24-year-old Ram Kolli just won the U.S. Memory Championship, quickly memorizing decks of cards, names and faces, poems, and long numbers.

… when Cooke sees a three of clubs, a nine of hearts, and a nine of spades, he immediately conjures up an image of Brazilian lingerie model Adriana Lima in a Biggles biplane shooting at his old public-school headmaster in a suit of armor… To keep all this information in order, memorizers have to link their images together in a chain. Some… use what’s called the “journey method.” They place their images at predetermined points along a route that they know well… When it comes time to recall, he simply takes a mental stroll through his old college town and is able see each of the images in the place where he put it.

Evolutionary selection has favored sharp navigational memory, ranging from ‘dude, where’s my food?’ to ‘dude, where’s my wife?’:

… this method of using visual imagery as a mnemonic device was first employed by a Greek poet named Simonides in 477 BC. Simonides was the sole survivor of a roof collapse that killed all the guests at a large banquet he was attending. He was able to reconstruct the guest list by visualizing who was sitting at each seat around the table. What Simonides had discovered was that people have an astoundingly good recollection of location… this same technique was later used by Roman generals to learn the names of thousands of soldiers in their command and by medieval scholastics to memorize long religious tomes.

Slate has a fascinating followup on memory formation as portrayed in one of my favorite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind:

… some scientists now believe that memories effectively get rewritten every time they’re activated, thanks to a process called reconsolidation… instead of simply recalling a memory that had been forged days or months ago, the brain is forging it all over again, in a new associative context. In a sense, when we remember something, we create a new memory, one that is shaped by the changes that have happened to our brain since the memory last occurred to us. Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure.

Selective erasure of memories may not be a feasible procedure in the near future, but cosmetic memory enhancement is likely to be a reality in the next 10 years…You won’t be able to sharpen your memory of a single person, but you may well be able to take a pill that will increase your general faculties of recollection.

Kolli is a grad student in computer science at Virginia Tech who placed in the top 5 the preceding two years as well. His talent was probably nurtured in the Indian educational system, with its fondness for corporal punishment (motto: ‘Forgot your maths? Show me your hand!’) And RAM is quite the apropos name for his hobby.

But male memory is highly selective: his girlfriend might report he still can’t remember her birthday 😉