Memorable

Every now and then, you meet someone who remembers your name from last year's conference. I'm usually amazed, since I cannot move from the living room (first phone) to the office upstairs (second phone) without either writing down the number that I do, really do, wish to remember, or walking like a mad, broken record, reciting it alound all the way to the next keyboard, which I normally reach safely, if nobody interrupts me. But then... Oxford is a strange place.

Kia (my brainy neuroscientist wife) has taught Ed Cooke, a memory grandmaster and a former undergradaute at New College.

Before Ed, I knew absolutely nothing about World Memory Championships.
When I came across Ed, it was like meeting someone from Mars. It's simply extraordinary.

I cannot remember a telephone number but Ed, who was number 7 during the WMC in 2007, can memorise, for example, the order of a shuffled deck of cards in under 45 seconds, a 1,200 digit number in an hour and a sequence of 155 words in fifteen minutes.

Watch him here reciting the extension of PI.

There are people who can do things one cannot even try. But because we have no sense of what it means to do it, we are less astonished. When someone has a memory like Ed's, since we know what it is like to keep a few things in mind (badly), the comparison simply leaves you speechless. What it might mean for your life is a mistery.

Oh well, one thing is sure: I won't play poker with Ed.