Dominic O'Brien on Memory

Courtesy of Dominic O'Brien

By Liz Neporent

Quick, read this list: Butter, telephone, bed sheet, aspirin, staples, goat, pencil, seltzer, basket, photograph. Now close your eyes and count to ten. Turn away and recall as many of the items on the list as you can without checking back. No peeking, please.

How did you do? If you’re good, you recalled perhaps three items, a perfect demonstration of the limits of the average person’s short term memory. It’s this limitation you have to thank for the lack of ability to remember the name of the person you just met and why you can never, ever seem to find your keys, cell phone or birth certificate.

Now imagine memorizing the order of 54 decks of inter-shuffled cards with only a single glance at each. It seems impossible, yet that’s what World Memory Champ Dominic O’Brien was able to do. On May 1st, 2002, the Englishman committed a random sequence of 2808 playing cards (54 packs) to memory after looking at each card only once. He was able to correctly recite their order, making only eight errors, four of which he immediately corrected when told he was wrong. It’s a Guinness Book of World Records feat that still stands today.

In fact, O’Brien now makes his living traveling the world, remembering things. He gives lectures, speaks at corporate events and through his company, Peak Performance Training, he instructs mere mortals like you and me on how to improve our powers of recall for facts, figures, names dates and faces. He’s also written 10 best selling memory improvement books. We recently caught up with the memory maven and picked his brain to find out how he does what he does.

AOL Health: You’ve won the World Memory Championships an unprecedented eight times, retiring from the competition in 2003. Describe how the championships work.

There are 10 disciplines which take three days to complete. There are marathon events such as being given one hour to memorize around 2000 decimal numbers (6803394581… and so on) and one hour to recall the order of around 25 decks of shuffled playing cards. There are also shorter "sprint" events such as recalling 100 names and faces in fifteen minutes, 120 fictional dates, and a 300 digit number heard at the rate of one digit per second. The object of all of these is to remember as much as you can in the amount of time you are given while making the fewest recall mistakes.

AOL Health: What drives you and other "memoirists" to compete?

Memory is a mental sport and just like any sport you have a desire to push yourself to see how far you can take your skills. It can be addictive.

AOL Health: Did you always have a good memory?

I always had a good imagination and was able to memorize music having heard it on a cassette or record. However, it wasn’t until I was age 30 that I started to train my memory. I was originally inspired by watching a man on TV memorize a deck of cards in three minutes. Now of course, I hold the World Record for the memorization of 54 decks of inter-shuffled cards with a single-sighting of each.

[Editorial side note: At the 2007 World Memory Championships, another Brit, Ben Pridmore, memorized a single shuffled deck of playing cards in 26.28 seconds beating the previous World Record of 31.16 seconds. This is widely considered the memory equivalent of breaking the four-minute mile in track & field.]

AOL Health: What is one of your most essential memorization techniques?

One technique used by many competitors dates back to ancient times when it was a learning tool used by orators and students. It is known by various names but most commonly as the “method of loci” or the “journey technique”. It involves mentally picturing a familiar journey, and placing pictures associated to the information you are trying to memorize along that route. Then when remembering the information, you simply go on your mental journey and "pick up" all of the things you placed there. For example, I translate numbers into images that resemble their shape; one becomes a candle or streetlamp and eight a snowman or egg-timer. To help remember a [bank] pin of 1580, I imagine walking into the bank carrying a candle, standing in a queue behind a snake, and seeing a snowman bouncing a football behind the counter.

AOL Health: Do you think good memory is a gift or a skill?

The vast majority of us are quite capable of training and developing extremely powerful memory functions. All that's required is the drive and the desire to train in the first place. Use it or lose it is a good adage.

AOL Health: Why do you think memory is so important?

Without memory our lives would be in chaos. Memory is what defines us. We are the sum total of our remembered experiences and this is what makes you, you, and me, me.

Once you learn to flex your memory muscles, it helps you in the real world. By running around a track daily you not only become proficient at running around a track -- you also develop a healthy physical condition which is advantageous for a multitude of physical (and mental) activities. Memorizing a 1000 digit binary number for example, requires activating all functions of the brain -- imagination, creativity, logic, imagery, sequential, spatial, overview, concentration, stamina and much more. Every time you memorize or hard wire data into your brain, new neural connections are made. These ever expanding pathways can be used to transport or act as conduits for a multitude of problem solving tasks. The evidence is out there -- training your memory increases fluid intelligence.

AOL Health: Do you ever find yourself needing to forget something?

Yes. I need to forget previously memorized sequences of numbers or cards. In order to remember the sequences, I use familiar routes such as a journey around my house to store lists of information. Obviously, I don’t want to confuse existing sequences with new lists on the same route. The easiest way to forget these lists is simply not to review or think about them for at least two weeks.

AOL Health: What is your earliest memory?

Standing in my cot as a baby and shaking the wooden bars. I remember my mother saying that I would become a boxer one day.

AOL Health: What advice do you have for someone looking to sharpen their memory skills?

Like any exercise it should be practiced regularly and progress monitored. And of course read my books! In particular, How To Develop a Brilliant Memory, and Learn To Remember (Castle House, 2005).