UNCHALLENGEABLE MEMORY!

Alex Mullen the 24 year old medical student from USA won the World Memory Championship in Chengdu, China in 2016. In the final round, however, he was 300 points behind Marein Wallonius from Sweden. All he had to do was to memorize the order of an entire deck of cards in 23 seconds or less. He did it in 21.5 seconds. Mullen became the first American to win the World Memory Championship. He also holds the Guinness World Record  for most numerical digits memorized in an hour: 3,029.

Mullen claims there's nothing super human about his brain - that growing up, he always had an 'average' memory. He says, "I felt frustrated; I was always cramming for tests and forgetting everything instantly." He started by reading a Bill Gates favourite: Joshua Foer's

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. "I was hooked from the beginning," Mullen said. " I couldn't believe I'd never heard about this stuff."

(Indebted to Jordyn Taylor's article on March 18, 2016 on the subject matter.)

K V George