by Joshua Foer
Sitting on the couch next to him was the legendary world memory champion Ben Pridmore, a man who until that moment I had known only through Google and myth. (I had heard he could memorize playing cards as fast as he could turn them over.) Ben wore a worn-out “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Dr. Seuss T-shirt with a badly stretched collar, and a fanny pack. He was also sporting an enormous wide-brimmed black Australian steer-hide undertaker’s hat that he professed to have worn every day for the last six years. “It’s my gimmick,” he said softly. “It’s part of my soul.” At his feet there sat a pink and black backpack with the words “Pump It Up” graffitied on the back. He informed us that there were twenty-two decks of playing cards inside, which he intended to memorize the next day in a single hour.
With his bald head, dark beard, face-swallowing glasses, and wide, searching eyes, Ben seemed almost like a figure out of an R. Crumb cartoon. He even had the same shrugged shoulders and loopy strut. The soles of his tattered leather shoes slapped under his feet like flip-flops. He spoke with a gentle, slightly nasal Yorkshire accent, which turned “my” into “me.” “I hate me voice,” he said when explaining why he’d been so cagey about returning my phone calls during the previous weeks. One of the first pieces of information about himself that he shared with me was that he believed he was England’s youngest college dropout. “I was admitted to Kingston on Thames University when I was seventeen, but I dropped out after six months. Now I’m twenty-eight, which is a bit depressing. I’m starting to feel like the old man of memory sports. You know, I was one of the hot newcomers once.”
Bad luck does seem to stalk Ben. He’d had no intentions of being at the World Memory Championship. Instead, he had devoted the last six months to memorizing the first 50,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi, which he planned to recite at the Mind Sports Olympiad, a weeklong festival of board games to be held a week after the World Memory Championship. It would have been a new world record. But an obscure Japanese mnemonist named Akira Haraguchi had emerged from nowhere to memorize 83,431 digits just a month earlier. It took him sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes to recite them. Ben read about the accomplishment on the Internet and was forced to reevaluate his plans. Instead of trying to learn another 33,432 digits, he gave up and rededicated himself to defending his title as world memory champion. He had spent virtually every free moment of the last six weeks cleaning out memory palaces that had been devoted to pi, undoing months of hard work so that he could reuse the palaces in the memory championships.
Most of the mental athletes on the memory circuit came to the sport the same way I did: They once saw someone perform an outrageous memory stunt, thought it was cool, learned the trick behind it, and then went home and tried it themselves. But Ben missed one critical step. He’d seen someone memorizing playing cards and thought it was cool, and went home and tried it himself. But nobody ever told him how it was done. Without using any techniques at all, he just stared at the cards over and over again until they’d become imprinted on his brain. And the amazing thing is, he kept doing this in his spare time for several months, under the assumption that eventually he’d surely get good at it. He finally got his time down to fifteen minutes using pure rote memorization, a feat in many ways more impressive than his world record time of thirty-two seconds using techniques. It wasn’t until he showed up at his first World Memory Championship in 2000 that he found out about the memory palace. After the first day of events wrapped up (he finished near last place), he went to a bookstore, bought one of Tony Buzan’s books, decided this was something he had a talent for, and forgot about all of his other extracurricular interests, including his lifelong quest to watch every one of the 1,001 theatrically released Warner Bros. cartoons made between 1930 and 1968.
Ben had been working on a book called “How to Be Clever,” which teaches readers how to calculate the day of the week for any date in history, how to memorize a deck of cards, and how to scam an IQ test. “The book is about making people think you’re brainy without actually increasing your intelligence,” he told me. “The problem is I haven’t written very much because I always have more important things to do, like watch cartoons. If I tried to write a serious book on how to improve your life, I’d be rubbish at it, because I haven’t got the faintest idea how to improve my life.”
