3 tips from the memory champions

Last weekend I covered the U.S.A. Memory Championship for NewYorker.com and the event had all the makings of March Madness. As the end drew near, with just three finalists left, the auditorium at Con Edison’s headquarters was as filled with taut anticipation as any second-half, final-minute, game-tied scenario could offer.

You can read about the finale here, but what happened in between the seven events was also intriguing. The mental athletes–their term–were asked to share techniques for remembering copious amounts of data. They were happy to oblige, because they want to dispel the notions that their feats are products of being savants or of pulling some kind of trick.

Here are three specific tips:

1) Create rooms of associations. This was a technique many of the mind athletes used. Walk through a room and in a very specific order to create “anchors” that you can associate with ideas, numbers, etc. For instance, the first thing I see walking into my apartment is a couch. Second is a bookcase. Third is an armchair. For memorizing cards, this is especially effective for the athletes. Here’s a hypothetical: When they see a Four of Diamonds first, that is attached to the couch. The Three of Hearts is the bookcase. The Queen of Diamonds is the chair. Every time a mental athlete sees his couch, s/he also sees the Four of Diamonds. So then the card comes up, s/he sees his couch and the reverses the association.

2) Use visual cues to connect names with faces. One of the contests, Names and Faces, gives the athletes 15 minutes to memorize the names of 99 people, with pictures of their faces above the name. They then get a scrambled list of just the pictures and they have to fill in the names. Many of the athletes use a method of finding attributes on the person’s face that remind them of their name. Often the connection is phonetic. So my mouth amplifies sound, like a “mic,” which can “call” a cab — Michael. My bald head looks like “hump” that has broken “free” from a camel — Humphrey.

3) Create mini stories for abstract details. Nelson Dellis broke a U.S. record in speed numbers Saturday, which gives athletes five minutes to memorize as many digits in a row from a randomly generated 500-digit string. Dellis did 178. He then shared his method, called number chunking. He associates every combination of two numbers from 0-10 with a famous name, an action and an object. So, another hypothetical, 03 could be John Malcovich, slicing and nectarines. 24 could be Mia Hamm, kicking and garbage cans. If the number 032403 were in the string, he would think John Malcovich is kicking a nectarine, a simple story replaces six abstract symbols.

Bonus time … here are three more general tips they gave:

A) Repeat, repeat and then repeat. These associations are stored through nothing other than recycling them in the mind over and over. To train for card memorization, in which each card is associated with an object, US Memory Champion Ronnie White runs through the deck multiple times per day. “Not to memorize the deck, just to repeat the associations I’ve made.” It works–White currently holds the record for memorizing a deck of cards in 87 seconds. Like the study I mentioned a few weeks ago noted, this kind of repetition is the most effective, and most underutilized, tool for memory.

B) Distractions are your enemy. The power of association is that it forces your mind to focus, but even associating ideas to objects can become rote and lose its efficacy. Being distracted by other thoughts and by outside stimuli is memory’s biggest enemy. During the competition, White puts on a set of noise-canceling headphones attached to nothing. Daily distractions are less intense that competition. Name memory, for instance, is often thwarted by subtle emotions–such as nerves–or initial judgment. Ignoring distractions is the key.

C) Exercise your body too. Most of the mental athletes were fit. White is a Navy reservist, Dellis is a mountain climber. This is no coincidence, they say. “Keeping your body in shape fuels the mind. They’re not separate.”