ABSTRACT
In 2005, a young journalist, Joshua Foer, was assigned to cover the United States Memory Championships. Memory championships are competitions, akin to sports tournaments, where participants compete against each other on tasks such as memorising lists of digits, packs of cards, or lists of words, or attaching names onto photographs of faces. They are genuine tournaments where mental performance levels are actively stretched to the limits of human capability. Around the world, they are held in 30 countries and attract several thousand participants every year. The organising panels refer to this as a mind sport, and the competitors refer to themselves as mental athletes or MAs for short. Besides annual championships, every four years a separate championship event, the Memoriad, akin to the Olympic Games, is staged.
