Moonwalking With Einstein Part 7

To take him up on his offer, I had to pa.s.s through a metal detector and have my bag searched by a police officer before entering the Gompers school building. Matthews believes that the art of memory will be his students' ticket out of a neighborhood where nine out of ten students are below average in reading and math, four out of five are living in poverty, and nearly half don't graduate from high school. "The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate," he told them, while I sat in the back of his cla.s.sroom. "Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?"

I listened to one student recite verbatim an entire paragraph from Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness to answer a question about nineteenth-century global commerce. "When it comes time to do the AP test, he'll pull out a quote like that," said Matthews, a dapper dresser with a goatee, closely cropped hair, and a thick Bronx accent. Every in-cla.s.s essay his students write must contain at least two memorized quotations, just one of many small feats of memory that he demands from them. After school, his students come back for an extracurricular cla.s.s in memorization techniques. to answer a question about nineteenth-century global commerce. "When it comes time to do the AP test, he'll pull out a quote like that," said Matthews, a dapper dresser with a goatee, closely cropped hair, and a thick Bronx accent. Every in-cla.s.s essay his students write must contain at least two memorized quotations, just one of many small feats of memory that he demands from them. After school, his students come back for an extracurricular cla.s.s in memorization techniques.

"It's the difference between only teaching a kid multiplication and giving him a calculator," Matthews says of the memory skills he imparts to them. Not surprisingly, every single member of the Talented Tenth has pa.s.sed the Regents exam each of the last four years, and 85 percent of them have scored a 90 or better. Matthews has won two citywide Teacher of the Year awards.

Students in the Talented Tenth must wear s.h.i.+rts and ties, and occasionally, at school a.s.semblies, white gloves. Their cla.s.sroom is plastered with posters of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. When they graduate, they receive a kente cloth with the words "Talented Tenth" embossed in gold. At the beginning of each cla.s.s, the Talented Tenth stand behind their desks, arranged in a pair of facing aisles, and recite in unison a three-minute manifesto from memory that begins: "We are the very best our community has to offer. We will not get lower than 95 percent on any history exam. We are the vanguard of our people. Either walk with our glory and rise to the top with us, or step aside. For when we get to the top, we will reach back and raise you up with us."

The forty-three kids in Matthews's cla.s.s are all honors students who had to pa.s.s a high bar just to get selected for the Talented Tenth. And Matthews works his students hard. "We don't get no vacations," one of them complained to me, while Matthews was standing close enough to overhear. "You work now so you can rest later," he told the student. "You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later."

The success of Matthews's students raises questions about the purposes of education that are as old as schooling itself, and never seem to go away. What does it mean to be intelligent, and what exactly is it that schools are supposed to be teaching? As the role of memory in the conventional sense has diminished, what should its place be in contemporary pedagogy? Why bother loading up kids' memories with facts if you're ultimately preparing them for a world of externalized memories?

In my own elementary and secondary education, at both public and private schools, I can recall being made to memorize exactly three texts: the Gettysburg Address in third grade, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech in fourth grade, and Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" soliloquy in tenth. That's it. The only activity more ant.i.thetical than memorization to the ideals of modern education is corporal punishment.

The slow disappearance of cla.s.sroom memorization had its philosophical roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's polemical 1762 novel, emile: Or, On Education emile: Or, On Education, in which the Swiss philosopher imagined a fictional child raised by means of a "natural education," learning only through self-experience. Rousseau abhorred memorization, as well as just about every other stricture of inst.i.tutional education. "Reading is the great plague of childhood," he wrote. The traditional curriculum, he believed, was little more than fatuous "heraldry, geography, chronology and language."

The educational ideology that Rousseau rebelled against truly was mind-numbing, and much in need of correction. More than a hundred years after emile emile's publication, when the muckraker Dr. Joseph Mayer Rice toured public schools in thirty-six cities, he came away appalled at what he saw, calling one New York City school "the most dehumanizing inst.i.tution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul." At the turn of the twentieth century, rote memorization was still the preferred way to put information, especially history and geography, into kids' heads. Students could be expected to memorize poetry, great speeches, historical dates, times tables, Latin vocabulary, state capitals, the order of American presidents, and much else.

Memorization drills weren't just about transferring information from teacher to student; they were actually thought to have a constructive effect on kids' brains that would benefit them throughout their lives. Rote drills, it was thought, built up the faculty of memory. The what what that was memorized mattered, but so too did the mere fact that the memory was being exercised. The same was thought to be true of Latin, which at the turn of the twentieth century was taught to nearly half of all American high school students. Educators were convinced that learning the extinct language, with its countless grammatical niceties and difficult conjugations, trained the brain in logical thinking and helped build "mental discipline." Tedium was actually seen as a virtue. And the teachers were backed up by a popular scientific theory known as "faculty psychology," which held that the mind consisted of a handful of specific mental "faculties" that could each individually be trained, like muscles, through rigorous exercise. that was memorized mattered, but so too did the mere fact that the memory was being exercised. The same was thought to be true of Latin, which at the turn of the twentieth century was taught to nearly half of all American high school students. Educators were convinced that learning the extinct language, with its countless grammatical niceties and difficult conjugations, trained the brain in logical thinking and helped build "mental discipline." Tedium was actually seen as a virtue. And the teachers were backed up by a popular scientific theory known as "faculty psychology," which held that the mind consisted of a handful of specific mental "faculties" that could each individually be trained, like muscles, through rigorous exercise.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a group of leading psychologists began to question the empirical basis of "faculty psychology." In his 1890 book Principles of Psychology, Principles of Psychology, William James set out to see "whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry." He spent more than two hours over eight successive days memorizing the first 158 lines of the Victor Hugo poem "Satyr," averaging fifty seconds a line. With that baseline established, James set about memorizing the entire first book of William James set out to see "whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry." He spent more than two hours over eight successive days memorizing the first 158 lines of the Victor Hugo poem "Satyr," averaging fifty seconds a line. With that baseline established, James set about memorizing the entire first book of Paradise Lost Paradise Lost. When he returned to Hugo, he found that his memorization time had actually declined to fifty-seven seconds a line. Practicing memorization had made him worse at it, not better. It was just a single data point, but subsequent studies by the psychologist Edward Thorndike and his colleague Robert S. Woodworth also questioned whether "the general ability to memorize" was influenced by practice memorizing, and found only minor gains. They concluded that the ancillary benefits of "mental discipline" were "mythological" and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. "Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike's experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum," writes the historian of education Diane Ravitch.

