Read more: 鈥�The ultimate guide to memory鈥�
Writer Joshua Foer immersed himself in the world of competitive memorisers to demystify their incredible feats of recalling vast strings of random digits or sequences of playing cards. Jon White asks him about his experience as a master memoriser
Why did you decide to get involved in competitive memorising?
I covered a US memory championship as a science journalist and saw these people performing utterly miraculous feats of memory, and I assumed that they had to be freaks of nature. I was rather surprised when they told me they all had relatively average memories and they had trained themselves to perform this way using a set of ancient techniques. I wanted to see if it was possible for me.
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Within a year you broke a US record for recalling a sequence of playing cards. How did you do it?
The techniques all come down to this: how do you take a piece of information that is otherwise lacking in any sort of context, say a string of random numbers, and apply associations to it, making it meaningful in the light of all the other things that you鈥檝e got in your memory. There are a whole bunch of strategies for doing that. One which is extraordinarily useful is to try to come up with a way of visualising whatever it is you鈥檙e trying to remember and making that imagery as bizarre as possible.
How might this work?
Some of the strategies take advantage of spatial memory. One of the best known examples is known as the memory palace 鈥� a mental construct which you populate with these images and then you 鈥渨alk鈥� through to recall them. The novelty of the images you use is part of what helps to make them memorable. This advice goes back to antiquity, if you want to make stuff memorable make it lewd, make it raunchy, make it gory, make it resonate emotionally.
Does it take long to master?
Not to get to a reasonable level. One of the neat things about these memory devices is you learn them and then all of a sudden you鈥檙e amazed at what you鈥檙e able to do with them. You can teach someone a simple trick for remembering numbers and all of a sudden they can remember 50 numbers or 100 numbers in a row pretty quickly. Getting up to competition level takes time, just like it takes time to get good at anything.
Are these techniques useful beyond memorising contests?
It鈥檚 really cool to know you can memorise an entire shuffled pack of playing cards in a minute and a half, but honestly, not that useful in everyday life. The basic skills do come in handy from time to time, especially remembering numbers, which is something that we end up having to do fairly often in our everyday lives.
Read about Foer鈥檚 experiences in Moonwalking with Einstein: The art and science of remembering (Penguin, 2011)
