"They are very hard to erase from the memory. "If I use one journey twice, there's a chance of mixing different images from different memorisations," Mallow says. Finally, he moves into his bathroom, placing the final objects in the toilet, the shower, the basin and the washing machine.ĭuring a competition, Mallow can only use this journey once, so he has around 15 other "journeys", including one around his mother's flat and one around the campus at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, where he is finishing his PhD in MRI tomography. He then goes into another room, where he has another plant, a coffee machine, his bike. Next he goes into his bedroom, where he places objects on a chair, in his bed, on his bedside table, on the heater. He moves to his lamp, to his TV, and, to its right, a set of candles. He segues to his sofa, then inserts a disc into his DVD player and moves to the balcony. He starts with his front door, then he goes left, where his wheelchair sits, then he proceeds to the living room where he finds a cupboard to his left, then to his kitchen, where he places something in his refrigerator, his sink and his window, and another cupboard. In his memory journeys, however, he sees himself walking. Mallow suffers from facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, a degenerative muscle disease that confined him to a wheelchair in 2011. When Mallow wants to memorise a long sequence of objects, he might mentally walk through his flat in Madgeburg, northern Germany, placing the objects he wants to memorise in specific places. Mallow is one of the seven mental athletes who, for the past three years, has travelled to the Memory Lab at Washington University's Department of Psychology in St Louis to be tested by Roediger, as part of his collaboration with Dart. "A lot of people still seem to think that our memory span can't be trained. "Johannes Mallow once got 364 correct, presented to him at a rate of one per second," says Henry Roediger, a cognitive psychologist who was sitting in the XMT audience and has been working with Dart for the past four years. For instance, one of the common assumptions about our memory span - our ability to recall a list of digits, letters or words in order, having heard it only once - is that it's fundamentally limited to seven items. Apart from a few isolated studies, psychologists and neuroscientists have taken little interest in studying memory athletes, despite the fact that their memory feats falsify much of our current understanding about the limitations of human memory. This year's Extreme Memory Tournament (XMT) was hosted at the headquarters of sponsors Dart NeuroScience, a pharmaceutical company developing memory-related therapeutic drugs, on the outskirts of San Diego. Ola Kåre Risa (in the cap) and Marwin Wallonius go head to head at the Extreme Memory Tournament Damon Cazares
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