by Joshua Foer
“The people who actually get through the tunnel networks have been through an adventure. They have had to struggle a tiny bit, and therefore upon arrival, they feel a sense of gratitude, relief, and accomplishment, and are committed to the project of having a good experience, with the most possible vigor and imagination. I think your memory training is extremely similar to this. Although it sounds silly to say ‘No pain, no gain,’ it’s true. One has to hurt, to go through a period of stress, a period of self-doubt, a period of confusion. And then out of that mess can flow the richest tapestries.”
I crawled behind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.
“Too often one is just left in a haze about what happened at a party because it’s a single, undifferentiated space,” he said. “One of the advantages of this kind of setup is that the experiences in each room get kept in each room, and are isolated from other experiences. One leaves the party with a beautiful repertoire of events, upon which one can dwell during old and middle age.”
In order to facilitate social interaction, Ed felt it was critical that partygoers not be able to recognize one another. Ben Pridmore, who had taken a four-hour train ride down from Derby, wore a black cape and a terrifying mask of a mohawked man-eater he called Grunch. Lukas Amsüss (recovered from his fire-breathing fiasco), who flew in from Vienna just for the party, arrived wearing a nineteenth-century Austrian military uniform with a sash and medals. One of Ed’s old friends from Oxford wore a full-body tiger suit. Another showed up in blackface and dreadlocks. Ed wore a curly wig, a dress, pantyhose, and a generously apportioned bra. In recognition of my being the only Yank at the party, I had my face painted like Captain America.
The highlight of the evening was the card-off. Shortly before midnight, Ed gathered his fifty or so guests in the basement of the barn and announced that in honor of his quarter-century of existence, two of the greatest card memorizers of all time were going to go head-to-head in competition. Ben, still wearing his black cape but no longer his Grunch mask, perched on a beanbag at one end of a long table littered with empty plastic sangria cups and the skeletal remains of an entire lamb that had been spit-roasted over a backyard bonfire. Lukas sat down at the other end of the table in his Austrian military uniform.
“First, I’d like to give the assembled here a few details about these two individuals’ capacities to remember packs of cards,” Ed announced. “Lukas was one of the first people in the world to break the forty-second barrier for a pack of cards. For a long time in the memory community, which comprises eleven people, this was regarded as the four-minute mile. He busted that mark and busted it again, and was once upon a time the world champion in speed cards. He is also one of the founding members of a distinguished society of memorizers known as the KL7. Of course, his terrific memory would be much better if he weren’t perennially drunk,” Ed said hyperbolically. Lukas lifted his plastic cup and nodded it in Ed’s direction. “You see, Lukas introduced me to an amusing and useful machine that he built with his engineering friends in Vienna, which allows you to drink four glasses of beer in less than three seconds. It’s got a valve mechanism they had to purchase off an aerospace company. Unfortunately, Lukas has used it a bit too much recently. He hasn’t memorized a deck of cards in almost a year. However, the last time he did it, he recorded a time of 35.1 seconds.”
Ed turned to Ben. “Pridmore here holds the current world record in cards, at 31.03 seconds. And he’s British.” This elicited a round of rowdy cheers from the guests. “Ben has also learned twenty-seven packs of cards in an hour—which is just, frankly, unnecessary.”
Ben unfolded his arms and spoke up. “Lukas and I have been talking, and we’ve been thinking that since Ed is ranked seventeenth in the world—”
“You mock me,” Ed protested. He didn’t know that a handful of young Germans had recently passed him in the international rankings.
“We’ve decided we will not compete unless he can tell us the name of every person in this room.”
There were more rowdy cheers, which Ed tried to quiet. He made it about a quarter of the way around the room before getting stumped by a friend of a friend, whom he claimed never to have met. He asked for silence, invited two guests to shuffle the packs of cards, and then handed them to Lukas and Ben. A stopwatch was set. They each had a minute.
Barely a half dozen cards were flipped over before it became clear that Lukas, who had been keeping his head upright only with concerted vigilance, was in no condition to use his higher cognitive faculties. He laid the deck back down on the table and sheepishly announced, “At least I am still ahead of Ed in the international rankings.”
Ed forcefully nudged Lukas out of the way and took his seat. “On the occasion of my twenty-fifth birthday, it gives me great pleasure to say that one of the competitors in my showcase event is too drunk to compete and I am going to have to take over!” The decks were reshuffled and the stopwatch reset. “Now, Pridmore, would you calm down, please?”
After a minute of hushed memorization, Ben and Ed took turns announcing cards from memory while a self-appointed judge checked to see that they were correct.
Ed: “Jack of clubs.” Cheers.
Ben: “Two of diamonds.” Boos.
Ed: “Nine of clubs.” Cheers.
Ben: “Four of spades.” Boos.
Ed: “Five of spades.” Cheers.
Ben: “Ace of spades.” Boos.
About forty cards into the deck, Ben shook his head and put his hands down on the table. “That’s enough for me.”
