Meet the Memory Masters

Some people call Stephen Wiltshire ‘the human camera’. Stephen was in a helicopter for twenty minutes, above London, and then he could draw pictures of the city from memory. Stephen wasn’t born in London and he doesn’t know the city, but in twenty minutes he memorized hundreds of buildings. His pictures weren’t perfect, but they were very detailed. 

 

Most people haven’t got a photographic memory like Stephen. In fact, the maximum number of things people can usually remember from a list is about six or seven. But it’s possible to train your brain.

 

For example, Mahavir Jain, from India, memorized 18.000 words and definitions from an English dictionary. His English exams were easy after that and now owns three English schools.

 

People also try to memorize pi. For most people at school, 3.142 is enough, but Akira Haraguchi, from Japan, once recited 100.000 digits of pi in sixteen hours. He started at 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday and finished at 1:28 a.m. the next day. It was a record.

 

There are also memory superstars. Dominic O’Brien was first interested in memory after he left school and he started to train his memory. In 1991, he won the World Memory Championships. He was World Memory Champion seven more times between 1992 and 2001. In 2002, Dominic memorized the order of cards in fifty-four packs of playing cards. That’s 2,808 cards! The world record was 2,704 cards. When he repeated the cards, Dominic was wrong only eight times!