The favorite to take Ben’s title at the world championship was Dr. Gunther Karsten, the balding, angular forty-three-year-old godfather of German memory sport, who had won every German national contest since 1998. Gunther showed up wearing what I learned is his standard uniform: an imposing pair of black earmuffs and metallic sunglasses whose insides have been completely taped over except for two small pinholes. “Extraneous stimuli,” as Gunther calls them, are the memorizer’s bête noir. (A retired Danish mnemonist used to compete wearing horse blinders.) He also wore a gold belt buckle embossed with his initials, a gold chain over his tight white T-shirt, and black sailor pants that flared at the bottom. Gunther informed me that in college he was a photo model for Nissan cars, and depending on how you squinted, he looked like the villain in a James Bond movie or an aging figure skater. He was in terrific physical shape, and was, I would soon learn, a fierce competitor. Despite the fact that one of his legs is slightly shorter than the other (from a childhood bone disease), he regularly races in—and wins—track events for middle-aged men. He was carrying around with him a locked, shiny metal suitcase filled with between twenty and thirty decks of playing cards, which he planned to memorize. He wouldn’t tell me the exact number for fear it would get back to Ben Pridmore.
The actual competition took place in a large oak-paneled room in one of Oxford’s storied old buildings, with tall Gothic windows and oversize portraits of the third Earl of Litchfield and the fourteenth Earl of Derby. The room was arranged no differently than it had been during the school year, when it was used to administer exams to Oxford undergraduates. There were four dozen desks, each of which had a six-inch-tall digital stopwatch clamped to it, which would be used for the last and most exciting event of the contest, speed cards, when the competitors race to commit a single deck of playing cards to memory as fast as possible.
Unlike the U.S. championship, which has just five events, none lasting longer than fifteen minutes, the World Memory Championship is frequently referred to as a “mental decathlon.” Its ten events, called “disciplines,” span three grueling days, and each tests the competitors’ memories in a slightly different way. Contestants have to memorize a previously unpublished poem spanning several pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in fifteen minutes), lists of binary digits (record: 4,140 in thirty minutes), shuffled decks of playing cards, a list of historical dates, and names and faces. Some disciplines, called “speed events,” test how much the contestants can memorize in five minutes (record: 405 digits). Two marathon disciplines test how many decks of cards and random digits they can memorize in an hour (records: 2,080 digits and 27 decks of cards).
The first World Memory Championship was held at the posh Athenaeum Club in London in 1991. “I thought, this is insane,” recalls Tony Buzan. “We have crossword championships. We have Scrabble championships. We have chess, bridge, poker, draughts, canasta, and Go championships. We have science fair championships. And for the biggest, the most fundamental of all human cognitive processes, memory, there’s no championship.” He also knew that the idea of a “world memory champion” would be an irresistible draw for the media, and a savvy way to promote his books on mind training.
With the help of his friend Raymond Keene, a British chess grand master who writes the daily chess column for The Times (London), Buzan sent out letters to a handful of people who he knew were involved in memory training, and ran an ad in The Times advertising the contest. Seven people showed up, including a psychiatric nurse named Creighton Carvello who had memorized the telephone number of every Smith in the Middlesbrough phonebook and another person named Bruce Balmer who had set a record for memorizing two thousan
d foreign words in a single day. Several of the competitors wore tuxedoes.
The contestants no longer adhere to such a strict dress code, but everything else about the championship has gotten far more serious since 1991. What began as a one-day contest has now expanded to fill an entire weekend. Of all the disciplines in a three-day memory decathlon, the first one of the first day, the poem, is the most universally dreaded. Because of my own faltering efforts to memorize poetry, it was the one event that I wanted to watch most closely. Every year Gunther lobbies to have the event stricken from the contest, or at least replaced with rules that are more—as he puts it—“objective.” But poetry is where memorization began, and to cut it from the championship because a few of the competitors find it difficult would run counter to the competition’s underlying premise that memorization is a creative and humanizing endeavor. So every year, a new, previously unpublished poem is commissioned for the world championship. For the first few years of the competition, in the early nineties, the poem was written by the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whom Tony Buzan describes as “an old friend.” Since Hughes’s death in 1998, the poem has been written by Buzan himself. This year’s 108-line free-verse offering, titled “Miserare,” came from a collection titled “Requiem for Ted.” It began:
With most things in the Universe
I am happy:
Supernovas
The Horse Head Nebula
The Crab
The light-years-big clouds
That are the Womb of Stars
It went on to list the many things Tony Buzan was happy about, including “God’s freezing balls,” and ended:
I am not happy
That Ted
Is Dead.
