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Super memorizers aren't born, however—they're made.
Johannes Mallow, for example, is the five-time winner of Germany's memory championships and says he started training his brain eleven years ago at age 23. "I have a normal memory—I still forget my keys to my apartment sometimes, like everyone does," he told Braindecoder. "But if I want to memorize something, I use the techniques I've learned and I am much better than the average guy. I've trained for many years to be able to do that."
To reach extraordinary memory skills, super memorizers teach their brains to use a unique tactic that combines data points with visual and spatial cues. Now in a new study published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, researchers have recorded super memorizers' brain activity when they learned and recalled information to better understand just how they retain so much.
Like wandering in a palace
The technique that Mallow and most other super memorizers use is called method of loci, also called the memory palace, a method known since the time of ancient Greeks and popularized recently by Joshua Foer in Moonwalking with Einstein.
At its heart, the method of loci is a mnemonic device, a shorthand that sticks better in the brain. Let's say Mallow is given a list of 50 random numbers. During his training, he will have come up with a visual object for each number: 0 could be an egg, 1 a candle, 4 a chair; for Mallow 33 is a mummy.
Then he will assign each image to a specific location in a fixed route. As Mallow walks through his apartment in his head, he might assign a chair to the door, an egg to the cabinet, a candle to the fridge. It quickly becomes very easy to remember information that would otherwise be overwhelmingly dense. It's even easier for words, Mallow said—phrases usually have verbs in them, which the mind easily turns into images. To remember a poem, he might picture a tree growing out of his apartment door, then his shoes in a cabinet, then imagine eating a banana near his fridge. "It sounds ridiculous and funny, and that's what the brain remembers easiest," Mallow said.
Inside the brain
In the new study, the researchers wanted to compare the brain regions that super memorizers use with those used by typical people who don't use the method of loci. Mallow, who is working on his PhD in biometrics and medical informatics at Otto-von-Guericke University, along with his colleagues there and at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, recruited 11 super memorizers who had competed against Mallow at memory contests—"That made it much easier to start the study," he said. Each of them, along with 11 control subjects, were hooked up to an fMRI machine that measures changes in the brain's blood flow during a task. Next, the participants were given 60 seconds to memorize as many numbers as possible in a 40-digit matrix. "For those super memorizers, that's an easy task to do in one minute, but it's almost impossible for an average person," Mallow said. Then, after another 20-second task designed to distract the participant, they were each asked to repeat as many digits as they could remember.
Unsurprisingly, the super memorizers performed much better on the task, easily recalling an average of 35 digits and rattling them off quickly. The typical control participant remembered only about 11. But the researchers were most interested in what was going on in their brains; when they were learning the digits, the super memorizers activated many different parts of their brains including several areas responsible for vision and for language, as well as a number of regions that are important for mental navigation and memory, such as the angular gyrus, retrosplenial cortex, and superior parietal cortex. The known functions of these areas of the brain are consistent with how Mallow and other super memorizers describe the method of loci. The researchers expected to see that the super memorizers were tapping into their short-term memory, but they were surprised to find that the super memorizers were also accessing their long-term memories, likely because they were connecting new data to fixed images and routes that they had memorized beforehand.
When the super memorizers were asked to recall the digits, their brains were much less active than the control group, suggesting that they could remember the information with little effort. On their fMRI scans, only the anterior temporal lobe (essential for recalling memory) and the motor cortex (likely because the participants were repeating the numbers out loud) lit up. In future studies the researchers hope to ask super memorizers to recall the digits silently to see if the motor cortex is still active.
Martin Dresler, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands, is also investigating super memorizers and sees the work conducted by Mallow and his colleagues as a valuable contribution. "Memory is probably the most widely-studied phenomenon in cognitive neuroscience—we have thousands, or tens of thousands, of studies, and most of these are focused on people who have normal or impaired memory. There's very little research on strong or exceptional memory," Dresler told Braindecoder. But it's still too soon to generalize the new findings, he added. The sample size in the new study was quite small, as is often the case with studies on super memorizers because there are so few of them.
In future studies Mallow and his colleagues hope to separate out each individual step in the super memorizer's encoding and recalling processes to better understand how these techniques work differently than normal memorization methods. "[Memorization] is a really complex process that uses so many brain areas for different tasks, so sometimes they are hard to separate," he said.
Dresler has a number of other questions about the brains of super memorizers, like if their brains are naturally structured differently, the effect of sleep on their ability to consolidate memories, and whether training to be a super memorizer can slow the cognitive decline that comes with age.
Though this study isn't the first to do so, Mallow said that the research provides hard evidence that memory techniques really work. "The encoding [memorization] process is a bit of effort, but if you've learned the techniques and are good at them, then the recalling process is much easier," Mallow said. That could be useful for students trying to memorize information as they prepare for exams, he added, provided that they have done the super memorizer training before cram time.
Dresler agreed, adding that even people who have not trained to be super memorizers but have better-than-average memories also adopt mnemonic devices, which hints at a deeper cognitive tendency in the human brain to use shortcuts and associations. "It really is a skill or feat that most people could achieve or train for," Dresler said. "Not everyone who starts to use these techniques becomes a champion, but most people that try them will increase their memory skills by orders of magnitude."
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