Moonwalking With Einstein (13 page)

“This is where I practice,” Ed said, and pointed to a balcony that jutted into the upper part of the barn. “Images of binary digits come pouring down those stairs over there, right across the room. This is exactly where you’d expect a memory champ to exercise, isn’t it?”

Before dinner, an old childhood friend of Ed’s named Timmy stopped by to say hello. Ed and I came downstairs to find him at the table chatting with Ed’s mother and father, Teen and Rod, while his youngest sister, Phoebe, chopped vegetables from the garden at the kitchen island. Timmy now ran an online application development company. He had driven over in a BMW, wore a crisp polo shirt, and had a warm tan.

Teen introduced me and explained, with a wry laugh, that Ed was my memory coach. Timmy seemed not to believe that Ed was still toying with all this memory stuff. Hadn’t it been quite some time since he’d taken that crazy trip to Kuala Lumpur?

“Edward, are you at all nervous that your new student will surpass you?” asked Teen, mostly it seemed for the sake of ribbing her son.

“I don’t think anyone needs to be too concerned about that,” I said.

“Well, I think it’d strike a tremendous blow for education,” said Ed proudly.

“Do you think you could give Ed a nine-to-five job?” Rod asked Timmy.

Ed laughed. “Yes, you know, maybe I could give memory training courses to your employees.”

“You could do programming,” offered Teen.

“I don’t know how to program.”

“Your father could teach you.”

Rod made a small fortune in the 1990s designing computer software, and retired at an early age to a life of leisure and eccentric pursuits. He is a practicing apiarist and gardener and would like to take the Mill Farm off the electrical grid by exercising his ancient water rights and installing a hydroelectric generator in the creek that runs by the house. Teen teaches developmentally disabled kids at a local school and is an avid reader and tennis player. She is mostly tolerant of Ed’s eccentricities, but also cautiously hopeful that Ed might someday direct his considerable talents in a more focused, and perhaps even socially useful, direction.

“What about the law, Edward?” she asked.

“I consider the law to be a zero-sum game, and therefore a pointless use of a life,” said Ed. “Being good at being a lawyer means merely, on average, maximizing injustice.” Ed leaned over to me. “I used to be quite a promising young man when I was eighteen.”

This prompted Phoebe to chime in: “More like thirteen.”

While Ed was in the bathroom, I asked Rod if he would be disappointed if his son ended up becoming the next Tony Buzan, a fantastically wealthy self-help guru. Rod pondered the question for a few seconds and stroked his chin. “I think I’d prefer if he became a barrister.”

The next morning
, at the examination hall at Oxford University, which was hosting the world’s finest mnemonists, Ed was sprawled out across a leather sofa, wearing a bright yellow cap and a T-shirt with the words “Ed Kicks Ass—220” emblazoned in bold letters across his chest, above a menacing ironed-on photograph of himself, a cartoon of a karate kick, and a photograph of thonged female hindquarters. (In addition to communicating an intimidating bit of trash talk to his opponents, he explained, those three words, “Ed Kicks Ass,” are a mnemonic that helps him remember the number 220.) He was smoking a cigarette (he doesn’t take the physical training part of the sport too seriously), and warmly greeting each of the competitors as they strolled through the door. He informed me that since we’d last seen each other, he’d taken an indefinite leave of absence from his PhD program in Paris to pursue “other projects.” He also told me that his and Lukas’s big plans for the Oxford Mind Academy had been temporarily derailed when, not long after the U.S. championship, Lukas badly seared his lungs in a fire-breathing stunt gone wrong.

Memory championships can be pathologically competitive events, and Ed described his vanity T-shirt as part of a “campaign of pretend intimidation” with the aim of “generally upping the quality of banter between competitors—especially with the Germans.” To that end, he had showed up at the championship bearing copies of a cheeky onepage stats sheet that he was handing out to the press and fellow competitors. It described his character (in the third person)—“Irreverent, flamboyant, ready for anything (especially yesterday)”—and his training regime—“Early Rise, Yoga, Skipping, Superfoods (including blueberries and cod liver oil), Four-hours training, two glasses of wine per day (from the potassium rich soil of the Languedoc-Roussillon in Southern France), 30 minutes reflection period at sunset each evening, keeping a journal online.” It noted that his “unique abilities” include lucid dreaming and tantric sex. It also described Tony Buzan as “a champion ball-room dancer and a mentor for me throughout puberty,” and his thoughts on the future of competitive memory: “Hoping it will be an Olympic sport before 2020,” when he is “planning to retire to a life of synaesthesia and senility.” His plans for after the championship: “Revolutionizing Western Education.”

