by Joshua Foer
When I finally did get to sleep sometime around three a.m., with the assistance of some Tylenol PM, I had a terrifying dream in which Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, my king and queen of spades, were riding around a parking garage for hours on a pony, the seven of spades, trying in vain to find where they’d parked their Lamborghini Countach, the jack of hearts. Eventually they and their horse melted into the asphalt, while Maurice Stoll looked on with a sinister Dr. Mengele cackle. I got up four hours later, bleary and dazed, and accidentally shampooed my hair twice—an ominous portent if ever there was one.
The first person I ran into when I got off the elevator on the nineteenth floor of the Con Edison headquarters was Ben Pridmore. He had flown in from England for the weekend solely to scout out the American field. At the airport in Manchester, he had splurged on a last-minute first-class upgrade. “What else have I got to waste my money on?” he asked me. I looked down at his half-eaten leather shoes, whose soles were now almost entirely detached. “Good point,” I said.
“The first event hasn’t even started, and I’ve already lost,” I told Ben. I explained about my insomnia and my redundant shampooing, and he seemed convinced that I had done myself no favors with those sleeping pills, whose chemicals, he said, were probably still swimming around in my bloodstream.
I downed two tall cups of coffee and, in truth, felt more jittery than tired. Mostly I just felt stupid for having so catastrophically screwed up the most important thing I needed to do in order to be competitive. Meanwhile, Maurice walked in wearing a Texas A&M Aggies baseball cap and a paisley shirt, looking far perkier than he had last year. And frighteningly confident. He recognized me from across the room, and strode straight over to shake my hand and introduce himself to the legendary Ben Pridmore.
“You’re back,” Maurice said to me. It was an assertion, not a question. To the extent that I had a strategy, it was to sneak up on Maurice and surprise him. But apparently he’d already been briefed on me. Somebody must have informed him that I’d been training with Ed Cooke.
“Yeah, I thought I’d try competing this year,” I said nonchalantly, and pointed down at my name tag, which read “Joshua Foer, Mental Athlete.” “It’s kind of like a journalistic experiment.”
I asked, “How are your numbers looking this year?” I was probing him to see if he’d upgraded his system.
“They’re good. And yours?”
“Good. What about cards?”
“Not bad. You?”
“I should be all right in cards,” I said. “Still using the same systems as last year?”
He shrugged a nonreply and asked me, “How did you sleep last night?”
“What?”
“How did you sleep?”
Why was he asking me that? How did he know about my insomnia? What kind of head games was Maurice trying to play? “Remember, last year I didn’t sleep so good,” he continued.
“Yeah, I remember that. And this year?”
“This year, I slept just fine.”
“Josh needed sleeping pills,” said Ben helpfully.
“Yeah, well, they’re basically a placebo, right?”
“I tried to take sleeping pills one time in practice, and I fell asleep the next morning memorizing numbers,” said Maurice. “You know, lack of sleep is the enemy of memory.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, good luck today.”
“Yeah, good luck to you, too.”
New this year was the gaggle of TV cameras buzzing about the room and the play-by-play analysts—the boxing announcer Kenny Rice and his color man, the four-time U.S. champ Scott Hagwood—perched in front of the stage on director’s chairs. Their presence lent the contest the surreal quality of a mockumentary. Did I really just hear Rice describe the contestants as having “taken mental prowess to a whole new level”?
Unlike the international competitions I’d been to, where competitors spent the moments before a contest isolated between a pair of earmuffs or juggling to warm up their brains, the U.S. competitors all milled about making small talk, as if they were about to take a test no more demanding than an eye exam. I sequestered myself in a corner, inserted my earplugs, and tried to clear my mind like a proper European mnemonist.
Tony Dottino, a slim, silver-haired, and mustachioed fifty-eight-year-old corporate management consultant, stood at the front of the room to introduce the contest. Dottino founded the U.S. Memory Championship in 1997 and has run thirteen of them ever since. He is one of Tony Buzan’s American disciples. Dottino makes his living consulting with companies like IBM, British Airways, and Con Edison (hence the unlikely location of the championship) about how their workforces can be made more productive through the use of memory techniques.
