Foer—a freelance writer for Slate magazine at the time—attended the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship to write a story on Ben Pridemore, the reigning champion. There, competitors memorize decks of cards, poems, thousands of random digits, hundreds of names of complete strangers, and more.
All the seemingly brilliant participants insisted their minds were no different than anyone else's—and so Foer decided that he would compete the next year. He spent a year training in all of the tricks and techniques. We called Foer up to ask how he went from lowly spectator at the national genius-fest to U.S. Memory Championship competitor, U.S. memory record holder, and book author.
To learn how to remember any phone number, scroll to the bottom of the story, where we give you Foer's technique. And to protect your memory as you age, read Remember Every Memory.
Men's Health: Can you explain the U.S. Memory Championships? What goes on there?
JF: Competitors memorize a poem, the names of as many strangers as possible, long strings of random numbers, and a shuffled pack of playing cards. For one of the events, five people come up on stage and reel off a ton of biographical information: their names, their favorite foods, the car they drive, their phone number, etc. You have to remember as much of that as possible.
MH: Tell us about what you did to research the book.
JF: I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what's it's potential might be. I also spent the better part of a year trying to train my own memory. I ended up coming back a year later to the same contest I had written about—this time to compete, as an exercise in participatory journalism.
MH: You talk about how in the beginning the U.S. Memory Championship competitors you interviewed all said that any average person could do what they were doing. What did you think then and what do you think now after experiencing everything?
JF: When I first met these individuals with incredible memories, I didn't believe them when they said it was all about training and technique. I figured they had to be prodigies from the far end of the bell curve. Now, having trained for and entered the U.S. Memory Championship myself, I know that these capacities are latent, to some degree, in all of us.
MH: What are some memorization techniques you picked up along the way?
JF: It's all about figuring out how to make whatever it is you want to remember meaningful, colorful, weird, raunchy—memorable. That's the art of the contest: in transforming boring information into images in your mind's eye that are so attention-grabbing that you can't possibly forget them.
MH: How did you come up with the title?
JF: Moonwalking with Einstein refers to a memory device I used when I memorized a deck of playing cards at the U.S. Memory Championship. When I competed in 2006, I set a new U.S. record by memorizing a deck of cards in one minute and 40 seconds. That record has since fallen.
MH: So, how's your memory now?
JF: These days it's so-so. I hung up my cleats after competing in 2006. Unfortunately, I still lose my car keys all the time.
—Interview by Claire Constant
BONUS: How to Remember Phone Numbers
If you don't have the book yet, here 's a trick from the pages of Moonwalking with Einstein to hone your memorization skills.
The technique is called chunking. Foer describes chunking as "a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember, by increasing the size of each item." He explains that this is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code. It's also why credit card numbers are put in groups of four.
Take this example: 120741091101. Break those numbers into chunks, so remembering them is easier: 120, 741, 091, and 101.
To really lock a number into memory, connect the numbers to meaningful dates or experiences, Foer says. In the above example, you could separate the digits into just two sets of numbers: 120741, 091101. Now you only need to say "the two big surprise attacks on American soil," and the numbers transform into 12/07/41 and 09/11/01 and become impossible to forget. Use birthdays, ages, addresses, historical dates, and anniversaries to jog your memory, Foer explains. It's actually the same way you can create and remember hard-to-hack computer passwords.
Thanks to Mike Darling / Blogs MensHealth
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