[Lifestyle] Experience: I’ve got the best memory in the world

[Amaterasu イタチ]

 

Growing up in Oxford, Mississippi, I never thought I had a good memory. None of my friends or family would have said I did, either.

In 2013, when I was studying biomedical engineering, I stumbled across a Ted Talk by Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. He mentioned techniques such as the “memory palace” or the “journey method”. They tell you that if you want to remember things, imagine you’re journeying through a specific physical space, depositing images that represent the information you’re trying to recall.

I applied these techniques to my studies and day-to-day tasks. The first time I used a memory palace to recall a 20-item shopping list, I felt I’d encountered an earth-shattering superhuman ability – although it’s something anyone can do.

Initially, competitions were of no interest, but I tried a few activities that they involve, such as memorising the order of a deck of cards or lists of numbers. I started training in March 2013 and by September I had broken the one-minute mark for memorising and recalling a single deck of cards. The national record was slightly over a minute, so I realised I could compete with the best. In 2014, when I was 22, I entered the USA Memory Championship and came second. That spurred me on.Memorising cards has always been my favourite. I break the cards into pairs and assign an image to each pair. To the human brain, images are a lot more memorable than the abstract idea of, say, the six of diamonds.

I use my childhood home as one of my memory palaces, and the first stop is outside the house, at the mailbox. If I was remembering a deck of cards, I could associate the first pair of cards with the image of Michael Jordan slamdunking a basketball into my mailbox. Then the next stop is the driveway. So I’ll associate the second pair with an image of Ian McKellen as Gandalf leading the Fellowship of the Ring up the driveway.

The images can be random – they don’t always need to be related to the information you’re trying to remember. It’s just about trying to make mental images that are as creative as possible to create a memorable story – they are inevitably ridiculous. It’s fun, which people might not expect, because memory seems like this dry thing. The fastest people in the world can memorise a deck of cards in 15 seconds or under. My personal best in a world championship event is 15.61 seconds.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/may/19/experience-ive-got-the-best-memory-in-the-world