Ed leaped up from his seat, his breasts slapping his chin. “I knew Ben Pridmore would go too fast! I knew it! He crashes and burns, that guy!”
“How many times have you won the world championship?” Ben responded, with more bite in his voice than I’d ever heard before.
“Shall we clarify our record in one-on-one competition, Ben?”
“You realize losing was my birthday present to you.”
As Ed circled the room exchanging high fives and embracing his female guests, Ben slunk back into his bean bag and petted his cape. One of Ed’s inebriated Oxford chums, suitably impressed with Ben’s performance in spite of his loss, came up to Ben and handed him a short stack of credit cards. He told Ben that if he could memorize them he was welcome to use them.
After the card-off, the party migrated outside to a bonfire that had been built in the clearing, where a drunken tribal hora lasted into the morning. When I finally went to sleep just before sunrise, Ed and Ben were still sitting around the kitchen table, reeling off the most entertainingly bizarre binary number combinations they could think of.
After sleeping off our hangovers, Ed and I spent the next afternoon huddled in training around the kitchen table. I’d come to him with three particular problems I needed his help with, the most pressing of which was that I was consistently mixing up my images. When you’re memorizing a deck of cards, there isn’t enough time to form images with all the detail and richness that the Ad Herrennium calls for. You’re moving so fast that usually you can only get the equivalent of a passing glance. In fact, more than anything else, the art of memory is learning how little of an image you need to see to make it memorable. It was only by analyzing the data I was keeping that I realized that I’d been consistently confusing the seven of diamonds—Lance Armstrong riding his bicycle—with the seven of spades—a jockey riding a racehorse. Something about the verb “riding” in those two very different contexts was causing me cognitive hiccups.
I asked Ed what I was supposed to do about that. “Don’t try to see the whole image,” he said. “You don’t need to. Just focus on one salient element of whatever it is you’re trying to visualize. If it’s your girlfriend, make sure that before all else, you see her smile. Practice studying the whiteness of her teeth, the way her lips
crease. The other details will make her more memorable, but the smile will be the key. Sometimes a stab of blue that smells of oysters might be all the recall you get from some particular image, but if you know your system well, you should be able to translate that back again. Often, when you’re really gunning for it, the only traces left by a speedily sighted pack of cards will be a series of emotions with no visual content whatsoever. Your other option is to change the images, so they’re not so similar—not so mundane.”
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize Lance Armstrong pedaling up a steep hill. I made a special point of focusing on the way his reflective sunglasses turned blue and green as they moved through sunlight. Then I thought about the jockey and decided he would be much more distinct as a pony-riding midget with a sombrero. That little adjustment probably shaved two seconds off my time.
“Good stuff with the cards,” Ed said when I showed my latest spreadsheet. “It’s just a matter of five or so more hours of practice before the images are totally automatic. I’ve no doubt the American record in speed cards will be child’s play. I weep for joy!”
Of course, for all the reanalysis and rejiggering that makes deliberate practice deliberate, Ed warned me that there was always a risk of overthinking things in memory sport, since every change to your mnemonic system leaves behind a trace that can come back to haunt you in competition. And if there’s one thing a mental athlete wants desperately to avoid, it’s for a single card or number to trigger multiple images on game day.
Another problem I’d discovered in my practice sessions was that my card images were fading too quickly. By the time I’d get to the end of a deck or string of numbers, the images from the beginning had become faint ghosts. I mentioned this to Ed.
“Well, you’ve got to get to know your images better,” was his response. “Starting tonight, take a suit at a time and really spend meditative time with each character. Ask yourself what they look, feel, smell, taste, and sound like; how they walk; the cut of their clothes; their social attitude; their sexual preferences; their propensity to gratuitous violence. After having got this kind of feel for them, try to let it all happen at once—feel the full fat force of their physical and social characteristics all at once in imaginative broadband, and then imagine them going about your house doing everyday things, so you get used to them being so rich and dense even in normal situations. That way, when they do come up in a packet of cards, they should always be offering up some salient characteristic that will stick to their surroundings.”
I needed Ed’s help with one other problem. Following the recommendations of Peter of Ravenna and the Ad Herennium, my collection of PAO images included a handful of titillating acts that are still illegal in a few Southern states, and a handful of others that probably ought to be. And since memorizing a deck of cards with the PAO system requires recombining prememorized images to create novel memorable images, it invariably meant inserting family members into scenes so raunchy I feared I was upgrading my memory at the expense of tormenting my subconscious. The indecent acts my own grandmother has had to commit in the service of my remembering the eight of hearts are truly unspeakable (if not, as I might have previously guessed, unimaginable).
I explained my predicament to Ed. He knew it well. “I eventually had to excise my mother from my deck,” he said. “I recommend you do the same.”
Ed was a stern coach, who berated me for the “lackadaisical character” of my training. If I went more than a few days without sending him my latest times, or admitted that I was not, in fact, putting in a half an hour a day as he’d commanded, I would receive a caustic reprimand via e-mail.
