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Special note from David Barron -
I've had a long history of learning and loving memory tricks. In fact
I'm working on a book at the moment of my favorite most amazing - and
if you're in a betting mood, profitable - memory tricks.
After you read this article, take some time to check out http://SkilledMemory.com
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How
to Win the U.S.
Memory Championship
By
Joshua
Foer
To
attain
the rank of grand master of memory, you must be able to perform three
seemingly superhuman feats.
You have to memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour, the precise order
of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in the same amount of time, and
one shuffled deck in less than two minutes. There are 36 grand masters
of memory in the world. Only one lives in the United States. His name
is Scott Hagwood, and he's won every U.S. Memory Championship since he
began competing in 2001. This past Saturday he was at home in
Fayettville, N.C., putting the finishing touches on his first book
about memory enhancement. That meant he was not in the auditorium on
the 19th floor of the Con-Edison headquarters in Manhattan, and that
meant that for the first time in five years, the gold medal of the
eighth annual U.S. Memory Championship was anyone's for the taking.
There are five events in the U.S. Memory Championships. First,
contestants are given 15 minutes to memorize 99 names and faces, and 20
minutes to recall them. Next, the contestants have to memorize an
unpublished 50-line poem (this year titled, "The Tapestry of Me") in 15
minutes, followed by a series of random digits, a list of random words,
and finally a shuffled deck of playing cards. The best memorizers in
the world—who almost all hail from Europe—can memorize a pack of cards
in less than a minute. A few have begun to approach the 30-second mark,
considered the "four-minute mile of memory."
One of those individuals is Lukas Amsuess, a 22-year-old grand master
and the male champion of Austria. Even though his scores couldn't be
counted in the American championship, Amsuess had flown all the way
from Vienna to compete as an unofficial contestant. He was accompanied
by Edward Cooke, a 23-year-old grand master from England. They thought
the competition would be a good spring training for this summer's world
championships in London, which both hope to win.
They had also always wanted to see New York. (They visited the Empire
State Building, where Amsuess successfully memorized an entire deck of
cards on the 53-second elevator ride to the observation deck.)
Though every competitor has his own unique method of memorization for
each event, all mnemonic techniques are essentially based on the
concept of elaborative encoding, which holds that the more meaningful
something is, the easier it is to remember. The brain isn't built to
remember abstract symbols like numbers and playing cards, but if one
can translate those symbols into vivid visual images, even the dullest
series of binary digits can be made as memorable as your own address.
The key is to develop a system that allows quick encoding and easy
recall.
Some memorizers arbitrarily associate each playing card with a familiar
person or object, so that the king of clubs is represented by, say,
Tony Danza. The grand masters associate each card with a person, an
action, or an object so that every group of three cards can be
converted into a sentence. The first card of the triplet is encoded as
a person, the second as a verb, and the third as an object. For
example, when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine
of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie
model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old
public-school headmaster in a suit of armor. The more vivid the image,
the more likely it is not to be forgotten.
They memorize numbers much the same way. Cooke converts every two-digit
number from 00 to 99 into a familiar object or person, so that every
six digits form a sentence. When he sees 342102, Cooke imagines Frank
Sinatra crooning the Britney Spears' song " … Baby One More Time" to an
obelisk. When he's doing well, this translation is happening
instantaneously. At his best, he can store about 300 digits, or 50
sentences, in his head in five minutes.
To keep all this information in order, memorizers have to link their
images together in a chain. Some, like Cooke and Amsuess, use what's
called the "journey method." They place their images at predetermined
points along a route that they know well. Cooke's route begins at his
favorite Oxford pub and ends at a nearby hotel. When it comes time to
recall, he simply takes a mental stroll through his old college town
and is able see each of the images in the place where he put it.
According to Harvard memory researcher Daniel Schacter, this method of
using visual imagery as a mnemonic device was first employed by a Greek
poet named Simonides in 477 BC. Simonides was the sole survivor of a
roof collapse that killed all the guests at a large banquet he was
attending. He was able to reconstruct the guest list by visualizing who
was sitting at each seat around the table. What Simonides had
discovered was that people have an astoundingly good recollection of
location. In his book Searching for Memory, Schacter explains that this
same technique was later used by Roman generals to learn the names of
thousands of soldiers in their command and by medieval scholastics to
memorize long religious tomes. During the 15th and 16th centuries,
European mystics created elaborate "memory theaters" consisting of
hundreds of fanciful locations in which mystical facts could be
deposited.
