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Brain Power Magazine: Issue 3
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AMAZING MEMORY STORIES
Famous Memory Men
In Dominic O'Brien's excellent book "How to Develop a Perfect Memory" (Pavilion, 1993), the World Memory Champion describes twelve of the best-known memory men, stretching from the first century BC to the present day. Some of these memorisers specialised in numbers, some in words, some in images and others in a combination of all of these.
One of the most fascinating of these memory men is a character named Ireno Funes, whose life was documented by Jorge Luis Borges. It is well known that Borges enjoyed mixing fact with fiction, but it is more than likely that the character of Funes was based on someone Borges knew, or had heard about, and in any case it makes a good story.
Borges' tale begins in 1887, when he visited the disabled Funes for the second time. On this occasion he learnt that when Funes was nineteen years of age he had been crippled by a fall from his horse. However, when he awoke from this near fatal accident he did so with a perfect memory! He could recall every day of his life and learnt English, French, Portuguese and Latin with ease. Funes had also developed his own system of number memorisation, translating them into people and other memorable images.
From Borges' description, Funes had synaesthesia (the sensation of a sense other than the one being stimulated, for example a smell may awake sensations of colour), coupled with a heightened sense of visual imagery. What is more, he could store these sensations in his memory.
On discovering his exceptional talent, Funes set about the task of cataloguing every memory image of his life, which numbered 70,000 by his calculation, a remarkably ambitious task that was curtailed by his death due to lung congestion at the age of twenty-one.
Another famous memory figure who is featured in Dominic O'Brien's book is Professor A.C. Aitken, who taught mathematics at Edinburgh University. Aitken had two remarkable skills. First, he could make lightning-fast, complex mathematical calculations in his head, and second, he had a phenomenal memory for numbers.
Aitken once remembered the first 1,000 digits of pi and described it as "like learning a Bach fugue". His technique was to arrange the digits in rows of fifty, each comprising ten groups of five numbers. He would then read through them, adopting a certain rhythm, so that when he recited the digits, he would call out five per second, then pause and then read another five digits. Obviously his remarkable powers of calculation would have enabled him to translate the digits into memorable forms.
Issue 3: Contents
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