A journalist’s journey from covering a memory championship to competing in one — and what it reveals about the untapped potential of the human mind 🧠

The Smartest Man Is Hard to Find

• Experience is the sum of our memories, and wisdom the sum of experience. Having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about yourself.

• The brain is like a muscle, and memory training is a form of mental workout. Over time, like any form of exercise, it will make the brain fitter, quicker, and more nimble — an idea that dates back to the very origins of memory training.

• Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France — among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in 21st-century New York, they would likely grow up living a life indistinguishable from their peers.

The Man Who Remembered Too Much

• For normal humans, memory gradually decays with time along what’s known as the “curve of forgetting.” The moment you grasp a new piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to slowly loosen, until finally it lets go altogether.

• Our brains function as perfect recorders — a lifetime of memories are stowed away somewhere in the cerebral attic, and if they can’t be found, it isn’t because they’ve vanished, but only because we’ve misplaced them.

• People claim to have photographic memory, but there’s no evidence that anyone can actually store mental snapshots and recall them with perfect fidelity. Indeed, only one case of photographic memory has ever been described in the scientific literature.

• All of our memories are bound together in a web of associations. This is not merely a metaphor, but a reflection of our brain’s physical structure. The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upward of 5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.

• The nonlinear nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception — another node in the nearly limitless interconnected web. When a memory goes missing or a name gets caught on the tip of the tongue, the search can be frustrating and often futile.

• S kept his memories rigidly organized by mapping them onto structures and places he already knew. When you or I hear someone mention the word “elephant,” we understand immediately that the reference is to a large gray animal with thick legs, but we do not conjure up an image of an elephant in our mind’s eye. That’s exactly what S did. He couldn’t help it. When he heard the word “green,” a green flowerpot would appear; with the word “red,” he’d see a man in a red shirt coming toward him; for “blue,” it meant someone waving a small blue flag from a window. When he wanted to commit something to memory, he would simply take a mental stroll down his home street and install each of his images at a different point along the walk.

• The brain is a mutable organ, capable — within limits — of reorganizing itself and rewiring its sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. It had long been thought that the adult brain was incapable of spawning new neurons, and that while learning caused synapses to rearrange themselves and new links between brain cells to form, the brain’s basic anatomical structure was more or less static.

• When mental athletes learn new information, they engage several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation. They were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys.