Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person's first and last name. Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Fill in the blanks on the next page.
The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner. In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. Some tests took just a few minutes; others lasted hours.
In the final and most dramatic of the events, contestants sat behind a table in front of a large digital stopwatch. Each was given a shuffled pack of playing cards. A judge announced, "Neurons at the ready—go!" Contestants then began riffling through the cards, memorizing. As contestants finished, they smacked a timer, then closed their eyes and put their heads down on the table. Five minutes after the event had begun, each contestant received a fresh, unshuffled pack to reorder so that it matched the first deck.
In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world's best "mental athletes," as some of them like to be called, are closing in on. Earlier this year, a 29-year-old British accountant and former world champion named Ben Pridmore hit 32.13 seconds at a competition in Germany.
