At the beginning of February, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20 -year -old Indian university student, won the Memory League World Championship, an online competition that put people against each other with challenges such as the storage of the order of 80 random numbers faster.
The famous neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in January, studied mental athletes such as Mr. Rajakumar and discovered that many of them used the ancient Method of Loci “Romano, a memorization makeup also known as” Palazzo della Memoria “.
The technique takes on different forms, but generally involves the display of a large house and the assignment of memories to the rooms. Walking mentally through the house he shoots the hippocampus, the engine of the maritime ride -shaped memory in the deep of the brain that consumed the career of Dr. Maguire.
We asked Mr. Rajakumar for his memorization strategies. His responses, slightly well -kept and condensed for clarity, are below.
Q. How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship?
Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When it memorizes things, they usually subclug and help to have a clear throat. Let’s say you are reading a book. You are not reading it aloud, but you are vocalizing inside you. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a little low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and clearer and you can read it faster.
Q. What do the Palazzo della Memoria appears?
Let’s say my first position is my room where I sleep. My second position is the kitchen. And the third position is my room. The fourth position is my veranda. Another location is my bathroom. Let’s say I’m storing a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a couple of words, I make a story and put them in a place. And I take the next two words. I make a story. I put them in the second position. The Palazzo della Memoria will help you remember the sequence.
Q. How much can these rooms contain?
Very. Let’s say I’m memorizing 100 words. I’m making a story on two words. There will be a set of 50 floors. But I don’t remember what he came first or what he came second. So it would be a problem, right? So if I use the Palazzo della Memoria, I can easily remember which one came first and which one came second. In the same way, I easily remember all 50 stories.
D.: Can you describe one of the challenges in the World Memory Championship?
They give you 80 random numbers that display on a screen. You have to store all those numbers as quickly as possible, then click a button and appears a sheet of call. I wrote all the 80 digits and did them well. My fastest moment to store 80 random digits in this world championship was 13.5 seconds, therefore almost six digits per second.
Q. Do you realize how surprising is?
Yes, of course. I was crying.
Q. What is the next?
After my completion of the college, as between two or three months, I will probably try to be a memory coach and will create a memory institute in India to teach other people these techniques. My goal is to make it great.