Pub Quizzes

A pub quiz can be an interesting experience. Putting aside ambitious thoughts of winning - much good can come from just attendance. The memory is a tricky thing to get to grips with. Reading information is seldom sufficient to stock the brain with easily accessible data. There has to be multiple stimuli - some reading some effort at recall, a mixed diversification on how that stimulus is obtained - if not reading then hearing. If not hearing then seeing. Or being bludgeoned with. Or frightened into. Or being dragged into consciousness by the agonies of a flawed memory.

So attending as many pub quizzes as possible is a good learning strategy to add to other methods of information reception. Typically a question is asked and you have either forgotten the answer or you never knew it in the first place. Once the answer has been given all that effort and frustration opens the memory valves and allows that relevant piece of information to slide in and take a permanent place in your brain. Without this theory I wouldn't know that: there exists a pink fairy armadillo, that Odin's 9 hand maidens are called Valkyries, a blue lagoon is made up of vodka and blue curaceu, Haydock is the other racecourse in Liverpool and that Everton football club have Prince Rupert's Tower etched into their club's insignia.  

I wouldn't know any of these facts had I read them from a book. The reason I know them today is because of the tense and heated atmosphere form which they sprung - with me not knowing and then becoming enlightened. So, it's against this background that I'm writing this blog as a kind of condemnatory for the rubbish quiz that was presented to us last night at the Old Bell and Bush. If a question is difficult it might be inconvenient at the time but it might also be used as part of the new you for the future - bluntly if the question comes up again you will know it. If a question is easy (at least to you) come you are going to score some much needed, ego massaging points as a win in the short term does wonders for ones confidence.   But if the question is boring - there is no merit to it whatsoever. 

Recently I read an article about pub quizzes and within that article, written by a pub quiz regular, that questions really need to be interesting for the quiz to be a success.  Not too easy (boring) or too difficult (moral sapping) but enough to make you wring out your memory for something you think you know, or attempt to break it down into parts and apply logic to what the answer might conceivably be based on what you already do know. The article gives by way of illustration a boring question example: ' By how much in percentage terms did British Gas put up their call out bills last month?' Who cares? Who wants to know? Why do  you want to know? The answer is then guessed at with no real sense of pride or achievement and if it turns out to be right will elicit mild pleasure in gaining a point.  If it guessed wrong nothing is learnt from what is after all a transient fact that means nothing to anyone even there and then let alone in a month or 6 months or a years time. During which there will still be 7 new wonders of the world to remember that a make you feel knowledgeable, b  make you want to travel more, c, get more from the travel experiences that you have, d will expand your knowledge base by an untold amount given the natural propensity to look deeper in to the components of the answer. Interesting questions make for an illuminating experience. Boring questions make you wonder whu yoy bothered turning up in the first place.