The best memory in the world. A man with a phenomenal memory

People known from history to have phenomenal memories had brains no better than any of us. They just used it more effectively. Choose one of the “phenomena” listed below and take him as an example for yourself in your future aspirations to improve your own memory. Consider this the first step in choosing for yourself a constellation of intellectual “gurus,” or ideals, whose achievements will serve as your guiding example.

1. Antonio di Marco Magliabechi had the ability to memorize entire books - down to a single word and punctuation mark. Over time, he memorized the entire library of the Grand Duke of Tuscany.

2. A. S. Aitken, professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh, easily reproduced the first thousand decimal places of pi, both from left to right and from right to left.

3. American Daniel McCartney, who lived in the nineteenth century, could tell, at the age of 54, what he did on any day, starting from early childhood. He could tell the exact date, indicating what the weather was like that day, and also remember what he ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner on any given day.

4. Christian Friedrich Heineken at the age of 10 months knew how to speak and was able to reproduce any word given to him. By the age of three, he remembered most of the facts of world history and geography, and also learned Latin and French.

5. Paul Charles Morphy - a chess champion who remembered every move he made in every game he played in his champion career, including those he played blindfolded. This was confirmed by the fact that almost 400 games he played were preserved for history only because he was able to dictate them a lot of time later. Those with whom he played these games and the judges confirmed the moves he named.

6. Themistocles could remember the name of each of the 20,000 citizens of Athens.

7. Xerxes became famous for knowing by heart the name of every warrior in his armies, which numbered 100,000 people.

8. Cardinal Messofanti, a polyglot who lived in the nineteenth century, remembered the vocabulary of 70-80 languages, including Latin, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Swedish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, Danish, Russian, Polish, Bohemian, Serbian, Hungarian, Turkish, Irish, Welsh, Albanian, Sanskrit, Persian, Georgian, Armenian, Hebrew, Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopian and Amharic.

9. Jews from the Polish religious community "Chasse Pollak" could absolutely accurately name the position of every word on any page of all 12 volumes of the Talmud.

10. Large religious books, such as the Talmud and an even larger literary monument - the ancient Indian Vedas - were also written down from memory.

11. Dr. Susan Whiting, women's world memory champion, demonstrates the ability to remember 5,000 pieces of information using CEM 3.

12. Dominic O'Brien, a six-time world champion in the use of memory reserves, has set a huge number of records for memorizing information, including memorizing a deck of cards in 33.8 seconds; 18 decks of cards in one hour; and more than 2,000 binary digital combinations in less than in 30 minutes!

Self-expanding general mnemonic matrix (CEM 3)

The Self-Expanding General Mnemonic Matrix allows you, using the same basic principles of mnemonics, to go from remembering 100 units of information to remembering 10,000 units as quickly as you can form mental images.

			Dinosaur	Nobleman	Full Moon						picture
										Violin
		Seaweed
		Spaghetti	Tomato							Ice cream
	Touch
	Motor-but-sensual	Swimming		Hugs	Mixing	Rubbing		Trembling	climbing
	Mammals				Monkey						Bear
						Red-necked	Lark		kingfisher	Flamingo
		Red	Orange		Green			Purple
	solar system		Mercury

Taking the base "hundred" from the "main system" as a basis, you expand it 10 times, getting a system based on 1000 base images; you then also expand the latter by 10 times and get a system where there are already 10,000 key elements.

By creating a list of 1000 (0-999) images, you use the basic “hundred” to apply to different aspects of your visual perception.

By creating a system of 10,000 images, you again use the basic “hundred”, but in all possible ways, relying alternately on your perceptions, caused by the main five “senses”: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, as well as the function of complex motor -sensory apparatus (such as sensations during dancing, swimming, etc.) and basic information from the field of natural science.

