In early Feb, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20-year-old Indian college student, won the Memory League World Championship, an online competition pitting people against one another with challenges like memorising the order of 80 random numbers faster than most people can tie a shoelace.
Renowned neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in Jan, studied mental athletes like Rajakumar and found that many of them used the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorisation trick also known as the “memory palace.”
The technique takes several forms, but it generally involves visualising a large house and assigning memories to rooms. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain that consumed Maguire’s career.
NYT asked Rajakumar about his strategies of memorisation. His answers:
How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship?
Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When you memorise things, you usually sub-vocalise, and it helps to have a clear throat. Let’s say you’re reading a book. You’re not reading it out loud, but you are vocalising within yourself. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a bit low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and more clear and you can read it faster.
What does your memory palace look like?
Let’s say my first location is my room where I sleep. My second location is the kitchen. And the third location is my hall. The fourth location is my veranda. Another location is my bathroom. Let’s say I am memorising a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a pair of words, make a story out of them and place them in a location. And I take the next two words. I make a story out of them. I place them in the second location. The memory palace will help you to remember the sequence.
How much can these rooms hold?
A lot. Let’s say I’m memorising 100 words. I’m making a story out of every two words. There will be a set of 50 stories. But I can’t remember which one came first or which one came second. That would be a problem, right? So if I use the memory palace, I can remember which came first and which came second. So likewise, I can remember all of the 50 stories.
Can you describe one of the challenges in Memory League World Championship?
They give you 80 random numbers that they display on a screen. You have to memorise all of those numbers as fast as possible, then click a button and a recall sheet appears. I wrote down all of the 80 digits – and I got them all right. My fastest time to memorise 80 random digits in World Championship was 13.5 seconds, so almost six digits per second.
Do you realise how amazing this is?
Yes, I do. I was crying.
What’s next?
After completion of college, like in two to three months, I’ll probably try to be a memory trainer and create a memory institution in India to teach other people these techniques. My goal is to make it big. NYT