Sitting on the couch next to him was the legendary world memory champion Ben Pridmore, a man who until that moment I had known only through Google and myth. (I had heard he could memorize playing cards as fast as he could turn them over.) Ben wore a worn-out “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish” Dr. Seuss T-shirt with a badly stretched collar, and a fanny pack. He was also sporting an enormous wide-brimmed black Australian steer-hide undertaker’s hat that he professed to have worn every day for the last six years. “It’s my gimmick,” he said softly. “It’s part of my soul.” At his feet there sat a pink and black backpack with the words “Pump It Up” graffitied on the back. He informed us that there were twenty-two decks of playing cards inside, which he intended to memorize the next day in a single hour.

With his bald head, dark beard, face-swallowing glasses, and wide, searching eyes, Ben seemed almost like a figure out of an R. Crumb cartoon. He even had the same shrugged shoulders and loopy strut. The soles of his tattered leather shoes slapped under his feet like flip-flops. He spoke with a gentle, slightly nasal Yorkshire accent, which turned “my” into “me.” “I hate me voice,” he said when explaining why he’d been so cagey about returning my phone calls during the previous weeks. One of the first pieces of information about himself that he shared with me was that he believed he was England’s youngest college dropout. “I was admitted to Kingston on Thames University when I was seventeen, but I dropped out after six months. Now I’m twenty-eight, which is a bit depressing. I’m starting to feel like the old man of memory sports. You know, I was one of the hot newcomers once.”

Bad luck does seem to stalk Ben. He’d had no intentions of being at the World Memory Championship. Instead, he had devoted the last six months to memorizing the first 50,000 digits of the mathematical constant pi, which he planned to recite at the Mind Sports Olympiad, a weeklong festival of board games to be held a week after the World Memory Championship. It would have been a new world record. But an obscure Japanese mnemonist named Akira Haraguchi had emerged from nowhere to memorize 83,431 digits just a month earlier. It took him sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes to recite them. Ben read about the accomplishment on the Internet and was forced to reevaluate his plans. Instead of trying to learn another 33,432 digits, he gave up and rededicated himself to defending his title as world memory champion. He had spent virtually every free moment of the last six weeks cleaning out memory palaces that had been devoted to pi, undoing months of hard work so that he could reuse the palaces in the memory championships.

Most of the mental athletes on the memory circuit came to the sport the same way I did: They once saw someone perform an outrageous memory stunt, thought it was cool, learned the trick behind it, and then went home and tried it themselves. But Ben missed one critical step. He’d seen someone memorizing playing cards and thought it was cool, and went home and tried it himself. But nobody ever told him how it was done. Without using any techniques at all, he just stared at the cards over and over again until they’d become imprinted on his brain. And the amazing thing is, he kept doing this in his spare time for several months, under the assumption that eventually he’d surely get good at it. He finally got his time down to fifteen minutes using pure rote memorization, a feat in many ways more impressive than his world record time of thirty-two seconds using techniques. It wasn’t until he showed up at his first World Memory Championship in 2000 that he found out about the memory palace. After the first day of events wrapped up (he finished near last place), he went to a bookstore, bought one of Tony Buzan’s books, decided this was something he had a talent for, and forgot about all of his other extracurricular interests, including his lifelong quest to watch every one of the 1,001 theatrically released Warner Bros. cartoons made between 1930 and 1968.

Ben had been working on a book called “How to Be Clever,” which teaches readers how to calculate the day of the week for any date in history, how to memorize a deck of cards, and how to scam an IQ test. “The book is about making people think you’re brainy without actually increasing your intelligence,” he told me. “The problem is I haven’t written very much because I always have more important things to do, like watch cartoons. If I tried to write a serious book on how to improve your life, I’d be rubbish at it, because I haven’t got the faintest idea how to improve my life.”