By creating a system of such elements, you simultaneously use all the basic “abilities” that are a function of your brain to develop memory. Thus, you will, as it were, go through a special school, in the process of preparation in which you will not only learn to memorize any list of information you wish, but will be in constant mental work, allowing you to develop your “intellectual muscle”, giving all the time to work on is the nature of the game. The self-expanding general mnemonic matrix is ​​constructed as follows:

100 - 999 Visible image

1000 - 1999 Sound image

2000 - 2999 Aromatic (olfactory) image

3000 - 3999 Taste image

4000 - 4999 Tactile image

5000 - 5999 Motor-sensory image

6000 - 6999 Mammals

7000 - 7999 Birds

8000 - 8999 Colors of the rainbow

9000 - 9999 Solar system

For numbers from 100 to 999 you use VISION: in other words, you focus your attention on the visual perception of the image that you want to remember as a key mnemonic image. For numbers from 1000 to 1999 it is used HEARING, at the same time, you focus on what sound picture is formed in you in connection with each image you remember. For numbers from 2000 to 2999 use SMELL, and the formation of images occurs mainly due to this one of the main “five senses”. And so on, for every thousand, successively, TASTE, TOUCH, MOTOR-SENSUAL EXPERIENCES, MAMMALS, BIRDS, COLORS OF THE RAINBOW and SOLAR SYSTEM.

For each individual “hundred” in each “thousand” you thus have a specific Visible Image, a specific Sound, a specific Smell, etc. So, according to the matrix, your visual images for each hundred from 100 to 999 are Dinosaur, Nobleman, Full Moon, Gorge, Lightning, Church, Concord, Fire and Picture.

For example, based on the base hundred words from the main system and using the nine Visual Images representing the “hundreds” from 100 to 999 in the first “thousand” (100-999), we could proceed as follows:

101 would simply mean a dinosaur that died due to the fall of a meteorite (according to one version, it was for this reason that dinosaurs became extinct), or an evil spirit that took the form of a dinosaur to look more scary. 151 could mean to you a dinosaur stepping on a Lada, causing it to flatten into a perfect pancake. Whatever you now want to remember as the 101st or 151st element of any list, it should be “linked” to these CEM 3 images, applying the basic principles of mnemonics.

Moving further within the first “thousand”, the main emphasis should still be on the first-accepted function of our senses - vision. All images, for example, the eighth in a row of a hundred, i.e. from 700 to 799, will be basic, but this time tied to the “visual” image of the Concorde supersonic passenger airliner. So, for example, 706 might represent to you the "neck" of the Concorde, easily visible in its bird-shaped head. Likewise, 782 could mean a souvenir hairdryer modeled after a Concorde. Thus, any object to be memorized, having a certain serial number in any list, should be associatively linked with the base image corresponding to the number, applying the principles of mnemonics.

Similarly, for an array of numbers from 3000 to 3999, each individual hundred will contain a “flavor” image tied to the key ones from the base “hundred” of the “main system”, namely: spaghetti, tomato, nut, mango, rhubarb, lemon, cherry, cream, fondant And banana.

To form and apply to your memory needs a basic image for any number from 0 to 9999 requires the simple thought process described below in the subsection “How to Use the Self-Expanding General Mnemonic Matrix.”

When creating your images, which you should treat at the same time as a game, an intellectual activity and education of your brain, make sure that the key mnemonic images included in one or another category based on their belonging to different areas of perception, determined by the five basic “senses” , proceeded from the realities of the corresponding “feeling”. So, for example, for number 4167 when creating tactile(first of all) the image should resort to key concepts“dampness” and “bug”; at the same time, your task is not only to imagine yourself as a beetle in a damp environment, but also feel his hard back, see droplets of moisture on its black, shiny surface, touch the movement of his furry paws tickling your palm and add to this smell, for example, a pine forest in the morning.

By using the self-expanding master mnemonic matrix, you will not only create a mnemonic system for yourself that will allow you to learn 10,000 pieces of information as easily as the subjects in Haber and Nickerson's experiments remembered pictures. You will find that as you use it, all the areas of your perception through which your brain communicates with the outside world will begin to improve, which will have a significant and very positive impact on all aspects of your life. This should also include a positive effect on health. Dissatisfaction with oneself and irritability, associated with the fact that a person knows that he has such a shortcoming as a weak memory, often leads to stress and ailments. The latter, in turn, are the direct cause of deteriorating memory. By using CEM 3, you will reverse this trend.

