U.S. memory champion's repeat victory holds lessons for college students

After a long day of memorizing 99 names and faces, a 50-line poem, and a deck of cards in a minute, Nelson Dellis won the annual US Memory Championship on March 24 in New York City.

Dellis, a 28-year old mountaineer, won the title for the second year in a row, breaking many of his own records and memorizing 303 random numbers in five minutes.

His method, which is common to all mental athletes, is to build memory palaces, placing images representing names or numbers into a space within his mind and connecting them. Recalling a sequence of data would simply require mentally walking through this place and finding the stored images again.

The number 0093495, Dellis said, was an image of Olivia Newton wearing spandex and slam-dunking a helmet.

Among the audience was Joshua Foer, the 2006 memory champion and author of the New York Times bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein, which made memory techniques more popular and seemingly brought more media attention to this year’s competition.

But the former memory champ claimed he would never be able to win again – especially if Dellis was his opponent.

“When I competed, I memorized a deck of cards in a minute and 40 seconds. If I competed today I don’t think I could even do it in three to four minutes,” Foer said. “I’m the old timer. I’m out of practice at this point.”

Dellis took 63 seconds to memorize a deck of cards this year.

But the benefits of memory techniques transcend a competition.

Foer, who learned about the art of competitive memorizing while on assignment as a journalist, said he wishes he would have known about them in high school or college.

“These sorts of memory techniques are really great for memorizing structured information like dates and facts,” he said. “They’re based on some pretty basic principles about how our minds work.”

Of the approximately 50 competitors, 28 were students – nine of which were in college.

University of Pennsylvania student Michael Mirski won third place, being eliminated after forgetting the sequence in a deck of cards.

The memory coach of a team of mental athletes from Hershey High School, Colette Silvestri, said this is a practice that is too often ignored on college campuses in a technological age.

“We are stuffing memory into a computer,” she said. But since her students started training for the competition, their grades have gone up, their focus has improved and they no longer have to take as many notes.

And science further proves the benefits of a sharp mind.

Dr. Majid Fotuhi, chairman of the Neurology Institute for Brain Health and Fitness, told the audience that when it comes to the brain, size matters, brain size can be increased at any age, and those with a bigger brain are less likely to be fall victim to memory degenerating conditions like Alzheimer’s.

Short-term memory lies in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that is shaped like a seahorse.

After memorizing two decks of cards on stage, Dellis, who lost his grandmother to Alzheimer’s earned the US memory title and held up his trophy: A figure of a shimmering blue seahorse.

“We should take care of our minds: that’s the bottom line. And a lot of us take that for granted.” he said. “I hope you are inspired a little bit to explore your own mind.”

Nicole Glass is a senior at American University. She is a staff writer at her campus newspaper, The Eagle, and an intern at National Geographic Traveler Magazine. Visit her website to see her published works or follow her on Twitter.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.