Lessons from Americas First Memory World

Champion
By Chris Day on 27/05/2016 in Uncategorized

By Ian Frisch
Before Alex Mullen competed inand wonthe World Memory Championships, this past
December, no American had ever placed higher than seventh. Photograph by Jonno Rattman for
The New Yorker
On the Saturday before Mothers Day, Alex Mullen, the countrys top-ranked memory athlete,
joined his parents and grandmother for dinner at a restaurant near his grandmothers home, in
Easton, Pennsylvania. Earlier that day, Mullen had been in Hershey, Pennsylvania, ninety miles
west of Easton, where he had competed in the U.S.A. Memory Championship and set two new
national records, in speed cards and speed numbers. To set the speed-numbers record, he had
memorized more than five hundred and fifty sequenced digits in five minutes.

As the family lingered at the table after the meal, Mullen

challenged his grandmother to memorize a list of ten words. He rattled them off for her: cherry,
coffee, flower, candy cane, scarecrow, dragon, pasta sauce, Coke can, ghost, and Hersheys
Kiss.
Im not doing thatI cant do that! she protested. He assured her that she could. All she had to
do was create a memory palacea familiar spatial setting, full of recognizable details, in which
image-based associations of the information being memorized could be placed in a unique and
hopefully unforgettable fashion. Alex told his grandmother to imagine walking through her house.
Put a cherry at your front door, a bunch of coffee grinds all over your couch, he told her. Make
your kitchen table a flower. She retraced her steps through her memory palace, working through
the clues Mullen had placed there. On her first try, she recited back eight of the ten words on
Mullens list.
No one is going to remember a random number or a random list of words, Mullen told me. Its
really all about taking things that dont make any sense and giving them some sort of strong
visual meaning. People are much better at remembering those sorts of things.
Mullen is twenty-four years old and six foot one, with yardstick-wide shoulders and close-cropped
hair. He wouldnt look out of place on a college lacrosse team. He first learned about advanced
memory techniques in 2013, during his junior year at Johns Hopkins, when he read the book
Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer, in which Foer chronicled his experiences as a
memory athlete.
I think he saw it as a nice distraction from school, his father told me. It was a healthy break, to
let his mind go. Mullen began practicing competition-style memory tasks during his senior year,
and in March 2014 he entered his first national competition, the U.S.A. Memory Championship,
where he placed second. After college, Mullen enrolled in medical school at the University of
Mississippi, and began applying memory techniques to his studies, while continuing to practice
for competition. I started falling in love with the challengegetting faster, he said. Something
nagged at Mullen, though. He noticed that whenever he was forced to take time off from
practicingeven if it was just a few dayshis skills would dull. I was not into the idea of losing
progress, so I just never stopped, he said. It became kind of an addiction. In the spring of 2015,
he competed in his second U.S.A. Memory Championship, the Extreme Memory Tournament,
and the Memory Athletes Association U.S. Memory Open. He placed fourth in all three
tournaments.
Earlier this month, Mullen broke both domestic and international records in speed cards,
memorizing the order of a deck in 18.65 seconds. Photograph by Jonno Rattman for The New
Yorker
By last summer, Mullen was practicing more advanced memorization techniques. One technique,
called the Major System, builds on the mental-palace structure by incorporating a phonetic code:
every number is translated into either a specific letter or sound. Seven is a guh sound. Three is
an muh sound. Two is a nuh sound. Guh, muh, nuh, Mullen explained. You sort of just
squeeze those together and make some sort of word that has those consonant sounds. For me,
seven-three-two turns into gaming. So seven-three-two is a gaming control, like an Xbox
controller. Thats how I go from seven-three-two to the Xbox controller. Using the Major System,
Mullen has chosen visual objects to represent any three-digit combination. Six-two-seven is John
Goodman. Six-six-six is a trumpet spewing out smoke. The list goes on. During competitions,
Mullen places these visual objects in his mental palaces: either his parents home, in Oxford,
Mississippi, his college dorm room, or various spots on his medical-school campus. Within each
mental palace are specific locations, called loci, which memory athletes use to increase accuracy
and distinguish order. Loci can be simple things: the brick steps leading to a houses front door,
the mudroom bench, the couch in the living room. If Mullen wants to memorize a sheet of five
hundred numbers, and the first six digits run 627666, he can place John Goodman playing a
smoke-spewing trumpet on one of these loci and move on. The same method can be used to
memorize the order of playing cards, or anything else.
This past December, Mullen travelled to Chengdu, China, for the World Memory Championships.
He and his wife, Cathy Chen, who was also in medical school at the University of Mississippi, had
taken their end of semester exams early to make the trip. We each took two exams on Monday,