“You are the folks telling people in our country that memory is not for geeks,” he declared. “You will be the models that people will come to follow. We’re like little infants in terms of writing the history of these events. You”—he pointed at us with both index fingers—“are writing the history books.” I tuned out for the rest of his speech, put my earplugs back in, and took one last walk through each of my palaces. I was checking, as Ed had once taught me, to make sure all of the windows were open and good afternoon sunlight was streaming in, so that my images would be as clear as possible.
Among those of us who would contribute to “writing the history books” were three dozen mental athletes from ten states, including a Lutheran minister from Wisconsin named T. Michael Harty, about a half dozen kids from Raemon Matthews’s Talented Tenth, and a forty-seven-year-old professional memory trainer from Richmond, Virginia, named Paul Mellor, who had run a marathon in each of the fifty states and had been in New Jersey the previous week teaching police officers how to quickly memorize license plate numbers.
The big guns were all put behind desks in the back row. These were the folks that Dottino had predicted might make a run at the title. I was flattered to be counted among them, albeit in the last seat at the end of the row. (Dottino and I had spoken several times over the previous year, and I’d kept him updated on my practice scores, so he knew I had a sporting chance.) The lineup included a compact thirty-year-old software engineer from San Francisco named Chester Santos, who goes by the nom de guerre “Ice Man,” which hardly befits his soft-spoken, aw-shucks manner. He’d finished in third place the previous year. I had a strong suspicion that Chester didn’t like me very much. After I’d written my original article for Slate about the previous year’s U.S. championship, I was forwarded an e-mail he’d penned to Tony Dottino. In it Chester complained that my piece was “HORRIBLE” because I had made Lukas and Ed “sound awesome,” while the U.S. competitors came off as “complete amateurs and slackers.” That I now had the impudence to go head-to-head with him after just a year’s training must have seemed like the ultimate insult.
From the sidelines, I heard Kenny Rice say, “It must be intimidating, much like the weekend athlete who wants to take on LeBron James in a game of one-on-one.” I figured he was talking about me.
Though every other national memory championship in the world is sewn together from approximately the same standard set of events, according to the same standard set of rules established by the World Memory Sport Council, the United States does things slightly differently. In the international events, everyone’s scores are added up at the end of the tournament to determine the winner, but the U.S. championship is less straight forward. It consists of a preliminary morning round of four classic pen-and-paper disciplines—names and faces, speed numbers, speed cards, and the poem—that are used to select six finalists. Those six finalists then compete in the afternoon in three unique television-friendly “elimination” events called “Words to Remember,” “Three Strikes and You’re out of the Tea Party,” and “Double Deck’r Bust,” which whittle the field down until there is only one United States memory champion left standing.
The first event of the morning was names and faces, which I’d always done pretty well with in pra
ctice. The point of the game is to take a packet of ninety-nine head shots and memorize the first and last name associated with each of them. One does that by dreaming up an unforgettable image that links the face to the name. Take, for example, Edward Bedford, one of the ninety-nine names that we had to remember. He was a black man with a goatee, a receding hairline, tinted sunglasses, and an earring in his left ear. To connect that face to that name, I tried to visualize Edward Bedford lying on the bed of a Ford truck, then, deciding that wasn’t distinctive enough, I saw him fording a river on a floating bed. To remember that his first name was Edward, I put Edward Scissorhands on the bed with him, shredding the mattress as he paddled it across the river.
I used a different trick to remember Sean Kirk, a white guy with a mullet, sideburns, and the cockeyed smile of a stroke victim. I paired him up with the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, and painted an image in my mind of the three of them forming a human pyramid.
After fifteen minutes of the contestants staring at those names and faces, a judge came by and picked up our packets, and handed us a new bunch of stapled pages, with the same set of faces arranged in a different order, and this time, with no names attached. We had fifteen minutes to recall as many of them as possible.
