Memory Superstar Josh Foer Journalist Josh Foer (2011) visited a memory competition expecting to find people with special memory abilities. Instead, he encountered a group of “mental athletes”—people with ordinary minds who had trained their memories to accomplish incredible feats, such as reciting hundreds of random digits or pages of poetry. Told that anyone could develop an expert memory with training, he set out to prove it and devoted months to training his own memory. A year later, he won the USA Memory Championship and even set a new U.S. record by memorizing the position of a deck of cards in one minute, 40 seconds. Josh’s secret? Mnemonic techniques, like the method of loci—and lots and lots of practice. Foer explains his method in his Ted Talk, available at http://www.ted.com/talks/
joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do
joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do
Merlijn Doomernik/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux