Don’t Forget: You, Too, Can Acquire a Super Memory

Learning a memorization technique used by elite memory athletes

leads to widespread changes in brain wiring.
Scientific American | Catherine Caruso

Elite memory athletes are not so different from their peers in any other sport: They face off in
intense competitions where they execute seemingly superhuman feats such as memorizing a
string of 500 digits in five minutes. Most memory athletes credit their success to hours of
memorization-technique practice. One lingering question, though, is whether memory champs
succeed by practice alone or are somehow gifted. Research suggests there may be hope for the
rest of us. A study published in Neuron provides solid evidence that most people can
successfully learn and apply the memorization techniques used by memory champions while
triggering large-scale brain changes in the process.

A team led by Martin Dresler of Radboud University in the Netherlands used a combination of
behavioral tests and brain scans to compare memory champions with the general population. It
found that top memory athletes had a different pattern of brain connectivity than controls did but
also that subjects who learned a common technique over a period of weeks, not years, greatly
improved their memory skills and began to exhibit brain-connection patterns resembling those of
elite memorizers.

Many of us learn new skills throughout our lives, and scientists have long wondered if, and how,
our brain changes as a result. Previous research has linked some skills to specific changes. One
well-known set of studies showed that London taxi drivers developed more gray matter in their
hippocampus (a brain area linked to memory) as they acquired the knowledge needed to navigate
the city’s haphazard maze of streets. Dresler and his colleagues, motivated in part by co-author
and professional memory trainer Boris Konrad, decided to focus on elite memory athletes who
utilize techniques to compete at highly specific tasks such as memorizing decks of cards or lines
of binary digits in minutes. They wanted to know whether these highly skilled practitioners
exhibit noticeable brain changes and how those changes occur.

In the first part of the study the researchers matched 23 elite memory champions with control
subjects based on age, gender and IQ. Both groups underwent a series of brain scans, including
anatomical scans and functional MRI during a resting state—one in which subjects were not
doing anything—and during a memory task. The researchers found the memory champions did
not differ from the controls in any particular brain region but rather had different patterns of
brain connectivity during resting-state and task-based fMRI scans. To Dresler, these results
suggested “there’s not a sort of general hardware difference in memory champions that allows
them to reach these memory levels but that something subtler is going on,” which spurred the
team to investigate further.

Next, the researchers took 51 subjects who had never previously engaged in memory training
and divided them into an experimental group and two control groups. Experimental subjects
underwent six weeks of intense memory training for half an hour each day using the centuries-
old method of loci strategy still popular with memory champions: They learned how to map new
information such as numbers or names onto familiar spatial locations such as those in their
homes. The active control group trained for a working memory task called the n-back that does
not train long-term memory. Meanwhile the passive control group received no training.

After training, the experimental subjects improved significantly at memory tasks (whereas
neither control group improved) yet did not exhibit any structural brain changes. Their brain-
connection patterns during resting-state and task-based fMRI scans, however, became more
similar to those of memory champs, a change that correlated positively with memory
improvements. “I think the interesting part is that not only can you boost memory in a similar
way behaviorally in normal subjects compared with memory athletes,” Dresler says, “but on the
brain level you see a reflection of that behavioral increase, and you drive the brains of naive
subjects into the patterns of the best memorizers in the world.”

James McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved
in the study, considers it to be in a similar vein as the research on London taxi cabs but highlights
an important difference: rather than pinpointing a particular brain region, the study found an
overall change in brain connections. “All our brains are malleable all the time, and this is just
another piece of evidence of that,” he says. “If you learn something, and you learn it well, the
brain changes.”

For his U.C. Irvine colleague, Craig Stark, a professor of neurobiology and behavior who also
was not part the research, it represents “a really interesting contribution to the field.” Stark was
particularly impressed by the study’s clever experimental design, which he expects to be adopted
by researchers in other domains. He adds that the results align with the idea that our brain is
highly plastic and continuously changes and adapts. “This is showing that the act of going and
learning something new is changing your brain and changing the way you process things, which
will change the way you actually see the world,” he says.

This article was originally published on March 9, 2017, by Scientific American, and is
republished here with permission.