![]() Memory palaces can be anywhere – hotels, houses, routes to work, restaurants, a favourite holiday, a park or a train ride. Then I’d walk into the hall and create a new scene with the next three cards.” “Say it’s the four of hearts, the nine of hearts and the eight of clubs – I’d open the front door and see an image of Sherlock Holmes playing the guitar and eating a hamburger. “So I might start at the front door,” he says. He has an image that he associates with each individual card, which he groups into sets of three, before placing them on a short walk through his house. Von Essen uses a slightly different technique to remember cards. He went on to become world memory champion in 20. His first competition was the Swedish memory championship in 2012, which he won. Von Essen, a student at the University of Gothenburg, tried out a few of the techniques – the benefits were instantaneous: “Almost immediately I realised I could memorise more things than I ever dreamed possible,” he says. “Once you’ve got your m, k and l, you just make up an image which fits those letters – they reminded me of the word Michael, so when I see that pair of cards I think of Michael Jordan.” He says he has another trick which halves the 2,704 possible pair combinations, but he didn’t want to go into details. Although it’s not immediately obvious where each sound comes from, they are in fact based on a code that someone else thought up a long time ago, says Mullen. The seven is converted to a ‘k’ sound and the five is an ‘l’. The diamond and the spade together create an ‘m’ sound, he says. ![]() Take the seven of diamonds and the five of spades, for example. It involves converting suits and numbers in phonetic sounds. Mullen, for instance, uses a “two-card” system for memorising a pack of cards. When it comes to remembering numbers or binary digits, each competitor has their own system for converting these items into images. The super-memorisers were better at remembering purely because they were walking around their mind palaces. The only difference appeared to be in the preferential use of three areas involved in navigation. The tests could not establish any difference in intellect, nor any structural changes in their brains. ![]() ![]() She hoped to identify whether they had any structural brain differences that predisposed them to having such an extraordinary memory. “You just have to create a mind palace,” he says.Ĭenturies later, Eleanor Maguire at University College London and her colleagues scanned the brains of 10 people who had placed at the highest levels of the world memory championship. But according to Mullen, anyone can do it. If you’re unable to remember a grocery list, let alone thousands of ones and zeros, these feats of memory may seem somewhat unattainable. He also holds a half-dozen US records, which include him memorising 3,888 binary digits in 30 minutes. “A few years ago, I would have thought that was impossible,” he says. Mullen now holds the world record for remembering as many numbers as possible in one hour – 3,029. It was enough to push Mullen into first place, winning the championship. He looked at the cards for 21.5 seconds – just one second faster than Yan Yang, the competition leader. Mullen was in second place when they began the final task. The final event is always the speed card round, where competitors memorise a single pack of cards as fast as possible. It consists of 10 rounds of mental challenges, which include memorising as many numbers as you can in an hour, remembering as many faces and names as you can in 15 minutes, or committing to memory hundreds of binary digits. The championship took place in December in Guangzhou, China. “It was really motivating, I kept practicing and eventually ended up at the 2015 world memory championship.” “I definitely didn’t have a great natural memory,” he said, “but in 2013 I started training using the techniques that Foer had talked about.” A year later, Mullen came second in the US memory championship. Mullen was spurred on to improve his own memory by Foer’s story. Foer started practicing the techniques himself, and went on to win the competition the following year. Instead, he found a group of people who had trained their memory using ancient techniques. The book was written by Joshua Foer, a journalist who attended a US memory championship to write about what he thought would be “the Super Bowl of savants”. Mullen told me about a book he’d read called Moonwalking with Einstein. Fast-forward to today and Mullen, a medical student at the University of Mississippi, has just been crowned the World Memory Champion. His memory wasn’t anything special – “below average” even. If you’d told Alex Mullen a few years ago that he was capable of memorising a whole pack of cards in 21.5 seconds, he would have said you were being ridiculous.
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