In many ways we're talking about that by doing such activities on yourself you impart speed positive the spiral process of development and evolution of one's own personality, the characteristic of which is that the more you practice applying the principles of mnemonics, the more perfect your memory becomes; the more information from various branches of knowledge you include in your own memory matrix, the higher the likelihood of automatically increasing the level of your education; and finally, the more you do all this, the more automatic you will improve. All without exception, your mental abilities.

Today we'll talk about famous personalities, whose names remained forever in the memory of generations, and whose actions and discoveries changed the world and the course of history. We know their names from scientific literature, the world of show business and politics. All of them are representatives of different historical periods and fields of activity, but there is one feature that allowed us to include them in one list - phenomenal memory.

In the 19th century, this girl served in the presidential house of Jefferson Davis. However, she is remembered as a heroine of the Civil War, as she was a spy for the Union Army. Any information she heard was conveyed in 100% volume, accurate to a single word.

Nikola Tesla

An outstanding scientist who created devices operating on alternating current. His contribution to science is great; it is possible that Nikola would not have made his discovery without the gift of photographic memory. Tesla never wrote anything down, and his laboratory burned to the ground; he managed to reproduce a good half of what he had previously invented without panic.

Theodore Roosevelt

The 26th American president was distinguished by a remarkable trait - the desire for constant personal development and expansion of his intellectual abilities. Roosevelt diligently trained his memory, read 2-3 books a day, and after that reproduced the content of the text to the smallest detail. Also, many stories indicate that Theodore was famous for his unique gift of doing several things at the same time. Parallel communication with two secretaries while reading a book was never a problem for him.

Sergei Rachmaninov

The great pianist, composer and conductor also possessed photographic memory, allowing you to memorize notes as quickly as possible. Rachmaninov could learn more than one piece of music in a matter of minutes.
If you watched "Rain Man" and remember the hero named Dustin Hoffman, meet this American guy with a unique memory and was his real prototype. The man absorbed texts like a sponge (he remembered 98% of what he read). His “super tricks” include the ability to simultaneously read content on two pages, which is how he managed to remember about 9,000 during his life.
In his role as spiritual guide and leading figure of the Catholic Church, John Paul II amazed everyone with his photographic memory. He had 21 languages ​​in his arsenal, and he also spoke a hundred dialects without hesitation.
The Philippine ruler from 1965-1986 had phenomenal ability to remember information. He could accurately repeat any constitutional law, and to prepare for a long speech, he only had to read it once.
The charming actress, who produced the TV show Taxi, is one of twelve unique people with an extremely large memory capacity (scientific name is hyperthymesia). She remembers everything that happened to her in life, right up to infancy and the moment of baptism.

Julius Caesar

How can you not know about the ability of the Roman commander to do several things at one time, to remember the face of every warrior who was in his army of 25,000.
Possessing a phenomenal memory, Napoleon became famous for the most ambitious and daring military strategies; he could navigate the terrain surprisingly quickly, as he easily remembered routes, and knew every enemy literally by sight.

10 outstanding personalities who influenced the course of history, transformed our understanding of the world and perception of the importance of man in it, his endless possibilities and power. 10 representatives different eras and generations, various professions - from politicians and musicians to physicists and brilliant military strategists, from show business representatives to spiritual mentors. Their life and biography will always be the object of research and scientific interest, but, despite the fact that the mystery of their unique abilities has not yet been fully revealed, there is one quality that unites them all - a phenomenal memory.

10. Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) - inventor, physicist and engineer, widely known for his contributions to the creation of devices operating on alternating current. Tesla had a “photographic memory” and rarely felt the need to write anything down. It is said that in 1885, when his laboratory burned down, he was able to reconstruct many of his inventions from memory.

9. Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919) - 26th President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize laureate for 1906 (for mediating the conclusion of the Russian-Japanese Portsmouth Peace). Roosevelt honed his memory skills by reading two or three books every day and then recalling all the details from memory. He was also blessed with the unique ability to do several things at once. According to stories, he could work with two secretaries and, at the same time, read a book.

