In early February, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20 -year -old Indian college student, won the Memory League World Championship, an electronic competition that stumbles people against each other with challenges such as memorizing 80 random numbers.
Famous neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in January, studied intellectual athletes such as Mr. Rajakumar and found that many of them used the ancient Roman “method of places”, a trick of memoirs known as “palace”.
The technique takes various forms, but generally involves visualizing a large home and assigning memories to rooms. Mentally walking through the house, the hippocampus, the marine memory -shaped engine deep in the brain that consumed Dr. Maguire’s career.
We asked Mr Rajakumar for memorable strategies. His answers, slightly processed and concentrated for clarity, are down.
Q: How are you preparing for the World Memory Championship?
Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When you memorize things, you usually retreat and helps have a clean neck. Let’s say you are reading a book. You don’t read it loudly, but you are shouting inside you. If you don’t drink too much water, your speed will be a little low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be increasingly clearer and you can read it faster.
Q: What does your memory palace look like?
Let’s say my first location is my room where I sleep. My second place is the kitchen. And the third location is my room. The fourth location is my terrace. Another location is my bathroom. Let’s say I memorize a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a pair of words, make a story from them and place them in a location. And I get the next two words. I make a story of them. I put them in second place. The memory palace will help you remember the sequence.
Q: How much can these rooms hold?
A lot. Let’s say I’m memorizing 100 words. I make a story from every two words. There will be a set of 50 stories. But I can’t remember who came first or who came second. That would be a problem, right? So, if I use the memory palace, I can easily remember that came first and came second. Similarly, I can easily remember all the 50 stories.
Q: Can you describe one of the challenges at the Memory League World Championships?
They give you 80 random numbers displayed on a screen. You have to memorize all these numbers as quickly as possible and then a button and a sheet of recall is displayed. I wrote all the 80 digits – and I got them well. My fastest time to memorize 80 random digits in this world championship was 13.5 seconds, so almost six digits per second.
Q: Do you realize how amazing this is?
Yes, I do. I cried.
Q: What will happen?
After completing my college, as in two to three months, I will probably try to be a memory trainer and create a memory institution in India to teach these techniques. My goal is to make it big.