Into this void rushed a group of progressive educators led by the American philosopher John Dewey, who began making the case for a new kind of education that would radically break with the constricted curriculum and methods of the past. They echoed Rousseau's romantic ideals of childhood, and put a new emphasis on "child centered" education. They did away with rote memorization and replaced it with a new kind of "experiential learning." Students would study biology not by memorizing plant anatomy from a textbook but by planting seeds and tending gardens. They'd learn arithmetic not through times tables but through baking recipes. Dewey declared, "I would have a child say not, 'I know,' but 'I have experienced.' "

The last century has been an especially bad one for memory. A hundred years of progressive education reform have discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying-not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain. Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking.

But is it possible we've been making a huge mistake? The influential critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. complained in 1987: "We cannot a.s.sume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture." Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can't even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what's needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. Hirsch's critics have pointed out that the curriculum he advocates is Dead White Males 101. But if anyone seems qualified to counter that argument it is Matthews, who maintains that for all the Eurocentrism of the curriculum, the fact is that facts still matter. If one of the goals of education is to create inquisitive, knowledgeable people, then you need to give students the most basic signposts that can guide them through a life of learning. And if, as the twelfth-century teacher Hugh of St. Victor put it, "the whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it," then you might as well give them the best tools available to commit their education to memory.

"I don't use the word 'memory' in my cla.s.s because it's a bad word in education," says Matthews. "You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and a.n.a.lyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning-you can't a.n.a.lyze-without retrieving information." And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between "learning" and "memorizing" is false, Matthews contends. You can't learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can't memorize without learning.

"Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person's physical health and well being," argues Buzan, who often sounds like an advocate of the old faculty psychology. "Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.

"The formal education system came out of the military, where the least educated and most educationally deprived people were sent into the army," he says. "In order for them not not to think, which is what you wanted them to do, they had to obey orders. Military training was extremely regimented and linear. You pounded the information into their brains and made them respond in a Pavlovian manner without thinking. Did it work? Yes. Did they enjoy the experience? No, they didn't. When the industrial revolution came, soldiers were needed on the machines, and so the military approach to education was transferred into school. It worked. But it doesn't work over the long term." to think, which is what you wanted them to do, they had to obey orders. Military training was extremely regimented and linear. You pounded the information into their brains and made them respond in a Pavlovian manner without thinking. Did it work? Yes. Did they enjoy the experience? No, they didn't. When the industrial revolution came, soldiers were needed on the machines, and so the military approach to education was transferred into school. It worked. But it doesn't work over the long term."

Like many of Buzan's pontifications, this one conceals a kernel of truth beneath an overlay of propaganda. Rote learning-the old "drill and kill" method that education reformers have spent the last century rebelling against-is surely as old as learning itself, but Buzan is right that the art of memory, once at the center of a cla.s.sical education, had all but disappeared by the nineteenth century.

Buzan's argument that schools have been teaching memory in entirely the wrong way deeply challenges reigning ideas in education, and is often couched in the language of revolution. In fact, though Buzan doesn't seem to see it this way, his ideas are not revolutionary so much as deeply conservative. His goal is to turn the clock back to a time when a good memory still counted for something.

Pinning down Tony Buzan for an interview is no easy task. He is on the road lecturing roughly nine months of the year, and boasts of having racked up enough frequent-flier miles to go to the moon and back eight times. What's more, he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru. When I finally corralled him behind a desk at the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p to discuss the possibility of our sitting down for a couple hours, he opened a large three-ring binder and unfurled a colorful panoramic chart, perhaps three feet long. It was his calendar from the previous year, and it was filled with expansive, continuous blocks of travel-Spain, China, Mexico three times, Australia, America. There was one three-month period when he didn't set foot in the United Kingdom. He told me that he absolutely didn't have any time to speak with me for at least three or four weeks (by which time I would be back home in the United States), but he suggested I visit his estate halfway to Oxford on the river Thames and take some photographs while he was away. for an interview is no easy task. He is on the road lecturing roughly nine months of the year, and boasts of having racked up enough frequent-flier miles to go to the moon and back eight times. What's more, he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru. When I finally corralled him behind a desk at the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p to discuss the possibility of our sitting down for a couple hours, he opened a large three-ring binder and unfurled a colorful panoramic chart, perhaps three feet long. It was his calendar from the previous year, and it was filled with expansive, continuous blocks of travel-Spain, China, Mexico three times, Australia, America. There was one three-month period when he didn't set foot in the United Kingdom. He told me that he absolutely didn't have any time to speak with me for at least three or four weeks (by which time I would be back home in the United States), but he suggested I visit his estate halfway to Oxford on the river Thames and take some photographs while he was away.

I told him I didn't see how I was likely to learn very much from an empty house.

"Oh, you'd learn quite a lot," he said.

