit easier, and then discovered that the a lot of the data isn't that well researched on any of the lists. When I reviewed the book on Amazon, I slated the content (while praising the system) for not researching any of the material properly even in it's later editions. And Tony Buzan is definitely not short on pennies.

So, after quite a bit of waffle, the main point of this post is that list of paintings - if you're looking for all the paintings in this list like I did, or just want to have a look through 100 famous paintings, here's my list of 100 Artists, thoroughly researched, and backed up by a few books I've read over the years. And more importantly, there's an image to go with each painting. There were a few cases where I couldn't find the famous work that Tony Buzan chose, the fact that they were so hard to find was testamant in itself that they weren't the most relevant works. In a couple of other cases I chose a different painting anyway just because it seemed much more relevant - but in most cases, I stuck to the original list as much as possible - apart from correcting all the mistakes, which were mostly dates and locations of paintings.

By the way, after years of this 'Brain Training' I still have a terrible memory! It didn't do a thing to improve my day to day memory. Arsebags! Still an amusing way to pass the time at the bus stop though as you have to keep going through these lists in your head. Specially if you have a head like a sieve, like I do.

100 Artists - 100 paintings