EntertainmentAnyone Can Do It
Sun, Jan 20 2007
David Thomas failed all his maths exams and left school with no qualifications, yet this 30-year-old fire fighter has just gone into the Guinness Book of Records by reciting from memory 22.500 digits of the mathematical constant, Pi. After five months of training, in which he spent ten hours a day memorizing a quarter of a million digits, David Thomas took part in a 16-hour mental battle. Witnesses watched in awe as Thomas set a new European record, earning the title "Most Powerful Memory in the Western Hemisphere". David says, "My education was very limited. My father left home when I was six years old, and my mother and stepfather didn't open my eyes much. When I was at school I was hopeless. I couldn't remember anything, but now I can remember more facts than anyone in Europe. I think of myself as a mental athlete. If there was a memory Olympics, I'd have a good chance of a gold medal." If they are given random numbers to learn, such as telephone numbers, most people can memorize only between seven and ten digits. So, how does Thomas do it?
"One night I was watching a TV programme and there was an interview with a man called Dominic O'Brien, who had been the world memory champion five times. He can remember, among other things the answers to all 7.500 Trivial Pursuit questions! He used to be a gambler, and he wasn't particularly successful until he developed his own mnemonics, or mental memory aid, for each card in order to remember which cards had already been dealt and which ones hadn't. Once he had perfected his system he began to win serious money."
Thomas became fascinated by O'Brien's theory that anyone can improve their memory by using specialized techniques. These techniques involve linking everything to familiar people or objects. If you want to remember a phone number for example, you have to give the numbers life. Sometimes I associate a number with a person. Number 10 for me is always the Prime Minister Tony Blair (who lives at number 10 Downing Street) and 50 is my uncle John who died at that age. Sometimes if I want to remember a number, e.g.42, I take the fourth and second letter of the alphabet (D and B) and then think of somebody, e.g. David Bowie. Or, if I'm trying to memorize a pack of cards, the four of hearts would be DH (Damon Hill the ex-racing driver): D stands for "four" and H stands for "hearts". Once you have learned the system you never forget.
If David is trying to remember facts he also links them to an image. "For instance, if I was trying to memorize the name "Tom Cruise", I would think of his film Top Gun, and that leads me to images of guns and cruise missiles. If I was trying to remember a place name, for instance "Quito", the capital of Ecuador, I might think of a "key to" open a door.
You might wonder what the point is of being able to remember 22.500 numbers. But David Thomas is soon going to appear on TV's Record Breakers, and this week he is teaching memory training and speed-writing at Huddersfield University. His fees are 600 pounds a day. He is sure that the future holds a lot more for him than a job as a fire-fighter.
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