When I put down my pen and handed in my recall sheet, I assumed my score was going to be somewhere near the middle of the pack. The names of Sean Kirk and Edward Bedford had come right back to me, but I’d blanked on the cute blonde and the toddler with the French-sounding name, and a handful of others, so it was hard to imagine I’d done all that well. To my surprise, the 107 first and last names I was able to recall were good enough for a third place finish, just behind Ram Kolli, who memorized 115, and just ahead of Maurice Stoll, who did 104. The winner of the event was a seventeen-year-old competitive swimmer from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, named Erin Hope Luley, who’d managed an impressive 124 names, a new U.S. record and a score that would have gotten a nod of respect even from the top Europeans. When her number was announced, she stood up and waved sheepishly. I looked over at Ram, and caught him looking back at me. He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, “Where’d she come from?”
The second event of the morning was speed numbers, always my worst. This was the one event where Ed’s coaching had given me little advantage—because I had largely ignored Ed’s coaching. He had been prodding me for months to develop a more complicated system for numbers—not quite the “64-gun Man of War” Millennium PAO system he had spent months working on, but something at least a step ahead of the simple Major System that most of the other Americans would be using. I’d indulged him and developed a PAO system for all fifty-two playing cards, but I never got around to doing the same for every two-digit combination from 00 to 99.
Employing the same Major System as the rest of the mental athletes, I used my five minutes of memorization time to go for what I figured was a very safe ninety-four digits—mediocre even by American standards. And still I managed to get the eighty-eighth digit mixed up (instead of Bill Cosby, I should have seen a family playing an oversize version of Milton Bradley’s Game of Life). I blamed my poor showing on Maurice, whom I had heard even through my earmuffs gruffly yelling, “Enough with the pictures already!” at a press photographer who was circulating in the room. Still, my eighty-seven digits left me in fifth place. Maurice had banked 148, a new U.S. record, and Ram had finished in second with 124. Erin was way down in eleventh place, having remembered just fifty-two digits. I got up, stretched, and had a third cup of coffee. “They’re known as MAs, or mental athletes,” I heard Kenny Rice earnestly tell the camera, “but at this point in the competition, MA could stand for something else: mental anguish.”
Though I’d been operating with inferior mnemonotechnics in the numbers event, when it came to speed cards, the next challenge, I was the only competitor armed with what Ed referred to as “the latest European weaponry.” Most of the Americans were still placing a single card in each locus, and even the guys who’d been competing for years, like Ram and “Ice Man” Chester, were at best turning two cards into a single image. In fact, only a couple of years ago it was entirely unheard of for anyone to be able to memorize a whole pack of cards at the U.S. championship. Thanks to Ed, the PAO system I was using packed three cards into a single image, which meant that it was at least 50 percent more efficient than what was being used by any of the other Americans. It was a huge advantage. Even if Maurice, Chester, and Ram were going to wipe me in the other disciplines, I hoped I might be able to run up my score in speed cards.
Each competitor was assigned an individual judge with a stopwatch, who took a seat across the table. Mine was a middle-aged woman, who smiled as she sat down and said something that I couldn’t make out through my earplugs and earmuffs. I had brought along my black spray-painted memory goggles for speed cards, and up until the moment a freshly shuffled deck was placed on the desk in front of me, I was still weighing whether to put them on. I hadn’t practiced without my goggles in weeks, and the Con Edison auditorium was certainly full of distractions. But there were also three television cameras circulating in the room. As one of them zoomed in for a close-up of my face, I thought of all the people I knew who might end up watching the broadcast: high school classmates I hadn’t seen in years, friends who had no idea about my memory obsession, my girlfriend’s parents. What would they think if they turned on their TVs and saw me wearing huge black safety goggles and earmuffs, thumbing through a deck of playing cards? In the end, my fear of public embarrassment trumped my competitive instincts, and I left the goggles on the floor by my feet.
