What I Learned Training for the U.S. Memory Championship: 5 Surprising Truths About Your Brain

We have all felt the frustration of a normal memory. It’s the sting of forgetting an acquaintance’s name moments after hearing it, the annoyance of misplacing car keys, or the vague sense of having only a foggy notion of a book you just spent six hours reading. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience; it’s a significant tax on our time. As journalist Joshua Foer noted, “I had once read that the average person squanders about forty days a year compensating for things he or she has forgotten.”

This article distills the most powerful and counter-intuitive lessons from Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, where he documents his journey from having an average memory to winning the U.S. Memory Championship in a single year. His experiment reveals a profound truth: the key to an exceptional memory isn’t a special brain, but a set of ancient techniques that anyone can learn. Here are the five most impactful takeaways from his journey into the art and science of remembering.

1. Memory Champions Have Average Brains

The most myth-busting revelation from the world of competitive memory is that “mental athletes” are not born with superior memories or structurally different brains. This isn’t just an encouraging platitude; it’s a scientific finding.

Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire conducted a study on contestants from the World Memory Championship to see what made them different. Her findings were stunning: their brains were “indistinguishable” from those of control subjects. On tests of general cognitive ability, their scores were “well within the normal range.” They weren’t smarter, and they didn’t have special hardware.

The secret was revealed by fMRI scans taken while the mnemonists were memorizing information. The mental athletes were simply using their brains differently. They were activating regions associated with spatial navigation and visual memory—the same parts of the brain that London cabbies use to navigate the city’s labyrinthine streets. This is a powerful realization: a superior memory is not an innate gift but a learned skill accessible to anyone willing to put in the practice.

“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly.” — Ed Cooke, Grand Master of Memory

This discovery—that a better memory comes from a different use of the brain, not a different brain—begs the question: what exactly are they doing differently? The answer, it turns out, is less about logic and more about embracing the brain’s natural appetite for the bizarre.

2. Your Brain Remembers Bizarre, Lewd, and Funny Things

The core technique behind all memory systems is a principle called “elaborative encoding.” Our brains did not evolve to remember boring, abstract information like lists of words or long strings of numbers. They are, however, exceptionally good at remembering vivid, multisensory, and emotionally charged images.

Mnemonists don’t remember abstract data; they transform it into unforgettable scenes. For his first memory task, Foer learned to turn “pickled garlic” into a giant, smelly jar standing in his driveway and “cottage cheese” into a vision of supermodel Claudia Schiffer swimming in a tub of it. His system for memorizing playing cards involved imagining bizarre acts, like the portly actor Dom DeLuise delivering a devastating karate kick to the groin of Pope Benedict XVI.

This isn’t a modern trick but an ancient principle, codified nearly two thousand years ago in a Roman rhetoric textbook, the Rhetorica ad Herennium. The text explains that the key to durable memories lies in creating shocking images.

“…if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”

The secret to remembering the mundane is to transform it into something unforgettable. The more shocking, bizarre, or hilarious the image you create, the more likely it is to stick in your mind. This technique also has a powerful side effect: it forces you to pay closer, more creative attention to the world, transforming the act of remembering into an act of mindfulness.

Harnessing the brain’s natural weirdness is the foundational trick of the mental athlete. But this technique is more than just a trick; it’s a window into how the mind builds mastery. It reveals that the path to expertise in any field is paved with a vast collection of richly encoded memories.

3. Expertise in Any Field is Just a Supercharged Memory

The techniques used by mental athletes are far more than party tricks; they reveal the fundamental structure of expertise in any field, from chess to surgery to chicken sexing. At the heart of this connection is the concept of “chunking.”

To understand chunking, try to memorize the following string of 22 letters: HEADSHOULDERSKNEESTOES. It’s difficult. But see it as four distinct chunks from a nursery rhyme—HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, TOES—and it becomes trivial. This is what experts do. They don’t see isolated pieces of data; they see meaningful patterns based on a vast library of memories.