The competitors had fifteen minutes to memorize as many lines as possible, and then a half hour to write them on a blank sheet of paper. In order to receive full credit for a line, it had to be rendered perfectly, down to each capital letter and punctuation mark. Competitors who failed to underscore just how “not happy” the author was or who mistakenly thought that Ted was “dead” without a capital D would get only half the total points for that line.
The question of how best to memorize a piece of text, or a speech, has vexed mnemonists for millennia. The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection: memoria rerum and memoria verborum, memory for things and memory for words. When approaching a text or a speech, one could try to remember the gist, or one could try to remember verbatim. The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on memoria verborum on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on.
Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)
Perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren’t very good at, a fact famously illustrated in the congressional Watergate hearings of 1973. In his testimony before the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee, President Richard Nixon’s counsel John Dean reported to the congressmen on the contents of dozens of meetings related to the cover-up of the break-in. To the president’s chagrin and the committee’s delight, Dean was able to repeat verbatim many conversations that had taken place in the Oval Office. His recollections were so detailed and seemingly so precise that reporters took to calling him “the human tape recorder.” At the time, it hadn’t yet been revealed that there had been an actual tape recorder in the Oval Office recording the conversations that Dean had reconstructed from memory.
While the rest of the country took note of the political implications of those tape recordings, the psychologist Ulric Neisser saw them as a valuable data trove. Neisser compared the transcripts of the recordings with Dean’s testimony, and analyzed what Dean’s memory got right and what it got wrong. Not only did Dean not remember specific quotes correctly—that is to say, verborum—he often didn’t even properly remember the gist of what had been discussed—rerum. But even when his memories were wrong in isolated episodes, notes Neisser, “there is a sense in which he was altogether right.” The major themes of his testimony were all accurate: “Nixon wanted the cover-up to succeed; he was pleased when it went well; he was troubled when it began to unravel; he was perfectly willing to consider illegal activities if they would extend his power or confound his enemies.” John Dean did not misrepresent, argues Neisser; he did get the details wrong, but he got the important stuff right. We all do the same thing when we try to recount conversations, because without special training our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.
It makes sense that our brains would work like that. The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. And to work efficiently, they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. From the vast amounts of data pouring in through the senses, our brains must quickly sift out which information is likely to have some bearing on the future, attend to that, and ignore the noise. Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing. What matters is the res, the meaning of those words. And that’s what our brains are so good at remembering. In real life, it’s rare that anyone is asked to recall ad verbum outside of congressional depositions and the poetry event at an international memory competition.
Until the last tick of history’s clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across space and from one generation to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment.” The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains.
Professional memorizers have existed in oral cultures throughout the world to transmit that heritage through the generations. In India, an entire class of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as Rawis were often attached to poets as official memorizers. The Buddha’s teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C. And for centuries, a group of hired tape recorders called tannaim (literally, “reciters”) memorized the oral law on behalf of the Jewish community.
The most famous of the Western tradition’s oral works, and the first to have been systematically studied, were Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. These two poems—possibly the first to have been written down in the Greek alphabet
—had long been held up as literary archetypes. However, even as they were celebrated as the models to which all literature should aspire, Homer’s masterworks had also long been the source of scholarly unease. The earliest modern critics sensed that they were somehow qualitatively different from everything that came after—even a little strange. For one thing, both poems were oddly repetitive in the way they referred to characters. Odysseus was always “clever Odysseus.” Dawn was always “rosy-fingered.” Why would someone write like that? Sometimes the epithets seemed completely off-key. Why call the murderer of Agamemnon “blameless Aegisthos”? Why refer to “swift-footed Achilles” even when he was sitting down? Or to “laughing Aphrodite” even when she was in tears? In terms of both structure and theme, the Odyssey and Iliad were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability. The same narrative units—gathering armies, heroic shields, challenges between rivals—pop up again and again, only with different characters and different circumstances. In the context of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks seemed hard to explain.
At the heart of the unease about these earliest works of literature were two fundamental questions: First, how could Greek literature have been born ex nihilo with two masterpieces? Surely a few less perfect stories must have come before, and yet these two were among the first on record. And second, who exactly was their author? Or was it authors? There were no historical records of Homer, and no trustworthy biography of the man exists beyond a few self-referential hints embedded in the texts themselves.