Eventually, through his a.s.sistant, I was able to fix an hour with Buzan in his limousine on his way home from the BBC studios in London, where he had just wrapped up a TV interview. I was told to go to a street corner in Whitehall and wait. "You won't be able to miss Mr. Buzan's car."

There was, in fact, no missing it. The car, which pulled up about half an hour late, was a bright ivory 1930s taxicab that looked like it might have just been driven off a BBC set. The door flew open. "Step inside," said Buzan, beckoning. "Welcome to my small, traveling, beautiful lounge."

The first subject we spoke about, because I had to ask, was his unique wardrobe.

"I designed it myself," he told me. He was wearing the same unusual dark navy suit with the large gold b.u.t.tons that I'd seen him in at the U.S. champions.h.i.+p months earlier. "I used to lecture in an offthe-peg suit, but I was tugging at it with my expansive gestures," he told me. "So I studied fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century swordfighters, and how their arms had not one iota of resistance from their wardrobes. Those ruffles and big sleeves weren't just for show. They were for thrusting and parrying. I design my s.h.i.+rts so that I, too, am free to move."

Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression. He never swallows a syllable or slouches. His fingernails are as well cared for as the leather of his Italian shoes. There is always a pocket handkerchief tucked neatly in his breast pocket. He signs his letters "Floreant Dendritae!"-"May Your Brain Cells Flouris.h.!.+"-and ends his phone messages "Tony Buzan, over and out!"

When I asked him about the source of his incredible self-confidence, he told me that he owes much of it to his extensive training in the martial arts. He has a black belt in aikido and is three quarters of his way to a black belt in karate. Sitting in the backseat of his limo, he demonstrated a series of jerky moves, a slice through the air, and a shadow punch. "The way I use these techniques is by not using them," he said. "What's the point of fighting if you know you can kill the other, i.e. human, or you can take out his eye, or rip out his tongue?"

Buzan is-he often found occasion to remind me-a modern Renaissance man: a student of dance ("ballroom, modern, jazz"), a composer (influences: "Philip Gla.s.s, Beethoven, Elgar"), an author of short stories about animals (under the nom de plume Mowgli, after the boy in The Jungle Book The Jungle Book), a poet (his last collection, Concordea Concordea, consists entirely of poems written on and about his thirty-eight transatlantic flights aboard the supersonic Concorde), and a designer (not just of his wardrobe, but also of his home and much of the furniture in it).

About forty-five minutes outside of London, our ivory chariot pulled into Buzan's estate on the river Thames. He asked that I not name its location in print. "Just call it Wind in the Willows Wind in the Willows territory." territory."

Inside his home, named the Gates of Dawn, we took off our shoes and tiptoed around a collection of drawings that had been laid out across the floor, part of an ill.u.s.trated children's book that he was working on "about a little boy who doesn't do well in school, but does very well in his imagination." There was a large television set with at least a hundred VHS tapes scattered about it, and a bookshelf in the foyer that held the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, several copies of the sci-fi thriller Dune Dune, three copies of the Quran, a large quant.i.ty of books auth.o.r.ed by Buzan, and not much else.

"Is this your library?" I asked.

"I'm only here three months of the year. I have libraries in several other places around the world," he said.

Buzan revels in travel, and in being a man of the world. Once, when I asked him where he's able to find the concentration to turn out two or three books a year, he told me that he has found serene spots to work on almost every continent. "In Australia at the Great Barrier Reef, I write. In Europe, wherever there are oceans, I write. In Mexico, I write. At the Great West Lake in China, I write." Buzan has been traveling since he was a young boy. He was born in London in 1942, but moved with his brother and parents-his mother was a legal stenographer, his father an electrical engineer-to Vancouver at age eleven. He was, he says, "basically a normal kid, in normal trouble, in normal schools."

"My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry," Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sungla.s.ses protecting his eyes. "He was always in the 1-D cla.s.ses, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like 'Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.' There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces' cla.s.s, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew-much more than I knew-in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one.

"And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn't know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn't, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you're smart? Who says you're not smart? And what do they mean by that?" Those questions, at least according to Buzan's tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college.

Buzan's introduction to the art of memory, the moment that set his entire life on its present path, came, he explained, in the first minutes of his first cla.s.s on the first day of his first year at the University of British Columbia. His English professor, a dour man "built like a very short wrestler with red tufts of hair on his otherwise bald head" walked into the cla.s.s and proceeded, with his hands behind his back, to call out the roll of students perfectly. "Whenever someone was absent, he told off their name, their father's name, their mother's name, their date of birth, phone number, and address," recalls Buzan. "And as soon as he'd done it, he looked at us with a sneer on his face. That was the beginning of my love affair with memory."

After cla.s.s, Buzan charged down the hall after his professor. "I said, 'Professor, how did you do that?' He turned to me and he said, 'Son, I'm a genius.' So I said, 'Sir, that is obvious. But I still want to know how you did it.' He simply said, 'No.' Every day we had English for the next three months, I tested him. I felt he had the Holy Grail, and he wouldn't share it. He despised his students. He thought they were a waste of time. Then one day he said, 'In the beginning of this miserable relations.h.i.+p between myself and yourselves, I demonstrated the exquisite power of human memory and none of you even noticed, so I'm now going to put on the board the code by which I managed to accomplish that extraordinary feat, and I am utterly convinced that none of you will even recognize the treasures put before you-these pearls before swine.' He winked at me and he put up the code. It was the Major System. Suddenly, I realized I could memorize anything."

Buzan left cla.s.s that day in a trance. It occurred to him, for the first time, that he had not even the most basic idea about how the complicated machinery of his mind worked. And that seemed odd. If the simplest memory trick could dramatically increase the amount of information a person could remember, and n.o.body had bothered to teach him that trick until he was twenty years old, what else was there that he'd never learned?

