in cognitive science at the University of Paris. Of memorizers called the KL7 and was at that time pursuing a Ph.D. He was a founding member of a secret society Only through memorizing, the thinking went, could ideas be incorporated into your psyche and their values absorbed.Ĭooke was wearing a suit with a loosened tie, his curly brown hair cut in a shoulder-length mop, and, incongruously, a pair of flip-flops emblazoned with the Union Jack. It was considered a form of character-building, a way of developing the cardinal virtue of prudence and,īy extension, ethics. A trained memory was not just a handy tool but also a fundamental facet of any worldly mind. Today we have books, photographs, computers and an entire superstructure of external devices to help us store our memories outside our brains, but it wasn’t so long ago that culture depended on individual In an amateur research program” whose aim is to rescue a long-lost tradition of memory training.
He explained to me that mnemonic competitors saw themselves as “participants “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke said. Earlier I watched him recite a list of 252 random digits as effortlessly as if it were his telephone number. That seemed hard to square with the fact that he knew huge chunks of “Paradise Lost” by heart. “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. “Oh, I’m not a savant,” he said, chuckling. event to train for that summer’s World Memory Championships - when he first realized he was a savant.
I asked Ed Cooke, a competitor from England - he was 24 at the time and was attending the U.S. Of random digits in under an hour and - to impress those with a more humanistic bent - any poem you handed them. The best among them could memorize the first and last names of dozens of strangers in just a few minutes, thousands They referred to themselves as mental athletes, or M.A.’s for short. The scene I stumbled upon, however, was something less than a clash of titans: a bunch of guys (and a few women), varying widely in age and personal grooming habits, poring over pages of random numbers and long I was there to write a short article about what I imagined would be the Super Bowl of savants. Memory Championship, stock-still and sweating profusely, began a year earlier in the same auditorium, on the 19th floor of the Con Edison building The unlikely story of how I ended up in the finals of the U.S.A. In a moment, the chief arbiter would click a stopwatch, and I would have five minutes to memorize the order of both decks. On a table in front of me, lying faceĭown between my hands, were two shuffled decks of playing cards. I also had on a pair of industrial-strengthĮarmuffs that looked as if they belonged to an aircraft-carrier deckhand (in the heat of a memory competition, there is no such thing as deaf enough). Not that Kolli or I could possibly have heard them. The audience was asked not to take any flash photographs and to maintain total silence. It was almost as tall as myĢ-year-old niece (if lighter than most of her stuffed animals). In the corner of the room sat the object of my affection: a kitschy, two-tiered trophy of a silver hand with gold nail polish brandishing a royal flush. memory sport, a bearded 43-year-old chemical engineer and four-time national champion from Fayetteville, One was a blow-dried mixed martial arts announcer named Kenny Rice, whose gravelly, bedtime voice couldn’tĬonceal the fact that he seemed bewildered by this jamboree of nerds.
The memory master method tv#
Spread out behind me, where I couldn’t see them and they couldn’tĭisturb me, were about 100 spectators and a pair of TV commentators offering play-by-play analysis. To my right was the lens of a television camera from a national cable network. Who was also the defending United States memory champion.
Sitting to my left was Ram Kolli, an unshaven 25-year-old business consultant from Richmond, Va., To the page, goes a long way toward explaining the unexpected spot in which I found myself in the spring of 2006.
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