The final event is always the speed card round, where competitors memorise a single pack of cards as fast as possible. It consists of 10 rounds of mental challenges, which include memorising as many numbers as you can in an hour, remembering as many faces and names as you can in 15 minutes, or committing to memory hundreds of binary digits. The championship took place in December in Guangzhou, China. “It was really motivating, I kept practicing and eventually ended up at the 2015 world memory championship.” “I definitely didn’t have a great natural memory,” he said, “but in 2013 I started training using the techniques that Foer had talked about.” A year later, Mullen came second in the US memory championship. Mullen was spurred on to improve his own memory by Foer’s story. Foer started practicing the techniques himself, and went on to win the competition the following year. Instead, he found a group of people who had trained their memory using ancient techniques. The book was written by Joshua Foer, a journalist who attended a US memory championship to write about what he thought would be “the Super Bowl of savants”. Mullen told me about a book he’d read called Moonwalking with Einstein. Fast-forward to today and Mullen, a medical student at the University of Mississippi, has just been crowned the World Memory Champion. His memory wasn’t anything special – “below average” even.
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