"I went to the library and I said, 'I want a book on how to use my brain.' The librarian sent me to the medical section, and I came back and said, 'I don't want a book on how to operate on on my brain. I want a book on how to operate it. Slightly different.' She said, 'Oh, there are no books on that.' I thought, you get an operations manual on your car, your radio, your TV, but no operations manual on the human brain?" In search of something that might elucidate his professor's feat of memory, Buzan found himself drawn to the library's ancient history section, where his professor had suggested he might find some of the original ideas about improving memory. He began reading up on Greek and Roman mnemonics (in Buzan's p.r.o.nunciation, the M is not silent), and practicing the techniques in his spare time. It wasn't long before he was using the my brain. I want a book on how to operate it. Slightly different.' She said, 'Oh, there are no books on that.' I thought, you get an operations manual on your car, your radio, your TV, but no operations manual on the human brain?" In search of something that might elucidate his professor's feat of memory, Buzan found himself drawn to the library's ancient history section, where his professor had suggested he might find some of the original ideas about improving memory. He began reading up on Greek and Roman mnemonics (in Buzan's p.r.o.nunciation, the M is not silent), and practicing the techniques in his spare time. It wasn't long before he was using the Ad Herennium Ad Herennium's advice about loci and images to study for exams-even to memorize all his notes from entire courses.

After graduating from college, Buzan went on to work a collection of odd jobs in Canada, first as a farmer ("I thought I'd take that job just to have 'shoveling s.h.i.+t' at the top of my CV"), then in construction. In 1966, the same year that Frances Yates published The Art of Memory The Art of Memory, the first major modern academic work to delve into the rich history of mnemonics, Buzan returned to London to become the editor of Intelligence Intelligence , the international journal of Mensa, the high-IQ society, which he had joined in college. Around the same time, he was hired by the city to work as a subst.i.tute teacher at difficult inner-city schools in East London. "I was a special have-brain-will-travel teacher," he says. "If a teacher got beaten up, I was the next one into that cla.s.sroom." , the international journal of Mensa, the high-IQ society, which he had joined in college. Around the same time, he was hired by the city to work as a subst.i.tute teacher at difficult inner-city schools in East London. "I was a special have-brain-will-travel teacher," he says. "If a teacher got beaten up, I was the next one into that cla.s.sroom."

In most cases, Buzan had just a short amount of time with each of the cla.s.ses he was subbing for, a few days at most, and hardly enough for even the most well-intentioned teacher to believe he could make any difference. In search of ways to help his troubled students, and perhaps rub off a bit of his own abundant self-confidence on them, Buzan turned to the old memory techniques he had first learned in college. "I would go into the cla.s.sroom and ask the students whether they were stupid or not, because everyone had been calling them stupid, and sadly they believed they were stupid," says Buzan. "They had been inculcated with the idea of their own incapacity. I said, 'OK, let's check it out,' and I'd give them a memory test, which they'd fail. I'd say, 'Seems you're right about being stupid.' Then I'd teach them a memory technique, and then I'd retest them, and they'd get twenty out of twenty. Then I'd basically say, 'You told me you were stupid, you proved you were stupid, and then you just got a perfect score on a test.' So I'd get them to question: What's going on here? For some of the students who'd never gotten a perfect score on an exam, this was quite a revelation."

Having the opportunity not only to practice the art of memory but also now to teach it allowed Buzan to start developing the old techniques in new directions, particularly when it came to note taking. Over the course of several years, he created what he believed was a completely new system for taking notes that took advantage of the ancient wisdom of the Ad Herennium. Ad Herennium.

"I was trying to get to the essence-the queen's jelly-of what note taking was all about," he says. "That led me to codes and symbols, images and arrows, underlining and color." Buzan called his new system Mind Mapping, a term he later trademarked. One creates a Mind Map by drawing lines off main points to subsidiary points, which branch out further to tertiary points, and so on. Ideas are distilled into as few words as possible and whenever possible are ill.u.s.trated with images. It's a kind of outline, exploded radially across the page in a rainbow of colors, a web of a.s.sociations that looks like a p.r.i.c.kly bush, or a neuron's branching dendrites. And because it is full of colorful images arranged in order across the page, it functions as a kind of memory palace scrawled on paper.

"In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory." If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making a.s.sociations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the G.o.ddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment. is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.

This is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a wellfurnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly a.s.sociated in the Middles Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them-as all crafts are used-to make make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems." new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems."

In 1973, the BBC caught wind of Buzan's work on Mind Mapping and mnemonics and brought him in for a meeting with the network's head of education. The ten-program BBC series and accompanying book that came out of that meeting, both of which were t.i.tled Use Your Head Use Your Head, helped turn Buzan into a minor British celebrity and made him realize that there was enormous commercial potential in the memory techniques he was promoting. He began taking his ideas, many of which were borrowed directly from the ancient and medieval memory treatises, and repackaging them in a steady stream of self-help books. To date, he's published nearly 120 t.i.tles, including Use Your Perfect Memory Use Your Perfect Memory, Make the Most of Your Mind Make the Most of Your Mind, Use Both Sides of Your Brain Use Both Sides of Your Brain, Use Memory, Make the Most of Your Mind, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, Use Use Memory, Make the Most of Your Mind, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, Use Your Memory, and Your Memory, and Master Your Memory Master Your Memory. (At one point, I was alone with Buzan's chauffeur long enough to ask his opinion of his boss's work. "Same meat, different gravy" was his private a.s.sessment of Buzan's ouevre.) To his credit, Buzan is undeniably a marketing genius. He has established franchises of Buzan-licensed instructors all over the world who are trained to teach his memory enhancement, speed reading, and Mind Mapping courses. Today there are over three hundred Buzan-licensed instructors in more than sixty countries. And a thousand teachers around the world are officially teaching Buzan-endorsed memory systems. He estimates that over his entire career the gross sales of all Buzan products, including books, tapes, television programs, training courses, brain games, and lectures, exceeds $300 million.