The favorite to take
Ben’s title at the world championship was Dr. Gunther Karsten, the balding, angular forty-three-year-old godfather of German memory sport, who had won every German national contest since 1998. Gunther showed up wearing what I learned is his standard uniform: an imposing pair of black earmuffs and metallic sunglasses whose insides have been completely taped over except for two small pinholes. “Extraneous stimuli,” as Gunther calls them, are the memorizer’s bête noir. (A retired Danish mnemonist used to compete wearing horse blinders.) He also wore a gold belt buckle embossed with his initials, a gold chain over his tight white T-shirt, and black sailor pants that flared at the bottom. Gunther informed me that in college he was a photo model for Nissan cars, and depending on how you squinted, he looked like the villain in a James Bond movie or an aging figure skater. He was in terrific physical shape, and was, I would soon learn, a fierce competitor. Despite the fact that one of his legs is slightly shorter than the other (from a childhood bone disease), he regularly races in—and wins—track events for middle-aged men. He was carrying around with him a locked, shiny metal suitcase filled with between twenty and thirty decks of playing cards, which he planned to memorize. He wouldn’t tell me the exact number for fear it would get back to Ben Pridmore.

The actual competition took place in a large oak-paneled room in one of Oxford’s storied old buildings, with tall Gothic windows and oversize portraits of the third Earl of Litchfield and the fourteenth Earl of Derby. The room was arranged no differently than it had been during the school year, when it was used to administer exams to Oxford undergraduates. There were four dozen desks, each of which had a six-inch-tall digital stopwatch clamped to it, which would be used for the last and most exciting event of the contest, speed cards, when the competitors race to commit a single deck of playing cards to memory as fast as possible.

Unlike the U.S. championship, which has just five events, none lasting longer than fifteen minutes, the World Memory Championship is frequently referred to as a “mental decathlon.” Its ten events, called “disciplines,” span three grueling days, and each tests the competitors’ memories in a slightly different way. Contestants have to memorize a previously unpublished poem spanning several pages, pages of random words (record: 280 in fifteen minutes), lists of binary digits (record: 4,140 in thirty minutes), shuffled decks of playing cards, a list of historical dates, and names and faces. Some disciplines, called “speed events,” test how much the contestants can memorize in five minutes (record: 405 digits). Two marathon disciplines test how many decks of cards and random digits they can memorize in an hour (records: 2,080 digits and 27 decks of cards).

The first World Memory Championship was held at the posh Athenaeum Club in London in 1991. “I thought, this is insane,” recalls Tony Buzan. “We have crossword championships. We have Scrabble championships. We have chess, bridge, poker, draughts, canasta, and Go championships. We have science fair championships. And for the biggest, the most fundamental of all human cognitive processes, memory, there’s no championship.” He also knew that the idea of a “world memory champion” would be an irresistible draw for the media, and a savvy way to promote his books on mind training.

With the help of his friend Raymond Keene, a British chess grand master who writes the daily chess column for
The Times
(London), Buzan sent out letters to a handful of people who he knew were involved in memory training, and ran an ad in
The Times
advertising the contest. Seven people showed up, including a psychiatric nurse named Creighton Carvello who had memorized the telephone number of every Smith in the Middlesbrough phonebook and another person named Bruce Balmer who had set a record for memorizing two thousand foreign words in a single day. Several of the competitors wore tuxedoes.

The contestants no longer
adhere to such a strict dress code, but everything else about the championship has gotten far more serious since 1991. What began as a one-day contest has now expanded to fill an entire weekend. Of all the disciplines in a three-day memory decathlon, the first one of the first day, the poem, is the most universally dreaded. Because of my own faltering efforts to memorize poetry, it was the one event that I wanted to watch most closely. Every year Gunther lobbies to have the event stricken from the contest, or at least replaced with rules that are more—as he puts it—“objective.” But poetry is where memorization began, and to cut it from the championship because a few of the competitors find it difficult would run counter to the competition’s underlying premise that memorization is a creative and humanizing endeavor. So every year, a new, previously unpublished poem is commissioned for the world championship. For the first few years of the competition, in the early nineties, the poem was written by the British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whom Tony Buzan describes as “an old friend.” Since Hughes’s death in 1998, the poem has been written by Buzan himself. This year’s 108-line free-verse offering, titled “Miserare,” came from a collection titled “Requiem for Ted.” It began: