Anyone can teach themselves to have a memory the size of a champion, a study shows.
Scans found ordinary members of the public had brains as sharp as the world's greatest memorisers after a simple brain training course using 'memory palaces'.
It means the ability to perform astonishing feats - such as remembering lists of several dozen words - can be learned, say scientists.
After 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous practise more than doubled their capacity.
Individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous memory training went from recalling an average list of 26 words to remembering 62, researchers report in Neuron.
Four months later, without continued training, recall performance remained high.
Brain scans showed that memory training actually altered the brain functions of the trainees.
'After training we see massively increased performance on memory tests,' says first author Martin Dresler, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
'Not only can you induce a behavioral change, the training also induces similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in memory athletes.'
Dr Dresler examined the brains of 23 world-class memory athletes and 23 people similar in age, health status, and intelligence but with typical memory skills.
Using structural MRI he measured differences in brain sizes.
He found there was no difference in brain anatomy between memory champions and normal people.
The differences they detected were in the connectivity patterns spread across the 2,500 different connectors in the brain.
Memory athletes are not born with different brains.
'They, without a single exception, trained for months and years using mnemonic strategies to achieve these high levels of performance,' Dr Dresler says.
In this study, the strategy Dr Dresler chose was memory of loci training.
Using this strategy, items on a list are associated with a remembered place, and users navigate that remembered place as they recall the list.
‘Loci’ is Latin for ‘places’. If you want to remember a shopping list, for example, you imagine putting all the items in specific locations in a familiar place, such as your living room.
'They, without a single exception, trained for months and years using mnemonic strategies to achieve these high levels of performance,' Dr Dresler says.
In this study, the strategy Dr Dresler chose was memory of loci training.
Using this strategy, items on a list are associated with a remembered place, and users navigate that remembered place as they recall the list.
‘Loci’ is Latin for ‘places’. If you want to remember a shopping list, for example, you imagine putting all the items in specific locations in a familiar place, such as your living room.
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