![]() The researchers put the competitors and a group of control subjects into an MRI machine and asked them to perform several different memory tests while their brains were being scanned. They wondered if the contestants' brains were different in some way. Psychologists Elizabeth Valentine and John Wilding, authors of the monograph Superior Memory, recently teamed up with Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London to study eight people, including Karsten, who had finished near the top of the World Memory Championships. Their feats are based on tricks that capitalize on how the human brain encodes information. Most contestants claim to have just average memories, and scientific testing confirms that they're not just being modest. Gunther Karsten, a 43-year-old patent translator and seven-time German memory champion, showed up in his distraction-minimizing uniform: earmuffs and sunglasses with the lenses taped over except for two small pinholes. Most were under 40, and two-thirds were men. Earlier this year, a 29-year-old British accountant and former world champion named Ben Pridmore hit 32.13 seconds at a competition in Germany. That nice round number has become the four-minute mile of competitive memory, a benchmark that the world's best "mental athletes," as some of them like to be called, are closing in on. In the 14 years since the World Memory Championships was founded, no one has memorized the order of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than 30 seconds. Five minutes after the event had begun, each contestant received a fresh, unshuffled pack to reorder so that it matched the first deck. As contestants finished, they smacked a timer, then closed their eyes and put their heads down on the table. A judge announced, "Neurons at the ready-go!" Contestants then began riffling through the cards, memorizing. Each was given a shuffled pack of playing cards. In the final and most dramatic of the events, contestants sat behind a table in front of a large digital stopwatch. Some tests took just a few minutes others lasted hours. ![]() In timed trials, contestants were challenged to look at and then recite a two-page poem, memorize rows of 40-digit numbers, recall the names of 110 people after looking at their photographs, and perform seven other feats of extraordinary retention. It is where generations of Oxford students have tested their memory on final exams, and it is where, last August, 34 contestants gathered at the World Memory Championships to be examined in an entirely different manner. The Examinations School at Oxford University is an austere building of oak-paneled rooms, large Gothic windows, and looming portraits of eminent dukes and earls. ![]() Rose Leo, for example, could be a rosebud and a lion. Try this memory test: Study each face and compose a vivid image for the person's first and last name. ![]()
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