Ogi Ogas gives a fascinating first-hand account of how he deployed tricks and ideas from his education and research in neuroscience to tackle the gameshow Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

The first technique I drew upon was priming. The priming of a memory occurs because of the peculiar “connectionist” neural dynamics of our cortex, where memories are distributed across many regions and neurons. If we can recall any fragment of a pattern, our brains tend to automatically fill in the rest. For example, hearing an old Madonna song may launch a cascade of linked memories: your high school prom where it was the theme song, your poorly tailored prom outfit, your forgotten prom date, the stinging embarrassment when you threw up in the limo.

And him describing how he felt when the host revealed that he had won 500,000 dollars (after playing a nasty bluff for a moment):

My neurohormones whipped from black misery to shining ebullience, saturating my brain in a boiling cauldron of epinephrine and endorphins. I gaped at the azure screen in front of me as the ultimate question coalesced in hot white font.

I love this guy!

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