Before he became an elite “mental athlete,” journalist Joshua Foer traveled to Oxford University in 2005 to report on the World Memory Championships for DISCOVER. There he watched contestants memorize ridiculously long strings of random digits, the names and faces of hundreds of strangers, and line after line of bad poetry. Most of the top memorizers, Foer realized then, rely on the same technique: building a “memory palace” in their mind’s eye and populating it with absurd but distinctive images that they can associate with the number or word that must be recalled. Inspired, he spent a year mastering the technique and exploring the meaning of memory for a book,
Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. As his narrative makes clear, he became more than just a reporter. In front of a stunned audience at the next year’s U.S.A. Memory Championship, held in New York City, Foer memorized the order of a shuffled deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds, then a U.S. record, and went on to win the event.
The U.S.A. Memory Champion turns out to be a minor (OK, very minor) celebrity. All of a sudden, Ellen DeGeneres wanted to talk to me, and Good Morning America and the Today show were calling to ask if I’d memorize a deck of cards on the air. ESPN wanted to know if I’d learn the NCAA tournament brackets for one of its morning shows. Everyone wanted to see the monkey perform his tricks.
