7 Brain Hacks ‘Memory-Hackers’ Use To Remember Anything

And what you can steal today from these Mental-Athletes.

Did you know there are memory athletes who compete in memory Olympics? Apexes of mental athleticism. They can do impressive but erroneous feats like memorising thousands of sequential cards. There’s a fun book on the subject, Walking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. I loved it.

Anyway, not everyone wants to recall 4140 binary digits. Most of us just want to stop forgetting important stuff. Like names, people and new things we’re learning. So how do memory athletes master their brains?

Here are 7 Brain hacks they use. I’ve saved the best for last, but it won’t make sense unless you read the rest.

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1. Space — Memory athletes make spatial references for everything. They turn numbers and facts into locations in their mind (memory palaces)

NEUROSCIENCE: We have ‘place’ and ‘grid’ cells in our brain, which work like a GPS. Our brain likes to think in images and spaces. Spatial references leverage this innate neural structure.

WHY: These cells allow us to navigate the world, they exist in other mammals. Without…