{"id":13312,"date":"2020-08-24T17:28:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T21:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=13312"},"modified":"2020-08-31T12:20:19","modified_gmt":"2020-08-31T16:20:19","slug":"the-world-memory-championships","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/the-world-memory-championships\/","title":{"rendered":"The World Memory Championships and Joshua Foer"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What are the World Memory Championships? How did author Joshua Foer get to the World Memory Championships in his book Moonwalking With Einstein<\/em>? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Memory Championship is a multi-day competition with ten memorization events. <\/strong>Moonwalking With Einstein <\/em>chronicles the journey of journalist Joshua Foer, as he trained with top mnemonists and eventually competed in the US Memory Championship<\/a> and the World Memory Championships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading to find out more about The World Memory Championships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The 2005 World Memory Championship<\/strong>s<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Josh convinced Discover <\/em>magazine to send him to the World Memory Championship in Oxford, England. Josh stayed with Ed and his family, who would have preferred if Ed had become a lawyer instead of a mnemonist<\/a>. Ed took a leave of absence from grad school, and his plans to start the Oxford Mind Academy with Lukas had temporarily fallen through, as Lukas had injured himself in a fire-breathing accident.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Memory Championship takes place over three days, and there are ten events, including memorizing lists of words, numbers, decks of cards, dates, faces, and names.<\/strong> Some of the events have a time component\u2014how much can competitors memorize in five minutes or an hour?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everyone dreads the poem-memorizing event, in which you have to memorize\u2014down to the punctuation and capitalization\u2014as many lines of an unpublished poem as possible in fifteen minutes. Then, you have half an hour to write down what you\u2019ve memorized. People had lobbied to get rid of this event, but historically, poetry was viewed as humanizing and creative, and the art of memorization started with poetry. Ted Hughes wrote the poem for the competition for many years, but Buzan took over after Hughes\u2019s death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The international competitors were much more serious than those at the US championship. The US competitors talked to each other before events, while the Europeans ignored each other or juggled to warm up their minds. The World Championship records were also far more impressive than the US ones. Americans are like the Jamaican bobsled team of the memory community\u2014friendly and cheerful, but lagging behind in terms of practice and technique.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The World Memory Championship<\/strong>s<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Because Josh had won the national championship and was officially a memory champ, he would act as the US representative at the World Memory Championship. At worlds, he\u2019d be competing against Ed, Ben, and Gunther. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Josh knew he was out of his league. He had hoped to finish in the top ten and become a grand master of memory<\/a>, but he finished 13th and missed the grandmaster standard in a few events. His top event was names and faces, in which he came third. He expected he did so well because the names were ethnically diverse, and coming from the US, he was used to non-European names. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clemens Mayer won the championship. Ed won silver in the hour cards and spoken digits events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KL7 Initiation<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

After the World Memory Championships, Ed invited Josh to join the KL7. The initiation includes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n