8. Sergei Rachmaninov (1873 - 1943) - an outstanding Russian composer, conductor and one of the greatest pianists of all time. His photographic memory allowed him to memorize notes with incredible speed. They say he could easily remember several passages from complex pieces of music.

7. Kim Peak (1951 - 2009) - the prototype of Dustin Hoffman’s hero from the film “Rain Man” (1988, USA), an American with a phenomenal memory, remembered up to 98% of the information he read. Throughout his life, Peake memorized more than 9,000 books and could read two pages at a time.

6. Pope John Paul II (1920 - 2005) - spiritual mentor and head of the Catholic Church from 1978 - 2005. John Paul II also had a photographic memory. His ability to pay attention to detail allowed him to learn 21 languages ​​and speak fluently more than 100 different dialects.

5. Ferdinand Marcos (1917 - 1989) - controversial president of the Philippines from 1965 - 1986. Marcos had a phenomenal memory. Without much effort, he memorized complex texts, could recite any chapter of the 1935 Philippine Constitution, and, once reading a long speech, was able to recite it by heart.

4. Marilu Henner (1952 - present) - actress, producer and creator of the television show "Taxi". Henner is one of twelve people on the planet who has an incredible memory capacity (hyperthymesia). Her exceptional memory allows her to recall the smallest details from her childhood, right down to her baptism in infancy.

3. Julius Caesar (100 BC - 44 BC) - Roman commander, rightfully considered one of the greatest military leaders in the history of the formation of the Roman Empire. Legend has it that Caesar knew every one of the 25,000 soldiers in his army by sight.

2. Mary Elizabeth Bowser (1839 -?) – Civil War heroine, spy for the Union Army. While working as a domestic servant in the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Bowser memorized and passed on valuable information to the Union.

1. Bonaparte Napoleon (1769 - 1821) - the first emperor of France, a talented military leader who gained fame during french revolution. Napoleon had an extraordinary memory. He could remember countless people, maps, and troop locations. His talent allowed him to act quickly and develop win-win strategies, anticipating the enemy’s actions several steps ahead.

The ability to forgive is a virtue, but not many of us are good at forgetting. “We have forgiven you, but we cannot forget,” sounds paradoxical, but sometimes memories settle so deeply in the depths and that they turn life into torment. The heroine of the film about 50 first dates seems happy to a person with too good a memory.

The mind of a person with a forgetting disorder is like a computer hard drive that has been actively filled but never cleaned. In such a repository of information, everything is retained - dates, patronymics, license plates of cars accidentally seen, details of the daily diet of one's own and others. Today we have the stories of four US citizens who in the 21st century are officially recognized as people with phenomenal memory. This is not a gift, it is a disorder that aggravates the days of life, usually developing against the background of acquired obsessive-compulsive disorder or congenital autism.

The Neuroscience Center at the University of California is eager to introduce you to the four best data storage systems of the Homo sapiens system.

1. Bob Petrella

The ability to memorize numbers and dates gave Bob Petrell the career he was mentally prepared for. Today he runs a TV channel that shows tennis, and at the same time, of course, remembers the results of all more or less important tennis competitions. Bob can be shown any “frozen” fragment of a match involving his favorite baseball or football team, and he will tell you what kind of match it was, when, and how it was played.

Petrella says she has memorized everything since she was 5 years old. All PIN codes and phone numbers remain in a separate memory bank. Bob, for example, remembers what he lost mobile phone September 24, 2006, but there was not a single number in the device’s memory, since Petrella stores them all in her head.

1. Jill Price

More often than the other three “”, Mrs. Jill Price from California, who remembers her whole life in detail since her 14th birthday, appeared on the screens and pages of the media. It began after the physical trauma and mental exhaustion of moving from the East to the West of the United States. To Jill herself, her painful gift reminds her of some kind of disgusting video camera that she has to carry around with her on all day and night. In the process of remembering something necessary or not, rewinding to the required fragment is activated. During the harsh years of war and the Internet being cut off, Ms. Price could have become a legendary spy and savior of the world.