The compet.i.tive memory community breaks cleanly into two camps: those who think Tony Buzan is the second coming of Jesus Christ and those who think he has gotten rich peddling overhyped, sometimes unscientific ideas about the brain. They point out, not unfairly, that while Buzan preaches a "global educational revolution," he has had far more success in creating a global commercial empire than in actually getting his methods into cla.s.srooms. community breaks cleanly into two camps: those who think Tony Buzan is the second coming of Jesus Christ and those who think he has gotten rich peddling overhyped, sometimes unscientific ideas about the brain. They point out, not unfairly, that while Buzan preaches a "global educational revolution," he has had far more success in creating a global commercial empire than in actually getting his methods into cla.s.srooms.

What is especially frustrating for folks like Ed, who take the art of memory seriously and believe in Tony Buzan's basic message that the art of memory still has a place in the modern cla.s.sroom, is that the messenger can often be a bit of an embarra.s.sment.

Buzan has a troubling habit of lapsing into pseudoscience and hyperbole when he describes how wonderfully revolutionary memory training can be, or how he has "changed the lives of millions." He's been known to say preposterous things, like "Very young children use 98 percent of all thinking tools. By the time they're 12, they use about 75 percent. By the time they're teenagers, they're down to 50 percent, by the time they're in university it's less than 25 percent, and it's less than 15 percent by the time they're in industry."

The fact that Buzan can go around making outrageous claims about the brain and not only be widely believed but actually celebrated is evidence of what a wild frontier the world of brain science is, and how much people want to believe that their memories are improvable. The truth is, the operating manual for the brain that Buzan went looking for in college still hasn't been written.

But for all the pseudoscience and hyperbole that Buzan employs in promoting Mind Mapping, there actually is scientific evidence that his systems work. Researchers at the University of London recently gave a group of students a six-hundred-word pa.s.sage to read, after teaching half of them how to take notes with a Mind Map. The other half were instructed to take notes normally. When they were tested a week later, the students who used Mind Maps retained about 10 percent more factual knowledge from the pa.s.sage than the students who used conventional note-taking techniques. That may be a modest gain, but it's hardly insignificant.

My own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note-taking, you can't Mind Map on autopilot. My sense is that it's a reasonably efficient way to brainstorm and organize information, but hardly the "ultimate mind-power tool" or "revolutionary system" that Buzan makes it out to be.

Raemon Matthews doesn't have any doubt about the effectiveness of Mind Maps or memory training. At the end of the year, each of his students creates an intricately detailed Mind Map of the entire U.S. history textbook. Most of the students' maps take up an entire three-panel science-fair board with arrows linking every word and image, from Plymouth Rock in one corner to Monica Lewinsky in the other. "If they get an essay question about the causes of World War I on their AP test, they can just see that part of the map in the mind, and the causes are right there," says Matthews. There might be an image of a black hand to represent the Serbian nationalist organization that Archduke Franz Ferdinand's a.s.sa.s.sin belonged to, next to a machine gun wearing running shoes, which represents the arms race that swept Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and beside that a pair of triangles to represent the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente.

Matthews takes every opportunity to turn facts into images. "My students were having a hard time getting their heads around the differences in the economic systems of Lenin and Stalin," he told me. "I told them, 'Look, Lenin is sitting on the toilet, and he's constipated because of his mixed economy. Stalin busts into the stall and says, "What are you doing in here?" And Lenin goes, "Land, peace, and bread." ' They never forgot that image."

A valid criticism of these sorts of mnemonics is that they are a form of decontextualized knowledge. They are superficial, the epitome of learning without understanding. This is education by PowerPoint, or worse, CliffsNotes. What can an image of Lenin and Stalin in the bathroom really tell you about communist economics? But Matthews's point is that you've got to start somewhere, and you might as well start by installing in students' minds the sorts of memories that are least likely to be forgotten.

When information goes "in one ear and out the other," it's often because it doesn't have anything to stick to. This is something I was personally confronted with not long ago, when I had the opportunity to visit Shanghai for three days while reporting an article. Somehow I had managed to scoot through two decades of schooling without ever learning even the most basic facts about Chinese history. I'd never learned the difference between Ming and Qing, or even that Kublai Khan was actually a real person. I spent my time in Shanghai roving around the city like any good tourist, visiting museums, trying to get a superficial grasp of Chinese history and culture. But my experience of the place was severely impoverished. There was so much I didn't take in, so much I was unable to appreciate, because I didn't have the basic facts to fasten other facts to. It wasn't just that I didn't know know, it was that I didn't have the ability to learn learn.

This paradox-it takes knowledge to gain knowledge-is captured in a study in which researchers wrote up a detailed description of a half inning of baseball and gave it to a group of baseball fanatics ("experts" is the term Ericsson would use) and a group of less avid fans to read. Afterward they tested how well their subjects could recall the half inning. The baseball fanatics structured their recollections around important game-related events, like runners advancing and runs scoring. They were able to reconstruct the half inning in sharp detail. One almost got the impression they were reading off an internal scorecard. The less avid fans remembered fewer important facts about the game and were more likely to recount superficial details like the weather. Because they lacked a detailed internal representation of the game, they couldn't process the information they were taking in. They didn't know what was important and what was trivial. They couldn't remember what mattered. Without a conceptual framework in which to embed what they were learning, they were effectively amnesics.

