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This month, Vishvaa Rajakumar won the Memory League World Championship, which tests memorization skills. He shared some of his techniques with The Times.
In early February, Vishvaa Rajakumar, a 20-year-old Indian college student, won the Memory League World Championship, an online competition pitting people against one another with challenges like memorizing the order of 80 random numbers faster than most people can tie a shoelace.
The renowned neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire, who died in January, studied mental athletes like Mr. Rajakumar and found that many of them used the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
The technique takes several forms, but it generally involves visualizing a large house and assigning memories to rooms. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain that consumed Dr. Maguire’s career.
We asked Mr. Rajakumar about his strategies of memorization. His answers, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, are below.
Q. How do you prepare for the Memory League World Championship?
Hydration is very important because it helps your brain. When you memorize things, you usually sub-vocalize, and it helps to have a clear throat. Let’s say you’re reading a book. You’re not reading it out loud, but you are vocalizing within yourself. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a bit low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and more clear and you can read it faster.