In early February, 20-year-old Indian university student Vishvaa Rajakumar won the Memory League World Championship. .
Eleanor Maguire, a well-known neuroscientist who passed away in January, studied spiritual athletes like Rajakumal, and many of them were “genes” in ancient Rome, a memorization trick known as the “Park of Memory.” I discovered that I use the “Sitting Method”.
This technique comes in several forms, but generally involves visualizing a large house and assigning memories to a room. As you walk around the house mentally, the hippocampus, the horse-shaped engine of memory deep inside the brain that consumed Dr. Maguire's career, is fired.
We asked Mr. Rajakumar about his memorization strategy. His answer, clearly edited and condensed, is below.
Q. How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship?
Hydration is extremely important as it helps your brain. When memorizing things, you usually sublocalize, which helps to have a clear throat. Let's say you're reading a book. You're not reading it loudly, but you're making your own voice. If you don't drink a lot of water, your speed will be a little slower. Drinking a lot of water will make you more clear and read faster.
Q. What does your memory palace look like?
Let's say my first place is my room where I sleep. My second place is the kitchen. And the third place is my hall. The fourth place is my veranda. Another place is my bathroom. Let's say you remember a list of words. Let's say 10 words. What I do is I take a pair of words, make a story out of them, put them in place. And I take two words: I make a story from them. Place it in the second place. The memory palace helps to remember the sequence.
Q. How much can these rooms be held?
a lot. Let's say I'm memorizing 100 words. I create a story for each of two words. There is a set of 50 stories. But I can't remember which came first or which came second. That would be a problem, right? So, with Memory Palace, you can easily remember which came first and which came second. Similarly, I remember all 50 stories in a simple way.
Q. : Can you explain one of the challenges of the Memory League World Championship?
They give you 80 random numbers to be displayed on the screen. You can memorize all these numbers as soon as possible, then click the button to view the recall sheet. I wrote down everything in the 80 digits – and I did them all right. My fastest time to remember a random number of 80 at this World Championship was 13.5 seconds, so it was about six digits per 6 digits.
Q.Do you understand how wonderful this is?
yes i will. I was crying.
Q. What's next?
After graduating from university, like 2-3 months, I'm probably going to become a memory trainer and try to create a memory institution in India to teach other people these techniques. My goal is to make it bigger.
