Mental Athletes Increase Brain Size in 15th US Memory Championship

[MindMover]

Nelson Dellis left Saturday’s US Memory Championship with gold medals around his neck and a trophy in his hand. He had broken new records, memorized 303 random numbers in five minutes, and recited the order of two decks of cards. The second-time champion was living proof that a 28-year old with an average memory can become the country’s greatest mental athlete.

The technique? Translating data into visual images and placing them into a “memory palace” – a place in your mind that you can walk through again later and gather the storage.

Dellis came to the competition with a new technique: he would turn a group of seven numbers into a single image. To him, the number 0093495, for example, represented an image of Olivia Newton slam-dunking a helmet while wearing spandex.

Using the same colorful imagery, Dellis and the other mental athletes memorized a 50-line poem, 99 names and faces, random words and numbers, and biographical information including zip codes and phone numbers – all under the pressure of a few minutes each.

Joshua Foer, a former memory champion and author of Moonwalking with Einstein, came to cheer on this year’s competitors, but says he no longer has the skills to win.

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/03/28/mental-athletes-increase-brain-size-in-15th-us-memory-championship-2/

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Gonna look into a pair of sound reducing headphones.....betcha that will improve my memory....right..

[Cirque du So-What]

1. The 'memory palace' technique has been around for a long time

Art of memory

Graphical memory devices from the works of Giordano Bruno

The Art of Memory or Ars Memorativa ("art of memory" in Latin) is a general term used to designate a loosely associated group of mnemonic principles and techniques used to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas. It is sometimes referred to as mnemotechnics.[1] It is an 'art' in the Aristotelian sense, which is to say a method or set of prescriptions that adds order and discipline to the pragmatic, natural activities of human beings.[2] It has existed as a recognized group of principles and techniques since at least as early as the middle of the first millennium BCE,[3] and was usually associated with training in rhetoric or logic, but variants of the art were employed in other contexts, particularly the religious and the magical.

Techniques commonly employed in the art include the association of emotionally striking memory images within visualized locations, the chaining or association of groups of images, the association of images with schematic graphics or notae ("signs, markings, figures" in Latin), and the association of text with images. Any or all of these techniques were often used in combination with the contemplation or study of architecture, books, sculpture and painting, which were seen by practitioners of the art of memory as externalizations of internal memory images and/or organization.

Because of the variety of principles and techniques, and their various applications, some researchers refer to "the arts of memory", rather than to a single art.[2]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_memory