I also set myself two secondary goals: to finish in the top 10 of the 36- person field and to earn the ranking of Grandmaster of Memory.Īs it turned out, both goals were beyond my reach. My principal ambition was simply not to embarrass myself or my country. When I showed up in London at the end of August that year, I brought along earmuffs (because in the heat of a memory competition, there is no such thing as deaf enough), which I’d painted with Captain America stars and stripes 14 decks of playing cards I would try to memorize in the hour cards event and a Team USA T-shirt. I was a beer league softball right fielder they were the New York Yankees. In all my hours of training, I hardly ever thought to compare my practice scores with theirs. ![]() At no point during my training did it ever occur to me that I might someday go head-to-head with the superheroes of memory I had initially set out to write about. This was not a position I had ever expected to be in. ![]() Everyone wanted to see the monkey perform his tricks.īut the biggest shock of my newfound stardom (or loserdom, depending on your perspective, I suppose) was that I was now the official representative of all 300 million citizens of the United States of America to the World Memory Championships. ESPN wanted to know if I’d learn the NCAA tournament brackets for one of its morning shows. 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. Memory Champion turns out to be a minor (OK, very minor) celebrity. 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. In front of a stunned audience at the next year’s U.S.A. As his narrative makes clear, he became more than just a reporter. Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Inspired, he spent a year mastering the technique and exploring the meaning of memory for a book, 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. 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. ![]() 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.
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