How to Remember Everything
The world’s most accomplished memorizers insist their powers aren’t an innate gift, but rather a skill that anyone can hone.
Every spring, teenagers and grown-ups travel from around the country to enter the U.S.A. Memory Championship. The competitors, called “memory athletes,” accomplish incredible cognitive feats over the course of the event. In 2016, Katherine He, then in high school, memorized a 50-line poem in 15 minutes. Alex Mullen, who won the competition that year, memorized the order of a deck of playing cards in under 19 seconds and successfully recalled a sequence of 483 numbers after studying it for just five minutes.
But champions like Mullen insist that they don’t possess
