Secrets To A Smarter You

Want to be bright as a button and quick as a whip? Hone your wits by harnessing the power of words, languages and mnemonics.

- Andrea Au Levitt And Brandon Specktor

How To Improve Your Memory

In an age when your refrigerator can help you manage your shopping list and your phone can answer almost any question, there’s less pressure on our memories. Which makes the feats of memory champions—who can recall hundreds of names and faces, random strings of numbers or words, or the order of multiple decks of cards—seem more superhuman than ever.

But here’s a nifty little secret about folks with phenomenal recall. In a study recently published in the journal Neuron, researchers found that super memorisers don’t have unusually large cerebral regions that allow them to absorb and retain prodigious amounts of information. Their brain structures are essentially the same as the rest of ours.

Comparing brain scans of 23 memory champions (who had placed in the top 50 at the World Memory Championship) with those of 23 regular people of the same age, gender, and IQ, the scientists found only one difference: In the memory champs’ brains, the regions associated with visual and spatial learning and the regions associated with memory lit up in a specific pattern. In the regular people’s brains, these same regions were activated differently.

Why is that important? Because we learn by seeing, and the more we see, the better we remember. These super memorisers have perfected a method to convert items they want to remember (numbers, faces, cards, even abstract shapes) into pictures they “see” in their minds. It’s a process that’s called “building a memory palace”.