This Journalist Accidentally Became a World Memory Champion
Joshua Foer tried memory techniques for a story about memory champions. Then he won a world championship.

It’s hard for any of us to imagine entering a competition where events include memorizing two decks of cards in five minutes. But that’s what Joshua Foer did after he learned memory tricks during a story he worked on as a reporter.
His reporting led him to another US memory champion who revealed how he could memorize book-length lines of text or over 100 names and faces in minutes.
The memory champions built mind palaces. These were imagined spaces where the things to memorize were placed like physical objects around an imaginary space, like a house or a forest.
Learning to build a dictionary of symbols to place around these spaces took months of practice. But once that skill was learned, anyone had the tools to commit large amounts of detailed knowledge to memory.
Why Memory Palaces Work
Early in the book, Foer meets with memory champion, Ed Cooke. Cooke introduces “elaborative encoding.” It’s a technique based on the human mind’s effortless memorization of shocking, unique images.
Many days blur together because they’re so similar, but a few days probably stick out because of some dramatic happening. This memory tendency can be hacked.
Cooke gave Foer a long to-do list with 15 random tasks and items. Instead of trying to memorize the words in a mental list, Cooke suggested imagining a physical place and imagining the items on the list in spots in that familiar place.
“The principle of the memory palace, he [Cooke] continued, is to use one’s exquisite spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally - in this case, Ed’s to-do list. “What you’re going to find is that in the same way as it’s impossible to get confused about the order of rooms in that house, it will be equally obvious that immediately after I locate three hula hoops, a snorkel, and a dry ice machine, my next task will be e-mailing my friend Sophia.”
The memory palaces don’t have to be houses, castles, or interiors. Malaysian memory champion, Dr. Yip Swee Chooi, “used his own body parts as loci to help him memorize the entire 56,000-word, 1,774-page Oxford Chinese-English dictionary.”
Physical objects aren’t the only things that can be memorized, either. There’s a system designed for memorizing numbers, too.
How the Major System Turns Numbers into Words
It’s easy to place things and characters around a room, but numbers aren’t as sticky. In the 1600s, Johann Winkelmann created a code to make numbers into sounds, which “can then be turned into words, which can in turn become images for a memory palace.” This is the code:
0 - S
1 - T or D
2 - N
3 - M
4 - R
5 - L
6 - Sh or Ch
7 - K or G
8 - F or V
9 - P or B
Memorizing this list doesn’t take long, but the dictionary of symbols these could turn into is another matter. Foer gives a few examples:
“The number 32, for example, would translate into MN, 33 would be MM, and 34 would be MR. To make those consonants meaningful, you’re allowed to freely intersperse vowels. So the number 32 might turn into an image of a man, 33 could be your mom, and 34 might be the Russian space station Mir.”
A space station in the middle of your dining room is a striking image that packs a greater punch than “34.” Anyone with important numbers to carry in their heads now have a way to carry many of them together.
Intelligence is More Than Memory
“The people whose intellects I most admire always seem to have a fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready. They’re able to reach out across the breadth of their learning and pluck from distant patches.”
Foer’s admiration is probably similar to many intellects readers admire. Anyone who can relate an interesting fact or insight to a conversation can deepen it. However, the value of a great memory is the feedback loop Foer observed between memory and intelligence:
“The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more associations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.”
The world is a complicated, fast-moving place. Studying history makes sense of how we got to where we are now, but in five or ten years, there will be massive amounts of new history to study.
Great memories are promising ways to be more interesting, more informed, and be better prepared for making sense of the future’s dramatic movements. Great memory is as foundational a sensemaking tool as a great podcast or newspaper. Reading great books is one thing, but remembering their lessons is another.