Could you win a memory championship?

1071.

If I gave you 15 minutes to memorize some decimal digits, and 30 minutes to recall them, how would you do it?

What if I told you the highest score was was 1071 digits?

One thousand and seventy-one.

Most people struggle with a 7-digit phone number.

How is over 1000 even possible?

Now let’s try history.

I’m going to give you some dates. You’ll have 5 minutes to memorize them, and 15 to recall them. You just need to remember the year that the event happened.

What’s the top score?

132 dates. Memorized in 5 minutes.

Okay, let’s try one more.

Words. Random words. I’m going to give you 5 minutes to memorize a string of random words, and I’m going to give you 15 to recall them.

What score are you competing against for this one? 125 words.

One hundred and twenty-five. In 5 minutes.

It can take a minute for the numbers to sink in. They’re almost too big, too impossible-sounding, to wrap your head around. How can an actual, real person remember 1071 digits in order?

But it’s true. These statistics are taken from the World Memory Championships Official Records (don’t believe me? See them here). The Olympics for Brains.

How do they do it? The easiest conclusion to make is that the people who attain these incredibly high scores and geniuses. Obviously, they can’t be like you and me.

Except…maybe not.

Joshua Foer is a science writer who covered the U.S. Memory Championship in 2005. The year before, he’d graduated with a B.A., having majored in ecology and evolutionary biology. It wasn’t like he’d spent his life training. In fact, in his book, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Memory, he lists a lot of familiar struggles as his own: forgetting car keys, food in the oven, that kind of thing.

But he got curious, and spent a year of mental training under one of the world’s top memorizers. A year later, he won the U.S. Memory Championship.

Key takeaways?

There’s a skill set for everything.

Sure, each competitor will have their own tweaks, but essentially the way that memory competitors pull off their incredible feats is by making everything mean something.

A number isn’t a number, but a tangible object that you can see and touch and maybe even smell, an object with a story behind it - it’s a lot harder to forget.

Then all you need is a way to quickly translate and recall whatever you’re trying to learn into these meaningful symbols (learn more in Joshua Foer’s original article).

When developing a method that works for them, memorizers can draw on historical methods like that of loci (which you can learn more about here) which people have been using for centuries. Then, they practise, training their mind like an Olympic athlete trains their body.

What does this mean for you?

Maybe you don’t have time to spend a year in mental training. But I bet you have 5 minutes. Pick 10 random objects around you right now. A TV, a table, it doesn’t matter. Give it a couple of minutes then try to remember them. How many did you remember?

Now link them to one another with a quick story. It can just be snapshots in your head. The TV smashed on the table, glass everywhere. The table leg crushing your phone. Give it a couple of minutes, then see how easy it is to remember those words now.

The difference in method is the only difference between a you who struggles to remember and the you who can remember anything. Who knows, the second version of you could be the next Joshua Foer. Or at least remember where you put your phone.