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“I just have the ability to retain information. It’s just there,” Glowacki says. She only needs to scan the internet once or twice to take and keep anything in.
Glowacki is on the autism spectrum and has superlative memory and calendar recall skills.
[Anastasia Woolmer] A two-time Australian Memory Champion and the first female to win this title in Australia, she achieved this goal after only five months of self-training.
“It was astounding to me,” she says. “You go your whole life thinking what you’re born with is it. I’d forget names at small dinner parties. I think impostor syndrome is common. It felt liberating: if I set my mind to something, I can learn it really quickly and gain confidence.”
Woolmer was inspired by Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which suggests brain training, rather than naturally gifted people, account for most USA Memory Championship finalists.
The memory techniques, known as mnemonics, use imagery to aid encoding and retrieval. Another, the memory palace, dates back to the fifth century BC and “places” abstract things on to actual objects, narrativising memory.
In Woolmer’s case, she used her dance background to remember the first 1,000 digits of pi. “I attached a movement for every number sequence from 000 to 999,” she says.
“So 100 digits of pi is just a short contemporary dance story of around 35 movements. It’s just scaffolding new information on to things already easy for me to remember.”