Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (16 page)

Why do people do this? The same reason my father worked for thirty-seven years in a factory he hated. The same reason I stayed in (and, in truth, cultivated) bad relationships. The same reason you probably do something in your life, right this minute, that you wish you didn’t.

All change is hard, even good change, like winning something. It’s hard for any of us to imagine real alternatives to our expectations, so they’re what we often wind up with. Which reinforces the existing pathways in what can become an inescapable loop.

I sometimes wonder if natural selection didn’t reward our ability to bullshit ourselves in precisely this fashion. If two hominids were both fleeing a large, fast predator, and one of them was sincerely thinking “I am safe, I am exceptional, the gods are watching over me, and I cannot die” and the other was thinking “AIEEE! I’m an entrée!
AAIEEE!
” it’s not hard to guess which one got dragged back by his entrails.

With Annika (and Tonya and Leviticus and Zachariah), I couldn’t imagine how things could be otherwise, what I could do differently, or what I could value differently. On the other hand, my high-school revenge-training had put such a value on intellectual competition that, even while
filled
with self-doubt, once a
Jeopardy!
game started, on some level I couldn’t imagine
not
winning.

This leads us to our next step down the Eightfold Path:

1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.

2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.

3. Put your head where you can use it later.

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

I
t 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

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.