A journalist trained his memory for a year and won the US championship

Joshua Foer attended the 2005 USA Memory Championship as a journalist. He watched competitors memorize the order of shuffled card decks, strings of random digits, and the names of hundreds of strangers — feats that looked like magic from the outside. When he talked to the competitors, they told him the techniques were ancient, learnable, and available to anyone.

The core method is called the memory palace, or the method of loci. You choose a familiar building — your childhood home, a walk you take every day — and mentally place vivid, bizarre images of whatever you're trying to remember at specific locations along a route. When you need to recall, you walk the route again in your mind. The stranger and more sensory the image, the more durably it sticks.

Foer spent a year training under the guidance of Ed Cooke, a British memory competitor. In 2006, he returned to the US Memory Championship and won. His account, Moonwalking with Einstein, is partly a sports narrative, partly a history of memory techniques that trace back to ancient Greece.

The conclusion he reaches is that memory isn't a fixed trait. It's a skill — specifically, the skill of turning abstract information into images the brain already knows how to keep. What we call a bad memory is often just an untrained one.