Secrets of a Mind-Gamer

This is a condensed version of how Joshua Foer broke the world record for memorizing an entire deck of 52 playing carda (1 minute, 40 seconds).

How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete. By Joshua Foer.

... I asked Ed Cooke, a competitor from England — he was 24 at the time and was attending the U.S. event to train for that summer’s World Memory Championships — when he first realized he was a savant.

“Oh, I’m not a savant,” he said, chuckling.

“Photographic memory?” I asked.

He chuckled again. “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.”

That seemed hard to square with the fact that he knew huge chunks of “Paradise Lost” by heart. Earlier I watched him recite a list of 252 random digits as effortlessly as if it were his telephone number.

“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke said. ...

...nearly all the memory tricks in the competitive mnemonist’s arsenal — can be traced to a short Latin rhetoric textbook called “Rhetorica ad Herennium,” written sometime between 86 and 82 B.C. It is the only comprehensive discussion of the memory techniques attributed to Simonides to have survived into the Middle Ages. The techniques described in this book were widely practiced in the ancient and medieval worlds. Memory training was considered a centerpiece of classical education in the language arts, on par with grammar, logic and rhetoric. Students were taught not just what to remember but how to remember it. In a world with few books, memory was sacrosanct. ...

The principle underlying most memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember every type of information equally well. Like every other one of our biological faculties, our memories evolved through a process of natural selection in an environment that was quite different from the one we live in today...

The point of the memory techniques described in “Rhetorica ad Herennium” is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t that good at holding onto and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for. It advises creating memorable images for your palaces: the funnier, lewder and more bizarre, the better. “When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary and banal, we generally fail to remember them. . . . But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.” What distinguishes a great mnemonist, I learned, is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly. Many competitive mnemonists argue that their skills are less a feat of memory than of creativity. ...

From the front of the room, the chief arbiter, a former Army drill sergeant, shouted, “Go!” A judge sitting opposite me clicked her stopwatch, and I began peeling through the pack as fast as I could, flicking three cards at a time off the top of the deck and into my right hand. I was storing the images in the memory palace I knew better than any other, one based on the house in Washington in which I grew up. Inside the front door, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). ....

The art of speed cards lies in finding the perfect balance between moving quickly and forming detailed images. You want a large enough glimpse of your images to be able to reconstruct them later, without wasting precious time conjuring any more color than necessary. When I put my palms back down on the table to stop the clock, I knew that I’d hit a sweet spot in that balance. But I didn’t yet know how sweet.

The judge, who was sitting opposite me, flashed me the time on her stopwatch: 1 minute 40 seconds. ...

Two of hearts, two of hearts. Two of diamonds, two of diamonds. Three of hearts, three of hearts. Card by card, each one matched. When we got to the end of the decks, I threw the last card down on the table and pumped my fist. I was the new U.S. record holder in speed cards. A 12-year-old boy stepped forward, handed me a pen and asked for my autograph.

via Secrets of a Mind-Gamer - NYTimes.com.