Could any less be said of those two thirds of American teens who don't have a clue when the Civil War occurred? Or the 20 percent who don't know who the United States fought against in World War II? Or the 44 percent who think that the subject of The Scarlet Letter The Scarlet Letter was either a witch trial or a piece of correspondence? Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it's also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture. was either a witch trial or a piece of correspondence? Progressive education reform has accomplished many things. It has made school a lot more pleasant, and a lot more interesting. But it's also brought with it costs for us as individuals and as citizens. Memory is how we transmit virtues and values, and partake of a shared culture.

Of course, the goal of education is not merely to cram a bunch of facts into students' heads; it's to lead them to understand those facts. n.o.body would agree with that more than Raemon Matthews. "I want thinkers, not just people who can repeat what I tell them," he says. But even if facts don't by themselves lead to understanding, you can't have understanding without facts. And crucially, the more you know, the easier it is to know more. Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches.

The people whose intellects I most admire always seem to have a fitting anecdote or germane fact at the ready. They're able to reach out across the breadth of their learning and pluck from distant patches. It goes without saying that intelligence is much, much more than mere memory (there are savants who remember much but understand little, just as surely as there are forgetful old professors who remember little but understand much), but memory and intelligence do seem to go hand in hand, like a muscular frame and an athletic disposition. There's a feedback loop between the two. The more tightly any new piece of information can be embedded into the web of information we already know, the more likely it is to be remembered. People who have more a.s.sociations to hang their memories on are more likely to remember new things, which in turn means they will know more, and be able to learn more. The more we remember, the better we are at processing the world. And the better we are at processing the world, the more we can remember about it.

TEN.

THE LITTLE RAIN MAN IN ALL OF US.

By February, a month before the U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p, my suspicions that I might actually have a chance of doing well in the compet.i.tion were beginning to be confirmed by my practice scores. In every event except the poem and speed numbers, my best practice scores were approaching the top marks of previous U.S. champions. Ed told me not to make too much of the fact. "You always do at least twenty percent worse under the lights," he said, repeating advice he'd given me many times before. Still, I was rather stunned by the progress I'd made. In practice, I'd even managed to memorize a deck of cards in one minute and fifty-five seconds, a second faster than the U.S. record. In that day's training log appears this note: "Maybe I could really win this thing?!" (Also, this inscrutable note: "Pay attention to DeVito's remaining hair!!") What had begun as an exercise in partic.i.p.atory journalism had become an obsession. I had set out simply wanting to learn what the strange world of the memory circuit was all about, and to find out if my memory was indeed improvable. That I might be in a position to really win the U.S. champions.h.i.+p seemed about as improbable as George Plimpton stepping into the ring with Archie Moore and actually knocking him out.

Everything I'd been told-by Ed, by Tony Buzan, by Anders Ericsson-suggested that my course of tedious training was the only way to achieve a more perfect memory. n.o.body comes into the world with an inborn ability to remember loads of random digits or poetry at a single glance, or take pictures with the mind.

And yet, combing through the literature, one comes across a few rare cases here and there-perhaps less than a hundred in the last century-of savants with remarkable memories who appear to break the rules. What's most striking about these individuals is that their exceptional memories-"memory without reckoning," it's been called-almost always coexist with profound disability. Some are musical prodigies, like Leslie Lemke, who is blind and brain damaged and couldn't walk until he was fifteen, but can nevertheless play complicated musical pieces on the piano after hearing them just once. Some are artistic prodigies, like Alonzo Clemons, who has an IQ of 40 but can sculpt lifelike animals from memory after just a fleeting glimpse. Some have freakish mechanical skills, like James Henry Pullen, the nineteenth-century "Genius of Earlswood Asylum," who was deaf and nearly mute, but built stunningly intricate model s.h.i.+ps.

One day, after memorizing 138 digits in one of my five-minute practice sessions, I was sitting in front of the television, riffling through a deck of cards, as I often did to pa.s.s the time. I was looking at the queen of clubs, thinking about Roseanne Barr, about to form a disgusting memory, when I caught a trailer for a new doc.u.mentary called Brainman Brainman about one of those rare prodigies. The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet, whose brain had been altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a toddler. Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone "island of genius," but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot-a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He'd even invented a language of his own called Manti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of about one of those rare prodigies. The subject of the film, which aired on the Science Channel, was a twenty-six-year-old British savant named Daniel Tammet, whose brain had been altered by an epileptic seizure he suffered as a toddler. Daniel could perform complex multiplication and division in his head, seemingly effortlessly. He could tell you if any number up to ten thousand was a prime. Most savants have just a single claim to exceptionality, a lone "island of genius," but Daniel had a veritable archipelago. In addition to his lightning calculations, he was also a hyperpolyglot-a term used to describe the small number of people who can speak more than six languages. Daniel claimed to speak ten, and he said he learned Spanish in a single weekend. He'd even invented a language of his own called Manti. To test his linguistic skills, the producers of Brainman Brainman flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week p.r.o.nounced himself "amazed." Daniel's tutor for the week called him a "genius" and "not human." flew Daniel to Iceland, and gave him one week to become conversational in Icelandic, one of the world's most notoriously difficult languages. The talk-show host who tested him on national television at the end of the week p.r.o.nounced himself "amazed." Daniel's tutor for the week called him a "genius" and "not human."