Studies of chess masters found that they don’t necessarily see more moves ahead than novices. Instead, they instantly recognize patterns from a deep mental catalog of past games. A seasoned SWAT officer doesn’t just see a man; he sees a “nervous twitch” that his experience tells him is a sign of trouble. An expert chicken sexer doesn’t analyze a chick’s anatomy; he or she recognizes a meaningful pattern from as many as a thousand different vent configurations.

“In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.”

In each case, expertise is the result of building a vast internal library of experiences, allowing them to perceive the world in meaningful chunks rather than isolated data points. Their memory, in essence, creates their perception.

If building expertise requires such an immense library of memory, why do so many of us with years of experience in a field stop getting better? It’s because we hit a comfortable, and deceptively permanent, barrier to improvement.

4. You Stop Improving When You Hit the “OK Plateau”

Think about skills you practice daily, like typing or driving. You probably improved quickly at first, but then your progress leveled off. This is the “OK Plateau”—the point where we become good enough for our needs and stop improving, even with constant practice.

The psychology of skill acquisition involves three stages: the “cognitive” stage (intellectualizing the task), the “associative” stage (becoming more efficient), and finally, the “autonomous” stage. The OK Plateau is the result of hitting this autonomous stage, where the skill runs on autopilot. To break past it requires what psychologist Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” It has three core components:

• Focus on your weaknesses. You must constantly push yourself just beyond your comfort zone.
• Get constant, immediate feedback. You need to know what you’re doing right and wrong as it’s happening.
• Practice failing and learn from mistakes. The best practice is structured, self-conscious, and analytical.

This concept explains why years of experience don’t always translate into expertise. “Deliberate practice” is the act of paying conscious attention to a task that you have relegated to your mental autopilot. It is the antidote to the OK Plateau and the key to continuous improvement.

“When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.”

The quest for a better memory is a constant battle against autopilot, a deliberate effort to notice and encode the world. But as we strive to remember more, it’s worth considering a strange paradox: the profound importance of being able to forget.

5. Forgetting Is What Makes You Human

We often curse our inability to remember, but the ability to forget is a crucial—and perhaps defining—human trait. A perfect memory is not a blessing but a pathology.

Consider the real case of “S,” a Russian journalist studied for decades who could remember almost everything. His mind was so cluttered with vivid details that he couldn’t think abstractly. He was unable to grasp metaphors or the gist of a story because every word created an overwhelming, literal image. At the other extreme is “EP,” an amnesic trapped in an “eternal present,” unable to build a narrative of his life or maintain relationships. These cases illustrate the torment of both perfect recall and total forgetfulness.

Jorge Luis Borges brilliantly captured the pathology of a perfect memory in his short story “Funes the Memorious.” The titular character, Funes, is paralyzed by a memory that is too perfect. He perceives every leaf on a tree, every vein on every leaf, every time he has perceived it before. Because his mind is a “garbage heap” of unfiltered details, Borges writes that Funes “was incapable of general, platonic ideas.” He couldn’t abstract, generalize, or truly think.

Forgetting is what allows us to filter the world and make sense of it. It enables us to form general ideas by letting go of trivial details. It’s the mechanism that allows us to move past pain and learn from experience without being chained to it. A healthy, functioning memory is not a perfect, computer-like storage device. It’s an elegant balance between remembering and forgetting, allowing us to build a coherent self that can learn from the past without being trapped by it.

“To make sense of the world, we must filter it. ‘To think,’ Borges writes, ‘is to forget.'”

Conclusion: Remembering to Remember

The central lesson from the world of memory training is that our memories are not static things we are born with, but dynamic, trainable skills. How we use them shapes our entire experience of the world, from our expertise in a given field to our subjective perception of time.

Ultimately, training your memory is less about winning contests and more about learning to be mindful and pay attention. The techniques force you to engage with the world in a more creative and observant way. How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. In the end, our memories make us who we are.

This leaves us with a final, important question to consider. In an age where we can offload our memories to external devices, what have we gained, but more importantly, what have we lost?