“You’ve got to step up your training because it’s inevitably the case that your performance will drop in the tournament itself,” he warned. “You might have the perfect sporting mentality and actually raise your score, but you’ve got to work on the assumption that you’re going to do better in practice than you’ll do in the tournament.”
In my own defense, “lackadaisical” wasn’t quite the word I’d have chosen. Now that I had put the OK plateau behind me, my scores were improving on an almost daily basis. The sheets of random numbers that I’d memorized were piling up in the drawer of my desk. The dog-eared pages of verse I’d learned by heart were accumulating in my Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. I was beginning to suspect that if I kept improving at the current pace, I might actually have a chance of doing well in the competition.
Ed sent me a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.” I copied that thought onto a Post-it note and stuck it on my wall. Then I tore it down and memorized it.
NINE
THE TALENTED TENTH
Not long after returning from England, I found myself sitting on a folding chair in the basement of my parents’ home at 6:45 a.m., wearing underpants, earmuffs, and memory goggles, with a printout of eight hundred random digits in my lap and an image in my mind’s eye of a lingerie-clad garden gnome (52632) suspended over my grandmother’s kitchen table. I suddenly looked up, wondering—remarkably, for the first time—what in the world I was doing with myself.
I realized I’d become fixated on the other competitors. With the help of detailed statistics kept on the memory circuit’s stats server, I had made myself familiar with each of their strengths and weaknesses, and I’d measured my own scores against theirs with compulsive regularity. The opponent whom I had become most preoccupied with was not the defending champ, Ram Kolli, a twenty-five-year-old business consultant from Richmond, Virginia, but rather Maurice Stoll, a thirty-year-old beauty-products importer and speed-numbers hotshot from outside Ft. Worth, Texas, who grew up in Germany. I had met him at the previous year’s competition. He had a shaved head and a goatee, spoke with an intimidating German accent (anything Germanic is intimidating at a memory contest), and was one of the only Americans to have ever crossed the Atlantic to compete in a European memory contest (he finished fifteenth at the World Memory Championship in 2004 and seventh at that year’s Memory World Cup). He held the U.S. records in both speed numbers (144 digits in five minutes) and speed cards (a single deck in a minute and fifty-six seconds). His only weaknesses were poetry (in which he was ranked ninety-ninth in the world) and insomnia. Everyone agreed he ought to have won the previous year’s contest but instead stalled out and finished fourth because he’d only gotten three hours of rest the night before. This year, if he could get to bed on time, I expected he was the favorite to win. And I was now putting in a solid half hour a day to ensure that he didn’t.
As I burrowed deeper into my mental training, I was starting to wonder if the sort of memorization practiced by mental athletes was not something like the peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility. Were these ancient techniques anything more than “intellectual fossils,” as the historian Paulo Rossi once put it, fascinating for what they tell us about the minds of a bygone era, but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls?
That has always been the rap against memory techniques: They’re impressive but ultimately useless. The seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon declared, “I make no more estimation of repeating a great number of names or words upon once hearing ... than I do of the tricks of tumblers, funambuloes, baladines: the one being the same in the mind that the other is in the body, matters of strangeness without worthiness.” He thought the art of memory was fundamentally “barren.”
When the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci tried to introduce memory techniques to Chinese Mandarins studying for the imperial civil service exam, he was met with resistance. He planned to hook them first on European study skills before trying to hook them on the European god. The Chinese objected that the method of loci required so much more work than rote repetition, and claimed their way of memorizing was
both simpler and faster. I could understand where they were coming from.
The demographics of your average memory contest are pretty much indistinguishable from those of a “Weird Al” Yankovic (five of spades) concert. An overwhelming number of contestants are young, white, male juggling aficionados. Which is why it’s impossible to miss the dozen or so students who show up at the U.S. championship each year in proper church attire. They are from the Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the South Bronx, and their American history teacher, Raemon Matthews, is a Tony Buzan disciple.
If I had thought that the art of memory was just a form of mental peacocking, Matthews aimed to prove otherwise. He has dubbed the group of students he trains for the U.S. Memory Championship the “Talented Tenth,” after W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion that an elite corps of African-Americans would lift the race out of poverty. When I first encountered Matthews at the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, he was pacing anxiously at the back of the room, while he waited for his students’ scores in the random words event to come in. Several of his students were vying for a top-ten finish, but as far as he was concerned, the real test of their memories was still two and a half months away, when they would sit for the New York State Regents exam. By the end of the year, he expected his students to have memorized every important fact, date, and concept in their U.S. history textbook using the same techniques they employed in the U.S. Memory Championship. He invited me to come visit his classroom to witness memory techniques being used “in the real world.”
To take him up on his offer, I had to pass through a metal detector and have my bag searched by a police officer before entering the Gompers school building. Matthews believes that the art of memory will be his students’ ticket out of a neighborhood where nine out of ten students are below average in reading and math, four out of five are living in poverty, and nearly half don’t graduate from high school. “The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate,” he told them, while I sat in the back of his classroom. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”
