Training like a memory athlete

Stanford scientists have found that teaching people a time-honoured mnemonic technique used by ‘memory athletes’ (people adept at quickly memorising the sequence of cards in a deck or a vast string of digits) not only boosted their recall ability but also induced lasting changes in the organisation of their brains.

The study, published in Neuron, showed that training normal humans to be memory athletes bulks up the brain’s memory networks.

The memory of participants who underwent a six-week course of daily online-training sessions in the method of loci improved dramatically. They could recall almost as many words as the memory athletes could, and they achieved similar results four months after completing training. Their resting-state functional connectivity patterns also now more closely resembled those of the memory athletes than they had prior to training.

No such memory gains and brain-connectivity changes were seen among participants who received working-memory training or no training at all.

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