How To Improve Your Memory

If you were asked to name a world-famous athlete Michael Jordan, Serena Williams, Scott Hagwood and Nelson Dellis would be top of mind. Each is instantly recognizable, they’ve performed consistently well under pressure and all are champions. Children and adults queue for hours just to catch a glimpse of their heroes, and if they’re lucky—really lucky—they might even score an autograph from their favorite star.

Scott Hagwood is also a world-class champion athlete. He can walk the streets of any city without being recognized even though, at one time, he was the best in the world in his sport. Hagwood’s athletic career was short, it only lasted four years, but in that time he became a four-time U.S. champion, and in the final year of his career, Hagwood won a world championship.

Scott Hagwood is a champion mnemonist—someone who can memorize vast amounts of information in minutes.

Hagwood began his athletic career (yes, mnemonists consider themselves athletes) in 2000 after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer. As part of his post-operative treatment, he had to undergo radiation but the protocol for those with thyroid cancer isn’t the same out-patient procedure that is commonly used with other forms of cancer. 

This type required Hagwood to drink radioactive iodine and remain in a lead-lined room for two days. Hagwood’s oncologist warned that a possible side effect of the radiation could be the impairment of long-term memory. For a chemical engineer who needs to recall a lot of complex data this wasn’t good news.

To stave off the possibility of impairment, Hagwood bought some how-to books on an ancient memory technique called “The Method of Loci.” 

The system, which is based on making visual connections, dates back 2,500 years to the Greeks and Romans who used it to remember words, numbers and people. As Hagwood sat alone in the lead room, he taught himself the fundamentals of Loci and discovered that he could, in fact, train his brain to remember.

Less than a year after his surgery and radiation treatment, Hagwood entered the 2001 U.S. Memory Championship, a sort of Olympiad for mental athletes. Unlike the quadrennial winter and summer Olympic Games, qualifying for the memory competition wasn’t terribly onerous (it’s open to anyone over the age of 12 who can afford the US$25 registration fee).

But don’t let the easy-of-entry fool you. Over the course of nine hours, the mental athletes competed in seven categories. They are asked to remember the names and faces of random people, lists of numbers, an unpublished poem and its punctuation, the sequence of single and multiple decks of cards, the personal details of five people and random words.

If you don’t think that’s tough, consider these current world records: the speed record for memorizing a deck of 52 cards is 21.9 seconds, the most consecutive cards memorized in an hour is 1,456, the most random numbers remembered in an hour is 2,280 and the most names and faces memorized in 15 minutes is 201.

Rigorous Training

Tony Dottino founded the U.S. Memory Championship in 1997 after learning about a similar, though significantly less formal, gathering of English blokes who met once a year to out-remember each other. Those early competitions, dubbed “The World Memory Championship” were held in a London pub and won (or lost) over pints of Guinness. 

The event has since matured into full-blown, three-day competition and attracts mnemonists from around the globe. There’s even a world ranking of the top memory athletes (there are currently 867 athletes on the list).

The 2011 U.S. Memory Championship was held this past March in New York. The event attracted 39 mental athletes, 400 spectators and worldwide media coverage.

Training for the event can be rigorous. Consider Ron White, a two-time U.S. champion, who, after finishing a disappointing fourth in the 2008 championship, enlisted the help of T.C. Cummings, a former Navy SEAL, to raise the level of (his) game.

To improve discipline and focus, Cummings advised White to train in places with lots of commotion and stress factors to learn how to block out extraneous noise and activity. White began hanging out at a local bar where he practiced memorizing cards while hundreds of people listened to live music and watched sports on TV. He also donned snorkel gear and spent time underwater with a deck of cards to sharpen his focus.

“I needed to add structure to my training,” White said. “I needed a mental mindset to believe I was worthy of winning and get rid of the doubts in my mind.”

In the months leading up to championship events, White practiced up to eight hours a day, altered his diet to include foods high in Omega 3, ate more chicken and blueberries, eliminated alcohol and got more exercise. By following this regimen, White was able to win back-to-back U.S. championships in 2009 and 2010 and finished second in 2011.

This year’s winner, Nelson Dellis, is a relative newcomer to the sport. In 2009, his grandmother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s, died from complications associated with the disease. Dellis had been dabbling with The Method of Loci, and his grandmother’s death inspired him to see if he could win the U.S. championship.

“I was scared that the loss of memory could happen to me,” Dellis said. “I wanted to develop the tools that I’d need in the future if I did develop some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. I feel like the things that I’ve taught myself are tools that I can use when I find that I’m losing my memory.”

Dr. Cynthia Green, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, says a person cannot preempt the onset of cognitive diseases such as Alzheimer’s or the side effects of radiation.

“The kinds of training that folks do for the U.S. Memory Championship have never been associated by research with lowering our risk for dementia,” she said. “They can improve everyday performance, such as our ability to recall a written list or a name.

However, if you look at the data, the best things we can do to lower our risk for dementia is adapt what I term ‘brain healthy’ lifestyle behaviors, such as regular aerobic exercise, maintaining a healthy weight, eating sensibly and maintaining a high level of intellectual and social engagement.”

For Dottino, running the U.S. Memory Championship and evangelizing the importance of memory development has become his life’s passion. The former IBM finance executive has spent nearly a decade trying to persuade academics that memory development is as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. He’s been dumbfounded by the reaction.

“I’ve been asked, ‘What does memory have to do with school performance?’ I’ve had CBS, Pepsi and a National Hockey League team ready to sponsor a memory competition, and I couldn’t get a state board of education to be a part of it because they didn’t see any correlation between memory and academic performance,” Dottino said. “Academics think of memory as tiring and brute force, that you just pound information into people’s skulls.”

He recalled giving a keynote address to an audience of high school students and teachers during which he asked the audience when they use their memory. 

A student in the front row raised his hand and answered that he uses his memory everyday. Dottino then asked, “And when have you learned how your memory works?” A teacher admitted that memory development isn’t part of the core curriculum.

“Does it make sense that there’s a skill that we use for everything we do but we’ve never learned how to use it?” Dottino said.

As with any sport, Dottino wants people to understand that they can improve their ability with practice and exercise. 

He believes that in the sport of memory anyone can become a champion as long as they’re willing to put in the effort. “Becoming a memory champion is like someone who wants to improve his or her health,” he said. “You need to get on the treadmill and do the work.