Some Memorizers Arbitrarily Associate Each Playing Card

To Attain The Rank Of Grand Master Of Memory, You Must Be Able To Perform Three Seemingly Superhuman Feats. You Have To Memorize 1,000 Digits In Under An Hour, The Precise Order Of 10 Shuffled Decks Of Playing Cards In The Same Amount Of Time, And One Shuffled Deck In Less Than Two Minutes. There Are 36 Grand Masters Of Memory In The World.

Growing Up In The Days When You Still Had To Punch Buttons To Make A Telephone Call, I Could Recall The Numbers Of All My Close Friends And Family. Today, I'm Not Sure If I Know More Than Four Phone Numbers By Heart. And That's Probably More Than Most.

One Trick, Known As The Journey Method Or 'memory Palace,' Is To Conjure Up A Familiar Space In The Mind's Eye, And Then Populate It With Images Of Whatever It Is You Want To Remember.

Since At Least The Middle Ages, Philosophers And Philologists Have Dreamed Of Curing Natural Languages Of Their Flaws By Constructing Entirely New Idioms According To Orderly, Logical Principles.

As Bad As We Are At Remembering Names And Phone Numbers And Word-for-word Instructions From Our Colleagues, We Have Really Exceptional Visual And Spatial Memories.