US quiz champ and academic Dr Monica Thieu. Photo: Jeopardy Productions!, Inc.
If you've ever watched in awe as trivia experts like the Dark Destroyer on The Chase pull obscure facts out of thin air and wondered if their brains work a little differently to yours, you are not alone.
Dr Monica Thieu is a four-time contestant on the popular US trivia show Jeopardy.
She first competed in high school, won a college tournament, and earlier this year, reached the quarter finals in an invitational tournament for the best of the best.
Now a postdoctoral fellow in psychology at Emory University, Atlanta, she wanted to know if there was something special happening in the brains of people who can remember that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland.
"We were basically wondering can we figure out something about what it is that makes trivia experts brains, their minds, more sticky for trivia than other people," she told RNZ's Afternoons.
There are two types of memory, she said, episodic and semantic.
"One is memory for things that happen to you, sights and sounds and smells, people you are with. All of these details that come to mind when you close your eyes and imagine yourself sort of going back in time to a memory.
"And we call that memory episodic memory, you're remembering the episodes of your life."
The other type of memory is memory for facts, she said.
"Who was the first prime minister of Canada, things like that. That is semantic memory."
Modern neurological science tells us these two memory systems work more closely together than previously thought, she said.
Anecdotally, she found talking to fellow contestants on Jeopardy they had a particular way of remembering.
"When people would remember these trivia facts, they would often be able to remember where they were, who they were with, certain details about these things.
"People seem to be sticking together their episodic memories for when they learned the facts and the facts themselves."
The study, which recruited participants from an international quiz site, bore this out, she said.
"We put people in these 'museums' where we collected a bunch of facts and images from real museum websites, we taught people these new things.
"And what we found is that trivia experts, when they remembered the facts that they learned in our virtual museum, they were also more likely to remember what was the picture of the exhibit that you saw at the same time. Or which half of the study did you see it in, the first half or the second half?"
Trivia experts have more of this type of "binding", she said.
"We did find some evidence of this sort of like binding, the associating stickiness for trivia experts for facts and where they learned them."
So why does this matter? She said it can help us learn more about the memory in general.
"Studying trivia experts is a really cool way for us to learn more about how our memory for our experiences, or episodic memory, can inform our memory for how the world works more generally, how we take that information from one memory system and put it into another one, and how those systems talk to each other."
