Marilyn sez, "Nelson Dellis began training his memory after his grandmother died of Alzheimer's, and last week the 28-year-old won the U.S. Memory Championship for the second year in a row."
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.
Mental Athletes Increase Brain Size in 15th US Memory Championship (Thanks, Marilyn!)