Jill Price lives far from Hollywood, leads a non-public lifestyle, working at a Jewish religious school. Parties are rare in her life, so Ms. Price is always pleased to surprise guests with her phenomenal knowledge. At the same time, as Jill admits, living with the burden of unpleasant memories (and who doesn’t?) is a painful fate.

1. Kim Peek

The prototype of Rain Man, the late Kim Pik, lived with a damaged cerebellum and was therefore considered crazy. Several other congenital brain abnormalities robbed Peake of his ability to forget. From what he read (a book spread in 8 seconds), Kim Peak remembered up to 98% of the information, verbal and digital. By the age of 7, he knew the Bible by heart, and by the age of 20, he knew the complete collection of Shakespeare.

Damage to the cerebellum in the walking encyclopedia was apparently caused by a gene mutation. As happens in such cases, the keeper of phenomenal memory walked poorly (his gait was very strange), and could not tie his shoelaces or fasten his shoes. All the “drivers” of this walking computer were aimed at scanning and remembering what the eyes see and the ears hear. Over time, however, in his declining years, Piku managed to learn how to button up his clothes and play the piano.

The prototype of the Rain Man, Kim Peak, did not suffer from “fashionable” autism, just as another movie character without a prototype did not suffer from it - mathematician Max Cohen from the film “Pi”, who was hunted by Orthodox Jews with sidelocks and machine guns. At the end of the film, Cohen, tired of his gift, drills a hole in his head and becomes a free man, since he is no longer tormented not only by fanatics, but also by headaches.

And two more living people live with an officially registered diagnosis of “hyperthymesia” (i.e. “excess memory”). This is Brad Williams and Rick Baron, both from the USA.

Americans say that for every Jill Price there is a Brad Williams. The Americans are referring to a radio host from Wisconsin, who, unlike Jill, is not a burden to super memory. Mr. Williams brags about her every chance he gets. If you ask him what happened on August 31, 1986, Brad will remember that on this day the Admiral Nakhimov sank and the sculptor Henry Moore died.

Mr. Williams remembers very well what day it snowed and what day there was a thunderstorm, what and when he ate for breakfast or dinner. In the TV show " Good morning"America!" Brad Williams has been called the “Google Man.”

Once, thanks to his impractical talent, Brad almost won the American version of the TV show Jeopardy. They say that he fought on sports issues. Unlike Bob Petrella, Williams does not like sports, and his deepest knowledge is filled with, for example, the history of pop culture. The Google man tells doctors that he sees nothing supernatural in his abilities.

Unlike his fellow hyperthymesians, Cleveland resident Rick Baron uses his genius abilities to make money. Being officially unemployed, Baron takes part in various television championships in erudition.

Constantly winning, Rick Baron receives discount cards, tickets to sporting events, 14 times he traveled with won vacation packages to distant lands. Baron claims to have memorized everything since he was 11 years old. Moreover, he retrospectively remembers the daily chronicles of everything that happened to him from the age of seven.

The sister of a chronic pageant winner believes that Rick has a serious obsessive disorder. This lies in the fact that Mr. Baron tries to organize and catalog everything around him. In addition, the owner of super memory does not allow anything to be thrown away and carefully stores all paid bills and redeemed tickets to sports matches.

There are only a few dozen people on the entire planet who have phenomenal memory and can remember even the smallest details from their infancy, while most people have absolutely no memory of themselves in such early age. The incredibly large amount of memory is due to a syndrome that is associated with the concept of hyperthymesia.

Hyperthymesia, or hyperthymestic syndrome, is the ability of a person to remember and reproduce an extremely high amount of information about his life. This ability affects only autobiographical memory. In medicine, they still cannot determine the status of this phenomenon and sometimes associate it with hypermnesia, that is, a similar ability that affects all types and forms of memory.

The term “hyperthymesia” appeared not so long ago, in 2006. A group of scientists then put forward a hypothesis about the characteristics of this disorder. Thus, a person who develops hyperthymestic syndrome spends an abnormal amount of time thinking about his past, resulting in the ability to recall certain events from his life.

