Regular Humans Have Been Taught to Double Their Memory Capacity in 40 Days

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Most days, it's a struggle just to remember where you put your keys. But there are a few 'super-memorisers' in the population who can memorise huge lists of words at a time, or recite thousands of digits of Pi by heart.

Now, new research suggests that these super-memorisers aren't all that different to us, and that even average human brains can be taught the same skills with just a little over a month's training.

In fact, the brain of a person with average memory skills isn't structurally any different to the brain of a super memoriser, according to the new study, which means there's hope for all of us to boost our memory abilities.

To figure this out, researchers from Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands studied the brains of the 23 top competitors in the World Memory Championships - a competition where contestants try to recall more words off a list than the person next to them.

Oddly enough, the researchers found that the brain anatomy of these super-memorisers was nothing special compared to the average brains of 23 people of similar ages, health, and intelligence. But the World Memory Championship brains did show specific changes in brain connectivity - in other words, regions in their brains work together in different ways.

Because brain connectivity is known to be flexible, the team then tested whether average memorisers could be trained to significantly improve their memories.

After training 51 'normal memorisers' for 30-minutes a day over 40 days, the team found that one technique in particular saw participants' memory capacity more than double - going from recalling an average of 26 words from a list of 72, to an impressive 62.

Even more fascinating, their brain connectivity patterns were more similar to the World Memory Championships athletes than before. And four months after the experiment and brain training exercises, their recall performance remained high.

The research has been published in Neuron