Clemens Mayer, 19, about to start as a law student, has won the Deutsche Gedächtnismeisterschaft (German memory championships).
In 30 minutes he learnt 1040 numbers. He associates each number between 0 and 99 with a symbol – a cow, a mouse, a pen.
bq. Der angehende Jura-Student Clemens Mayer, 19, aus Brannenburg hat die Deutsche Gedächtnismeisterschaft gewonnen. Damit löste er Gunter Karsten ab, der diesen Titel sieben Mal in Folge gewann.
He also managed to associate 85 names with faces. He trains for this every day by cutting out hundreds of faces from Quelle or Otto catalogues, under each of which his mother writes a fictitious name.
I suppose it’s good mental training for both of them. I just have this picture of them sitting there with the catalogues and the scissors.
Some years ago I followed a ‘fast reading’ course, which also focused on memorization: the technique of associating an object to the word/number/item you had to remember was widely used and, believe me, even after many years, I still remember some of the things I had associated to those objects! They seem to be ’embedded’ in my brain, in spite of the time that has passed and the fact that I had never paid much attention to these objects during the rest of my life. The brain is a wonderful and powerful machine, isn’t it?!?
SYLVY