While phenomenal memory developed with the help of mnemonic techniques is not considered a pathology, if we are talking about remembering the necessary information and data, then scientists consider hyperthymesia to be a deviation. Patients with this syndrome develop uncontrolled and unconscious associations when seeing certain objects or dates, as a result of which the person remembers with accuracy any day of his life.

One famous person who develops hyperthymesia is Marilu Henner (born 1952), an American actress and producer.

As for Marilu Henner, whose phenomenon is now being actively studied by specialists, her earliest memories date back to the age of 18 months. On this day, as the woman recalls, she was playing with her brother. Interestingly, it was previously believed that a person cannot remember what happened to him before he was two years old.

After this event, she can talk about how she spent any of her days, what she talked about, what programs were on TV, etc. So, if in your entire life ordinary person remembers about 250 faces, Henner remembers thousands of them. From this, scientists also concluded that long-term memory is not selective, and all events that are processed by short-term memory go into long-term storage.

The process of remembering for Marilu Henner requires absolutely no effort. This, as experts say, is akin to an ideal video editor that can accurately recreate any fragment of a recording.

American Jill Price - she remembers absolutely all the events of her life, starting from the age of 14 - if you name an arbitrary date, Jill will reproduce what happened to her that day, what the weather was like, what important events happened in the world. Her phenomenal abilities were confirmed by scientists at the University of California, Irvine in 2006. Since then, due to increased interest in research in this area, hyperthymesia has been confirmed in five more people.

In total, according to scientists, by 2014 it was possible to identify about 50 people with such incredible abilities to remember in detail any day of their lives. Scientists are currently unable to accurately identify the causes of this syndrome, but this may be due to the fact that in patients the temporal lobes and caudate nucleus in the brain are enlarged in size.

Neuroscientists study the characteristics of the brain. As part of the search for people with good memory, more than two thousand people were studied at the California Neuroscience Center. They were asked sixty questions, which only people who remembered everything could answer.

It is believed that the planet is home to between four and twenty people with supermemories. The most famous of them is Los Angeles resident Jill Price, who wrote a book about herself, “The Woman Cannot Forget.” The American city turned out to be rich in unusual talents: The second owner of absolute memory, Bob Petrell, also lives in Los Angeles.

Two more people with officially recognized supermemory also live in the United States: Brad Williams and actress Marilu Henner. The latter is notable for the fact that she remembers herself from the age of 18 months - this contradicts the opinion of scientists that a person is not able to reproduce the events of his life that happened to him before the age of two.

Due to the fact that there are very few people with hyperthymesia, there is practically no data on the occurrence of this ability. Some scientists consider absolute memory a myth and the desire of people to believe in their limitless capabilities. Professor of the history of psychology at the University of Groningen, Douwe Draaisma, writes in his “Book of Forgetting” that “most of our experiences leave no trace in the brain.”

Douet also notes that “people tend to compare memory to something that has become a symbol of preservation for them personally, such as a computer or a photograph. And for forgetting, other metaphors are used: a sieve, a colander. But they all assume that storing in memory and forgetting are opposite processes, and, accordingly, one excludes the other. In fact, forgetting is mixed into our memories like yeast into dough.

The professor applies a medieval metaphor to memory - a palimpsest, i.e. a reused piece of parchment. “Parchment was expensive, and therefore the old texts were scraped off or washed off and a new text was written on top, after a while the old text began to appear through the new text. ... palimpsest - very good image layers of memories: new information comes, old information is erased, but in principle, the old information is hidden in the new. Your memories also resonate in your experiences, and for this reason you cannot describe a memory as a direct copy of what you experienced. They are absorbed by what is already there.” (Based on materials from “Het geheugen is ongezeglijk.” - de Volkskrant, 03.11.10, p. 48-49.)

Most of us, however, are not “lucky” to have absolute memory. And, while scientists are arguing whether hyperthymesia is a disease or a semantic feature of the body, we have the power to make our memory good, because no one disputes the possibility of training it.