Designs, digits & dates: This memory athlete breaks records | Mumbai News – Times of India

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[google-translator]

It wasn’t the sun that made Uttarakhand’s Prateek Yadav cover his head in Mumbai last month. On entering an Andheri banquet hall on May 1, the Rishikesh-based engineering graduate put on his cap and stuffed an A4 sheet into it in a way that made the hovering cameramen disappear from his peripheral vision.
Paper visor on, the 29-year-old ‘athlete’ got down to the five tasks aka ‘disciplines’ at hand, one of which involved memorizing and recalling within five minutes a page full of 180 suspicious “historical” dates and events including ‘2027: French gets lost in China’, ‘1404: All beaches becomes red’ and, closer home, ‘1066: Mumbai renamed as Bombay’. At the end of five such five-minute cramming exercises–ahem–disciplines, when the announcer called onstage the “Virat Kohli of memory sports”, the A4 sheet came off but the cap stayed on.
The Maharashtra Open Memory Championship 2023 was the “T20 version” of the mindsport in which Yadav is now 12-time-national champion, three-time international grandmaster and holder of 18 national and three world records. Formally developed in the 1990s, memory sport competitions are events in which participants who are called mental athletes try to memorize and recall large assortments of information spanning decks of cards to fictional “historical” dates– typically have ten contests. In the recent state-wide contest organised by the World Memory Sports Council along with Growth Vidyapeeth, not many of the 77 participants were surprised when the memory coach from Uttarakhand broke a national record by mugging up and recalling 1206 binary digits in and smashed a world record by memorizing 168 random words–both within five minutes each.
Yet, “I don’t have superhuman qualities,” insists Yadav who once held the mehndi-sporting hands of 17 pink-sari-clad women on a Russian TV show, listened to each of them recite the name of their particular henna design–Milana, Gloria, Avanti, Uliana–and minutes later, when each of the hands reached out to him from behind a curtain, got just one name wrong. “Just as an athlete does physical training to get sharper and better, I do mental training,” says the 29-year-old “MA” (memory athlete) who became enchanted with the limitless potential of the brain in college when he read that Swami Vivekananda “could recite ten giant volumes of the encyclopedia by heart.”
An internet rabbit hole soon introduced the shy B-Tech student to the alternate universe of passionate German and Chinese practitioners of memory sports through a website called World Memory Statistics. Their strategies such as the ‘memory palace’ –a memory training technique dating back to ancient Greece–reminded him of the time an extortionist, armed with a bag filled with pins, would seek a ransom in Hinglish inside his head. In school Yadav had learnt all 195 country capitals from his Atlas by splitting their names and creating outlandish movie plots around them. “So, the Philippines became ‘Fill pins’ and Manila became ‘Money La’,” says Yadav, recalling the splinters that formed the visual of the pin-toting criminal.
All he had to do to master the art of the memory palace was to park such silly visuals along a series of familiar checkpoints such as TV, fridge, almirah, window that he can revisit in the same order. “The human brain is exceptionally good at remembering locations,” says the 29-year-old who would build and rebuild many memory palaces as an engineering student, especially in the daily 20-minute quiet window when his hostel mates would leave for dinner.
Since 2012, his go-to ‘memory palace’–extending from his building’s parking lot to his neighbour’s home–has housed and cleared thousands of random visuals, words, dates, faces, shuffled cards, spoken words and abstract images to winning effect. When his first nervous international flight took him to Singapore in 2015, Yadav returned with a gold after stowing away over a hundred fictional dates and events such as ‘1525: Aliens attacked earth’ in the palace.
Today, a month has passed since the Maharashtra contest and the digits and words have evacuated his memory palace. To keep his form, Yadav revisits the palace daily for about 30 minutes. “The more you stimulate the brain, the better it functions,” says the memory coach who believes just as physical training prevails in the age of food-delivery apps, training the mind in the age of reminder apps isn’t redundant but healthy.

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