The world’s most accomplished memorizers insist their powers aren’t an innate gift, but rather a skill that anyone can hone.
Every spring, teenagers and grown-ups travel from around the country to enter the U.S.A. Memory Championship. The competitors, called “memory athletes,” accomplish incredible cognitive feats over the course of the event. In 2016, Katherine He, then in high school, memorized a 50-line poem in 15 minutes. Alex Mullen, who won the competition that year, memorized the order of a deck of playing cards in under 19 seconds and successfully recalled a sequence of 483 numbers after studying it for just five minutes.
But champions like Mullen insist that they don’t possess any extraordinary proclivity for memorization. To hone their memories to competitive levels, they train every day for years—and they say that, with the same training, anyone can learn to remember anything.
It’s wonderful to see coverage of memory competitions/techniques in a newsstand magazine like The Atlantic. The exposure it great.
Still… I can’t help feeling that this should be old news by this point. How many times does someone have to put this information out there before it “sticks” with the general public, before it once again becomes part of what it means to be a thoughtful human being?
It’s almost criminal negligence that we don’t teach memory techniques in school. Students are required to memorize large amounts of information and they are given nothing but the most naive strategies. Take notes, review, sleep - work hard.
There’s no excuse. We aren’t waiting on Science. We’ve had these methods throughout history. They aren’t hard to learn or to teach.
I don’t know how I messed that up. I really hope I was rushing to clock back into work or something typing on mobile, because how does that mistake even happen otherwise?