two on Tuesday, and then packed all night, Chen said. At three in the morning I gave him a
haircut. He took a shower and I made some pasta and we went straight to the airport. Mullen
arrived in China with a growing reputation on the memory circuit, but no one expected him to win
the tournament. International memory competitions have for years been dominated by memory
athletes from England and Germany (and, more recently, Sweden and China), and no American
had ever placed higher than seventh at the world championships.
But as the competitionten events held over three daysgot under way, Mullen quickly leapt
into second place on the leaderboard, and stayed there. He broke one world record by
memorizing three thousand and twenty-nine digits in an hour, as well as the U.S. records for
cards memorized in an hour (twenty-eight decks and four cards), binary code memorized in thirty
minutes (three thousand eight hundred and eighty-five digits), and abstract images in fifteen
minutes (five hundred and five shapes). The crowd was stunned. An American was making a run
for it.
The final event of the tournament was speed cardsMullens specialty. Mullen needed to
memorize a deck in under twenty-three seconds to win the whole tournament. He did it in 21.5
seconds, becoming the first American world champion in the history of the sport and taking home
the forty-thousand-dollar grand prizethirty-two thousand after taxes, he told mealso the
sports largest prize to date.
After his showing in Chengdu, Mullen was arguably the best memory athlete in the world.
(Because of a quirk in the scoring system, he is currently ranked second in the world by the World
Memory Sports Council.) He had some decisions to make. He was two years into medical school,
but he was tempted to try his luck in the world of applied memory techniques. I wanted to put
more effort into it and try to do speaking engagements and build coaching opportunities and try to
promote the techniques specifically for learning applications rather than competition, Mullen said.
Other memory-blessed individuals have made lucrative careers out of their particular skills. Ron
White, who won the U.S.A. Memory Championship in 2009 and 2010, for example, gives
presentations on memory to dozens of corporate clients a year, and charges a speaking fee of
twelve thousand dollars. Did Mullen want that kind of life?
His wife helped him put together a Web site and film tutorials, and they decided that, after the
spring term ended, they would both take a year off from school to devote themselves to the
memory business as a team. Medical school wasnt going anywhere. Plus, all this memory stuff
made Mullen happy. (Chen also wanted to put time into Read Record Replay, a nonprofit she
founded focussed on child illiteracy.) This is really the only opportunity we have to take time off
to try this out, Mullen said. Its basically now or never.
Mullens year off began earlier this month, when he flew to Pennsylvania for the U.S.A. Memory
Championship. He caught an early break when the reigning champion, Nelson Dellis, opted out of
the contest so that he could climb Mount Everest. That made things easier for me, Mullen said.
The tournament, held on May 7th at a hotel convention center, was split into two sessions. Four
events would be held in the morning: names and faces, speed numbers, poetry recall, and speed
cards. The top nine competitors from the morning would then advance to a three-event afternoon
session. In the morning, Mullen won names and faces, speed numbers, and speed cards. In
speed cards, he broke both domestic and international records, memorizing the order of a deck in
18.65 seconds. The second-place finisher took one minute and fifty-two seconds.
The afternoon round offered a twist. Instead of writing out the material theyd memorized, the
athletes would recite the information aloud, onstage, in front of an audience. Sitting in a row of
chairs, the finalists would take turns reciting the information. If their turn came and they flubbed
something, theyd be eliminated from the competition.
In the first round, the athletes were asked to recall a list of two hundred words. Four competitors
were eliminated, and Mullen survived. For the second round, a tea party, six actors came on the
stage and listed fictional facts about themselves, including their names, home towns, phone
numbers, birthdays, favorite foods, favorite hobbies, and favorite pets. The remaining five athletes
were then asked to recall certain facts about each of the actors. Two more competitors came up
short.
In the final round, the remaining three athletesMullen, a forty-six-year-old dentist from
Tennessee, and a high-school student from Hersheywere asked to memorize two decks of
cards. The competitors were then asked, one at a time, to name the next card in the sequence.
The high-school student was eliminated about thirty cards in. The dentist got to the seventy-fifth
card before making a mistakeit was not the jack of diamonds. Mullen provided the correct
answer: Seven of clubs. As the judge declared him the winner, Mullen lingered in his mental
palace. It was his college rec center, back at Johns Hopkins. He closed his eyes and took a
second look at the image that had brought him to victory: the Notorious B.I.G., sitting on a
television, holding the skull of his worst enemy.
Ian Frisch is a journalist and editor in Brooklyn.