The producers of the Brainman Brainman doc.u.mentary also invited two of the world's leading brain scientists, V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego, and Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge, to each spend a day testing Daniel. They both concluded that he was literally a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Unlike virtually every other savant who had ever been studied, he could explain what was going on in his head-often in vivid detail. Shai Azoulai, a graduate student in Ramachandran's lab, proclaimed that Daniel "could be the linchpin that sp.a.w.ns off a new field of research." Dr. Darold Treffert, an expert in savant syndrome, declared him one of only fifty people in the world who can be cla.s.sified as a "prodigious savant." doc.u.mentary also invited two of the world's leading brain scientists, V. S. Ramachandran at the University of California, San Diego, and Simon Baron-Cohen at Cambridge, to each spend a day testing Daniel. They both concluded that he was literally a one-of-a-kind phenomenon. Unlike virtually every other savant who had ever been studied, he could explain what was going on in his head-often in vivid detail. Shai Azoulai, a graduate student in Ramachandran's lab, proclaimed that Daniel "could be the linchpin that sp.a.w.ns off a new field of research." Dr. Darold Treffert, an expert in savant syndrome, declared him one of only fifty people in the world who can be cla.s.sified as a "prodigious savant."

Even though it's described as a syndrome, savantism is not actually a recognized medical condition, and has no set of standard diagnostic criteria. However, Treffert divides savants into three informal categories. There are "splinter skill" savants who have memorized a single esoteric body of trivia, like Treffert's young patient who can tell you the year and model of a vacuum cleaner just from its unique hum. A second group, which he calls "talented savants," have developed a more general area of expertise, like drawing or music, which is remarkable only because it stands in such stark contrast to their disability. The third group, prodigious savants, have abilities that would be spectacular by any standard, even if they weren't accompanied by handicaps in other areas. It's a subjective scale, but an important one, Treffert believes, because prodigious savants are members of one of the rarest cla.s.ses of human being on the planet. When a new prodigious savant like Daniel is discovered, it is a very big deal.

The media devoured Daniel's story. Newspapers in England and America ran glowing profiles of the eminently quotable "Boy with the Incredible Brain." He appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman The Late Show with David Letterman , where he calculated the day of the week Dave was born on (Sat.u.r.day), and on the , where he calculated the day of the week Dave was born on (Sat.u.r.day), and on the Richard & Judy Richard & Judy program, the closest thing Britain has to Oprah. His memoir, program, the closest thing Britain has to Oprah. His memoir, Born on a Blue Day, Born on a Blue Day, became a became a New York Times New York Times bestseller in America, and quickly rose to number one in the Amazon UK rankings. Daniel became perhaps the most famous living savant in the world. bestseller in America, and quickly rose to number one in the Amazon UK rankings. Daniel became perhaps the most famous living savant in the world.

What interested me most about Daniel was his extraordinary memory. In 2003, he set a new European record by reciting the first 22,514 digits of pi from memory. It took him five hours and nine minutes, sitting in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the Science Museum at Oxford University, and he says he did it without any mnemonic techniques beyond his powerful raw memory. Here, it seemed, was someone with the same astounding abilities as the mental athletes, but they came to him entirely without effort. It was almost impossible to believe. Meanwhile, I was putting in torturous hours taking mental strolls through every home I'd ever visited, every school I'd ever attended, and every library I'd ever worked in so that they could be converted into memory palaces. I wondered why a savant like Daniel never competed in memory contests. Surely he'd wipe the floor with the trained mnemonists, I imagined.

The more I researched Daniel's story, the more fascinated I was by the differences between him and the mental athletes I'd come to know-and the mental athlete I was rapidly becoming myself. I knew how the mnemonists did it: They'd improved their memories through rigorous training, using ancient techniques. I'd even done it myself. But I didn't understand where Daniel's powers of recall came from. Daniel, like the journalist S before him, seemed to have an innate ability to remember. How was his brain different from mine? And did he have any tricks up his sleeve that could give me an advantage at the U.S. champions.h.i.+p?

I decided that I would try to meet up with Daniel. He invited me to the home he shared with his partner, Neil, at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in the scenic seaside town of Kent, England. We ended up spending two full afternoons together in his living room, chatting over tea and fish and chips. Daniel was skinny, with short blond hair, gla.s.ses, and birdlike features. He was gentle, soft-spoken, charming, and hyperarticulate-equally comfortable explaining his bizarre memory as opining on why would try to meet up with Daniel. He invited me to the home he shared with his partner, Neil, at the end of a leafy cul-de-sac in the scenic seaside town of Kent, England. We ended up spending two full afternoons together in his living room, chatting over tea and fish and chips. Daniel was skinny, with short blond hair, gla.s.ses, and birdlike features. He was gentle, soft-spoken, charming, and hyperarticulate-equally comfortable explaining his bizarre memory as opining on why The West Wing The West Wing was the most thoughtful American television program. I suppose I'd come expecting some kind of freak, and so I was taken aback by how surprisingly ordinary Daniel seemed-even more ordinary than some of the mental athletes I'd come to know. In fact, if he hadn't told me, I'm not sure I'd ever have guessed that there was anything unusual about him. However, Daniel a.s.sured me that despite appearances, he was anything but normal. "You should have met me fifteen years ago. You'd have said, 'Boy, that guy has autism!' " was the most thoughtful American television program. I suppose I'd come expecting some kind of freak, and so I was taken aback by how surprisingly ordinary Daniel seemed-even more ordinary than some of the mental athletes I'd come to know. In fact, if he hadn't told me, I'm not sure I'd ever have guessed that there was anything unusual about him. However, Daniel a.s.sured me that despite appearances, he was anything but normal. "You should have met me fifteen years ago. You'd have said, 'Boy, that guy has autism!' "

Daniel is the oldest of nine children. He grew up in subsidized housing in East London and had what he calls "a very difficult" childhood that "seems like something out of d.i.c.kens." In Born on a Blue Day Born on a Blue Day, he describes the ma.s.sive epileptic seizure he suffered as a four-year-old: It was "an experience unlike any other, as though the room around me was pulling away from me on all sides and the light inside it leaking out and the flow of time itself coagulated and stretched out into a single lingering moment." Had his father not rushed him to the emergency room in the back of a taxi, that seizure very probably would have killed Daniel. Instead, he believes it was the moment he became a savant.