From the front of the room, the chief arbiter, a former marine drill sergeant, shouted, “Go!” My judge clicked her stopwatch, and I began peeling through the pack as fast as I could, flicking three cards at a time off the top of the deck and into my right hand. I was storing the images in the memory palace I knew better than any other, the house in Washington, D.C., that I’d lived in since I was four years old—the same house I’d used to remember Ed’s to-do list on the rock in Central Park. At the front door, I saw my friend Liz vivisecting a pig (two of hearts, two of diamonds, three of hearts). Just inside, the Incredible Hulk rode a stationary bike while a pair of oversize, loopy earrings weighed down his earlobes (three of clubs, seven of diamonds, jack of spades). Next to the mirror at the bottom of the stairs, Terry Bradshaw balanced on a wheelchair (seven of hearts, nine of diamonds, eight of hearts), and just behind him, a midget jockey in a sombrero parachuted from an airplane with an umbrella (seven of spades, eight of diamonds, four of clubs). Halfway through the deck, Maurice’s Teutonic wail once again penetrated my earmuffs: “No walking!” I heard him yell, presumably at another photographer. This time, I didn’t let it break my focus. In my brother’s bedroom, I saw my friend Ben urinating on Benedict XVI’s papal skullcap (ten of diamonds, two of clubs, six of diamonds), Jerry Seinfeld sprawled out bleeding on the hood of a Lamborghini in the hallway (five of hearts, ace of diamonds, jack of hearts), and at the foot of my parents’ bedroom door, myself moonwalking with Einstein (four of spades, king of hearts, three of diamonds).
The art of speed cards is in finding the perfect balance between moving quickly and forming detailed images. You want to catch just enough of a glimpse of your images so as to be able to reconstruct them later, without wasting precious time conjuring up any more color than necessary. When I put my palms back down on the table to stop the clock, I knew that I’d hit a sweet spot in that balance. But I didn’t yet know how sweet.
The judge, who was sitting opposite me, flashed me the time on her stopwatch: one minute and forty seconds. Not only was that better than anything I’d ever done in practice, but I also immediately recognized that it would shatter the old United States record of one minute and fifty-five seconds. I closed my eyes, put my head down on the table, whispered an expletive to myself, and took a second to dwell on the fact that I had possibly just done something—however geeky, ho
wever trivial—better than it had ever been done by anyone in the entire United States of America.
I looked up and quickly glanced over at Maurice Stoll, who was stroking his goatee and seemed agitated, and I felt an unseemly satisfaction in the trouble he seemed to be having. Then I looked over at Chester and got nervous. He was smirking confidently. He shouldn’t have been. He had clocked in at a lethargic two minutes and fifteen seconds.
By the standards of the international memory circuit, where thirty seconds is the best time, my minute and forty seconds would have been considered middling—the equivalent of a five-minute mile for any of the serious Europeans. But we weren’t in Europe.
As word of my time traveled across the room, cameras and spectators began to assemble around my desk. The judge pulled out a second unshuffled deck of playing cards and pushed them across the table to me. My task now was to rearrange the unshuffled pack to match the one I’d just memorized.
I fanned the unshuffled deck out across the table, took a deep breath, and walked through my palace one more time. I could see all the images perched exactly where I’d left them, except for two. They should have been in the shower, dripping wet, but all I could spy were blank beige tiles.
I can’t see it, I whispered to myself frantically. I can’t see it. I ran through every single one of my images as fast as I could. Had I forgotten a giant pair of toes? A fop wearing an ascot? Pamela Anderson’s rack? The Lucky Charms leprechaun? An army of turbaned Sikhs? No, no, no, no.
I began sliding the cards I did remember around with my index finger. In the top left corner of the desk, I put my friend Liz and her dead pig. Next to her, the Hulk on his bike, and Terry Bradshaw with his wheelchair. As the clock ran out on my five minutes of recall time, I was left with three cards still on the table. They were the three cards that had disappeared from the shower: the king of diamonds, four of hearts, and seven of clubs. Bill Clinton copulating with a basketball. How could I have possibly missed it?
