In early February, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20-year-old Indian college student, won the Memory League World Championship, an online competition pitting people against one another with challenges like memorizing the order of 80 random numbers faster than most people can tie a shoelace.
The renowned neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in January, studied mental athletes like Mr. Rajakumar and found that many of them used the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
The technique takes several forms, but it generally involves visualizing a large house and assigning memories to rooms. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain that consumed Dr. Maguire’s career.
We asked Mr. Rajakumar about his strategies of memorization. His answers, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, are below.
Q. How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship?
Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When you memorize things, you usually sub-vocalize, and it helps to have a clear throat. Let’s say you’re reading a book. You’re not reading it out loud, but you are vocalizing within yourself. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a bit low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and more clear and you can read it faster.
Q. What does your memory palace look like?
Let’s say my first location is my room where I sleep. My second location is the kitchen. And the third location is my hall. The fourth location is my veranda. Another location is my bathroom. Let’s say I am memorizing a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a pair of words, make a story out of them and place them in a location. And I take the next two words. I make a story out of them. I place them in the second location. The memory palace will help you to remember the sequence.
Q. How much can these rooms hold?
A lot. Let’s say I’m memorizing 100 words. I’m making a story out of every two words. There will be a set of 50 stories. But I cannot remember which one came first or which one came second. So that would be a problem, right? So if I use the memory palace, I can easily remember which came first and which came second. So likewise, I can remember all of the 50 stories easily.
Q.: Can you describe one of the challenges in the Memory League World Championship?
They give you 80 random numbers that they display on a screen. You have to memorize all of those numbers as fast as possible, then click a button and a recall sheet appears. I wrote down all of the 80 digits — and I got them all right. My fastest time to memorize 80 random digits in this World Championship was 13.5 seconds, so almost six digits per second.
Q. Do you realize how amazing this is?
Yes, I do. I was crying.
Q. What’s Next?
After my completion of college, like in two to three months, I’ll probably try to be a memory trainer and create a memory institution in India to teach other people these techniques. My goal is to make it big.