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USA National Memory Championships

Posted by timothy on from the pretty-faces-are-easy-to-recall dept.

bigtallmofo writes "Could you memorize 1,000 digits in under an hour? How about remember the exact order of 10 shuffled decks of playing cards in under an hour as well as one shuffled deck in less than two minutes? If so, you could be counted among 36 grand masters of memory worldwide. Slate is reporting that other spectacular memory feats were performed at the 2005 USA National Memory Championship. Congratulations to Ram Kolli, a graduate student in computer science at Virginia Tech, and this year's champ."

1 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. More practically.. by pilkul · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Similar techniques are sometimes used by adult foreign learners to learn Chinese/Japanese characters. It can be easier to remember, say, Darth Vader setting a pack of wild dogs on fire on a pile of flowers in a swamp, than 25 strokes of chicken scribbles. James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji is the most popular (perhaps the only?) book using such a method.

    In this context such methods are fairly controversial, since the mnemonics are rather time-consuming to learn and recall is slower than brute force (on the order of 5-10 seconds instead of instantaneous), but it has some quite dedicated followers.