According to Baron-Cohen, two rare conditions may have conspired to produce Daniel's savant abilities. The first is synesthesia, the same perceptual disorder that afflicted the journalist S, in which the senses are intertwined. By one estimate, there are more than a hundred different varieties of the disorder. For S, sounds conjured up visual imagery. In Daniel's case, numbers take on a distinctive shape, color, texture, and emotional "tone." The number 9, for example, is tall, dark blue, and ominous, while 37 is "lumpy like porridge" and 89 resembles falling snow. Daniel says he has a unique synesthetic reaction like that for every number up to 10,000, and that experiencing numbers in this way allows him to do quick mental math without pencil or paper. To multiply two numbers, he sees each number's shape floating in his mind's eye. Intuitively, and without effort, he says, a third shape, the answer, forms in the negative s.p.a.ce between them. "It's like a crystallization. It's like developing a photo," Daniel told me. "Division is just the reverse of multiplication. I see the number and I pull it apart in my head. It's like leaves falling from a tree." Daniel believes his synesthetic shapes somehow implicitly encode important information about the properties of numbers. Prime numbers, for example, have a "pebble-like quality." They're soft and round, without the jagged edges of numbers that can be factorized.

Daniel's other rare condition is Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism. Autism was first identified in 1943 by the child psychiatrist Leo Kanner. He described it as a form of social impairment, a disorder in which, as Kanner put it, patients "treat people as if they were things." Along with this inability to empathize, autistic individuals have a host of other problems, including language impairment, an extremely focused range of interests, and "an anxiously obsessive desire for the preservation of sameness." A year after Kanner first wrote about autism, an Austrian pediatrician named Hans Asperger noted another disorder that seemed almost identical except that Asperger's patients had strong linguistic abilities and fewer intellectual impairments. He called his precocious young patients, with their bottomless wells of arcane trivia, "little professors." It wasn't until 1981 that Asperger's was recognized as its own separate syndrome.

Daniel's Asperger's diagnosis was made by Baron-Cohen, who runs the Cambridge Autism Research Centre and who also happens to be one of the world's leading authorities on synesthesia. "If you saw him today, you wouldn't necessarily think that this guy has a form of autism," Baron-Cohen told me over tea in his Trinity College office one afternoon. "It's only in the context of hearing his developmental history. I said to him, 'Your development suggests that when you were younger you had Asperger's syndrome, whereas looking at you today, you've made such a good adaptation and you're functioning so very well that you don't necessarily need a diagnosis. It's up to you whether you want one or not. He said, 'Yes, I prefer to have it.' It gave him a new way of looking at himself. That's fine. It fits with his profile."

In his memoir, Daniel writes extensively about the effects of growing up with undiagnosed Asperger's. "What must the other children have made of me? I don't know, because I have no memory of them at all. To me they were the background to my visual and tactile experiences." Throughout his childhood, Daniel was afflicted with a pa.s.sion for trivia. He collected leaflets and counted everything, and developed an obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of the popular 1970s soft-rock duo the Carpenters. He frequently got into trouble for taking things far too literally. After extending his middle finger in the direction of a schoolmate, he was surprised at the reprimand he received. "How can a finger swear?" he wondered. Empathy did not come easily. "I had no concept of deception," he says. "I've worked so hard to reach this place where I can be really normal, where I can have a conversation and know when to start and stop talking, and remember to make eye contact." Despite having apparently conquered his most debilitating social problems, to this day, Daniel says he still can't shave himself, or drive a car. The sound of the toothbrush scratching his teeth drives him mad. He says he avoids public places, and is obsessive about small things. For breakfast, he measures out exactly forty-five grams of porridge on an electric scale.

I mentioned Brainman Brainman to Ben Pridmore. I was curious to know whether he'd seen it, and whether he was afraid that Daniel, someone with natural gifts that seemed to measure up to-if not surpa.s.s-Ben's own acquired skills, might someday make an appearance on the memory circuit. to Ben Pridmore. I was curious to know whether he'd seen it, and whether he was afraid that Daniel, someone with natural gifts that seemed to measure up to-if not surpa.s.s-Ben's own acquired skills, might someday make an appearance on the memory circuit.

"I'm pretty sure that guy did did compete in the champions.h.i.+ps a couple years ago," Ben told me matter-of-factly. "But I think he had a different name. Back then he was called Daniel Corney. He did quite well one year, as I recall." compete in the champions.h.i.+ps a couple years ago," Ben told me matter-of-factly. "But I think he had a different name. Back then he was called Daniel Corney. He did quite well one year, as I recall."

I asked a few of the other mental athletes what they thought of Daniel. Almost everyone had seen Brainman Brainman, and almost everyone had an opinion. Quite a few were suspicious about his claims of savanthood, and believed he used basic mnemonic techniques to memorize information. "Any of us could do what he's done," the eight-time world memory champion Dominic O'Brien told me. "If you want my opinion, he simply realized he'd never be number one as a mental athlete." O'Brien said as much on camera, when he was filmed for Brainman Brainman , but the producers didn't include his interview in the final cut. , but the producers didn't include his interview in the final cut.

Clearly the mental athletes had plenty of reason to be envious of Daniel. His memory skills were almost exactly equivalent to theirs, and yet their respective places in the cultural firmament couldn't have been more different. While the trained mnemonists toiled away in geeky obscurity, Daniel's medicalized condition had generated enormous popular interest.

The next time I was in front of a computer, I logged into the memory circuit