Mind games: Chilliwack man wins second straight national memory championship
Credit to Author: Gordon McIntyre| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:52:05 +0000
It takes Braden Adams as little as 47 seconds to reorder a fresh deck of cards in the exact order of a shuffled deck he had spent five minutes memorizing,
Still, it’s a skill that would be of no use at a casino.
“I get asked that a lot,” the elite memory champion said. “I heard a podcast with a guy who used to do memory sports and then got into card counting. The guy could memorize decks in 30 seconds, and he said, ‘I tried,’ but he basically had to learn a whole new set of skills.
“So I don’t know first-hand, but apparently it doesn’t translate.”
Adams, a civil servant in Chilliwack, has won the Canadian Mind Sports Association memory championship two years in a row, while breaking four records in defending his title late last month.
He got interested in memory challenges after stumbling upon the 2011 best-seller Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
“It’s a fascinating book, I read it probably faster than I’ve read any other book,” the 34-year-old said. “Afterward, I looked around to see if there was a (memory sports) scene in Canada.”
In winning this year’s national memory championship, Braden Adams broke records in digits (memorizing 393 in 10 minutes), images (292 in five minutes), names (62 in five minutes) and random words (122 in 10 minutes).
It was a small one, but there was a scene, and today there are two organizations that hold national memory playdowns: The CMSA, of which Adams is the two-time defending champ; and the longer-established Canadian Memory Championships, where Adams finished second overall in 2017.
In winning the 2019 title, Adams broke records in digits (memorizing 393 in 10 minutes), images (292 in five minutes), names (62 in five minutes) and random words (122 in 10 minutes).
It took him a “disappointing” 88 seconds to get all 52 cards he had memorized in a shuffled deck in the right order with a fresh deck, fully 41 seconds off his national record of 47 seconds.
“The reason I was so slow is I’ve switched to a much more complex system where instead of every single card is a unique image, now each unique pair of cards is a unique image.”
So instead of 52 unique images, “I have to know ahead of time 1,360 images. It’s been this mind-numbing, months-months-months-long thing to learn that I’m finally starting to get better at.
“Once you get good at it you can coast, guys are reordering decks in 20 seconds or less with this kind of thing.”
Most memory contestants train their brain with memory palace, in which items to be memorized (a grocery list, say) are associated with specific locations (frogs legs dancing in your kitchen sink, rolls of toilet paper festooning the entrance to your home, etc).
“Let’s say Location 1 is your driveway and I’m going to imagine a jug of milk splashed all over my driveway and car,” Adams said. “OK, that’s item No. 1.
“Then I walk to my porch and, oh, I’ve got to get some eggs, so I imagine a bunch of eggs all over my door, my doorbell, maybe I’m stepping on eggs and it’s all gooey.”
And so on.
According to studies, most people can learn the techniques memory champions employ, and that doing so can trigger large-scale brain changes (positive ones).
“The one thing all memory athletes will tell you, myself included, is that anyone can learn to do this,” Adams said. “We aren’t born with some special gift, it’s a skill that can be practised and learned.
“Anyone can do what I do.”
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