Though mnemonics have a long history, competitive memory has been an
organized sport only since 1991, when Tony Buzan, a business consultant
and author of 82 books on the brain and memory, including the
best-selling Use Your Head, organized the first international
competition in England. Since then, national championships have sprung
up in Austria, South Africa, Singapore, Australia, Germany, Malaysia,
China, Japan, Mexico, and the United States.
The top competitors at the international level exercise their
memory—and in some cases, also their bodies—rigorously. "It's very much
like training for the Olympics," says Buzan, who stresses the need to
be physically as well as mentally fit for competitive memory. The best
grand masters will spend several hours every day preparing, he says.
Dominic O'Brien, an eight-time world champion from the United Kingdom,
is said to begin his intense training regimen six months before every
world championship. Though there's little money to be won in
competitive memory (total prizes at last year's world championships
were just £3,000), several of the top memorizers have been able
to parlay their success into book deals and business consulting gigs.
But that's the European memory scene. Here in the United States, the
top competitors don't take things quite as seriously, and that's
reflected in the United States' fourth-place ranking in the world
behind Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Of the top U.S.
competitors, few readily admit to beginning training more than a week
before the national tournament, and most don't even follow memory
expert Frank Felberbaum's advice to eat a meal of wild Alaskan salmon
(high in omega-3 fatty acids) the night before competing.
The contest itself unfolded with all the excitement of, say, the SAT.
Contestants sat quietly at tables staring at sheets of paper, then
scribbled answers that they handed off to judges. During the speed
cards event, each memorizer pored over a shuffled deck of cards for up
to five minutes and then was handed a fresh deck to rearrange like the
original. After each event, scores were quickly calculated and
displayed on a screen at the front of the room. There was a lot of
dramatic temple massaging and nervous foot tapping and the occasional
blank stare of defeat but none of the public agony of a basketball game
or spelling bee.
Of the 24 "mental athletes" competing at the U.S. championship, the
most feared by far was Tatiana Cooley-Marquardt, a stay-at-home mom and
self-proclaimed "Queen of Memory" who won the first three U.S.
championships but hadn't competed since being dethroned by Hagwood four
years ago. In the meantime, she had married and had a kid.
Cooley-Marquardt, who was tall, pretty, and fashionably dressed,
claimed not to have practiced at all during the weeks leading up to the
competition, and she may have suffered for her insouciance. She was
able to win only one event, the poem, and trailed a 24-year-old Capital
One business analyst from Richmond, Va., named Ram Kolli all day. In
the final standings, Cooley-Marquardt came in a distant second, and
Chester Santos, a software engineer from San Francisco, placed third.
Kolli walked away with a round-trip ticket, courtesy of British
Airways, to the world championships in August and a small Oscar-like
trophy. The tournament wound to a close with several celebratory
speeches by the competition's organizers. Tony Buzan proclaimed that
"America is now entering the top league."
The European visitors might beg to differ. Though Amsuess and Cooke's
scores weren't officially tabulated, it was clear that Cooke would have
destroyed the American competition. In the random words event, he
managed 150 words in five minutes, 50 more than the best American
score. In the speed numbers event, he memorized almost twice as many
digits as the next best American competitor. German-speaker Amsuess did
not fare as well. He botched the names and faces event and performed
poorly in the poetry and random words competitions because he didn't
recognize several words like "yawn," "ulcer," and "aisle." And in speed
cards, his best event, he clocked an impressive 45 seconds—almost four
times faster than the best American—but lost out on a heap of points
because he reversed two out of the 52 cards. Not dejected all, he
loosened his tie, left the building, and walked to a nearby pub, where
he memorized a deck of cards for the waitress and got three free beers
in return. |
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 Remember
hundreds of
names and recall them months after learning them. Recall complex
directions step by step. Cut study time by 50% or more. Remember the
facts from everything you read or hear.
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