Yesterday, the nineteenth USA Memory Championship was held in Pennsylvania. What’s that you say? You didn’t know there was a competition involving long and complicated memorization? Well, there is. Since being founded by Tony Dottino nineteen years ago, participants have been trying their hands at rote memorization, entering the competitions armed with nothing but their brains. It’s easy to suspect that the kinds of people who enter these competitions are savants, or geniuses; the ability to recall the specific order of a deck of cards, or of a list of stranger’s faces must be one that comes randomly with the genetic lottery.
Sure, it’s possible that some of the participants have this natural ability: when I first heard about the competition, I thought it must be a room full of Cam Jansens battling for supremacy. But many of the competitors could easily be classified as just average Joes. Take this year’s winner, Alex Mullen; it’s easy to picture some Sheldon Cooper-like automaton, but he’s actually a medical student.
These people don’t have some otherworldly ability; their gift of recall is so powerful because they work at it. Like building up to the ideal bench press weight or that perfectly timed mile, these competitors have a rigorous training program. If any one of us stuck to the same program, with enough time and training, we too could memorize the exact order of a full deck of cards in under five minutes. (This is actually one of the events in the championship, among others.) Don’t take it from me, though: journalist Joshua Foer wrote an entire book, Moonwalking with Einstein, all about it. After a year of training, Foer attended the 2006 USA Memory Championships and won first place.
One of the most effective techniques used by competitors is the memory palace. A type of spatial memory, the method is said to date back to a Greek lyric poet, Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was attending a banquet when suddenly, the hall collapsed onto the party-goers underneath. When the wailing relatives arrived to collect the bodies for proper burial rites, they were unable to find the deceased, who were technically already buried -- under piles of rubble. As the grieving sobbed in the ruins around him, so the story goes, Simonides closed his eyes and pictured the banquet hall around him as though it were still standing. Once the mental picture was clear, he led the mourners to the spot where their kin lay buried. And so the memory palace was born.
For aspiring memory savants, the same basic exercise can be applied: choose a building you know well -- your childhood home for instance -- and place the information you need to remember in a specific order at different points throughout the location. It’s important to try to make the information as outlandish or bizarre as you can, since our brain tends to remember what’s unusual. Then, close your eyes and do a mental walkthrough, spending time really building up the mental picture. If this is done enough times, with enough concentration, the information should stick.
The brain is a muscle like any other; the more you work it, the stronger it becomes. So emulate everyone’s favorite detective, Sherlock, and give the memory palace a try.
