How do memory champions memorize a deck of cards?
Their brains turn out to be ordinary. Their trick is a very old one that works by walking through a house that exists only in their heads.
▶ Start the storyNot with a special brain. They use an ancient trick, the method of loci or memory palace, that turns arbitrary items into a walk through a place they already know. You imagine putting each item at a point along a familiar route, in order, and later recall the items by mentally retracing the route. The images tend to be vivid or unusual, which helps them stand out. Researchers who study top memory athletes report that such skills do not seem to come with extraordinary brain anatomy or general cognitive superiority, but are acquired through deliberate training in mnemonic strategies.
Step 1: Pick a place you know well
A house, a street, a route.
Step 2: Turn each item into a vivid or unusual image
Step 3: Place the images at points along the route, in order
Step 4: To recall, mentally walk the route and read off the images
The trick is said to have begun with the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who, the story goes, identified the guests at a banquet hall that collapsed by remembering where each one had been seated. Today competitors use it for shuffled decks of cards, long strings of numbers and lists of words, and mnemonic techniques are considered a necessary part of competing.
Joshua Foer is the human version of the story. He first went to the USA Memory Championships in 2005 as a journalist. A year later he won, setting a US record by memorising a 52-card deck in 1 minute 40 seconds, and he credits memory palaces and mnemonics. The world record for a single deck is 12.74 seconds.
Is it just talent? A 2017 experiment suggests training matters. Researchers studied 23 of the world's top-50 memory athletes and controls matched for age, sex and intelligence. In a word test taken by 17 of the athletes, they recalled about 71 of 72 words after 20 minutes, the controls about 40. Then they trained novices for six weeks, 40 sessions of 30 minutes, in the method of loci, or in an n-back working-memory task, or not at all. The loci group improved significantly more than both other groups, and the gain was still there four months later.
Words recalled out of 72, 20 minutes after learning
words
| Mean words recalled | |
|---|---|
| Top memory athletes | 70.8 words |
| Matched controls | 39.9 words |
It is not magic, though. Other research found that superior memory can come from practising strategies or, in some cases, from natural superiority, and the gain is typically limited by how well the strategy fits the task.
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Recap
Top memory feats seem to come from a trained strategy rather than an extraordinary brain, though natural ability can play a part in some cases and the strategy has limits.
💡 A trick to remember it · Think of a street you know: if every house holds one thing, walking down the street gives you the list.
Surprising fact · The world record for memorising a shuffled deck of cards is 12.74 seconds.
Sources (4)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (23 claims) cites at least one of these.