You can learn to possess super-powerful memory: remember 500 words in 5 minutes

You can track the process of transforming from a "goldfish" brain into a champion brain.

An athlete competing in a memory contest looked like a normal person. They are even leaner than you, run slower and don't play basketball as well as you. However, when it comes to brain competitions, such as memorizing 500 characters in five minutes, they reveal themselves as superhuman brains.

Questions that have bothered scientists: Is the memory of these champions innate or practiced? And is the brain structure of memory athletes different from normal people? It turns out, scientists have concluded, anyone can own the brains of champions.

But how? Recently, a study published in the journal Neuron has proven to be solid: Learning and applying successfully the techniques of memory athletes will create large-scale changes in the brain. Therefore, if you persevere, those "goldfish brains" can become champions.

A memory athlete is preparing his cards.

The team is led by Associate Professor Martin Dresler, a neuroscience and cognitive scientist at Radboud University, Netherlands. He and his team used tests, combined with images that scan deep into the brains of memory champions, to compare them with a group of ordinary people.

The results showed that memory athletes have some very special connection patterns in the brain . That is something that ordinary people don't have. However, when ordinary people were put into a memory training program for a few weeks, they significantly improved their memory skills.

At the same time, special patterns of connections in the brain, similar to those of athletes, also began to appear. Notably, it is the result of a training session of only a few weeks, not every year.

In fact, many of us are always learning and cultivating new skills throughout our lives, not just stopping at the end of our college years. Scientists still often ask: Does our brain change if we go through the learning process when we grow up like that?

Some previous studies have shown, learning some more real skills has changed the brain. For example, research demonstrating that London taxi drivers have improved the amount of gray matter in the hippocampus (a memory-related brain region), when they learn skills to never lose the direction in the labyrinth of the city's intersections.

Does the brain change when going through the learning process at the time of maturity?

Dresler and colleagues collaborated with Boris Konrad, a professional memory trainer to find out if the same thing happened in athletes competing in memos:

Are the techniques they are practicing every day, to memorize tables full of cards or a set of binary numbers in minutes, that produce specific changes in the brain? And if so, how does that process happen?

In the first part of the study, scientists paired up 23 memory champions with ordinary people of the same age, gender and IQ. Both groups were monitored for brain imaging, through computerized tomography and magnetic resonance at two points: while resting did nothing and when they used memory.

The results show that the specific brain regions of memory champions are no different from the average group. Instead, there is only one difference that occurs in brain-connected models during magnetic resonance imaging scans, resting states and memory usage states.

For Dresler, these results suggest that there is no difference between the physical structure of the regions in the brain that allows someone to have superhuman memory. Something more sophisticated is the starting point of these capabilities, which prompted the research team to implement the second phase of the study.

Athletes in a memory contest.

In the second phase, the researchers recruited 51 people who had never participated in any form of memory training. Then, they divided the group into one group participating in the experiment and two control groups.

The trial team participated in 6 weeks of intensive memory training, with about 30 minutes a day of roadmap strategy training (Loci- a basic memory method, available hundreds of years ago but still used by the home memory champion). Specifically, they learned how to combine new information, such as numbers or names, with familiar furniture in their own room.

Control group 1 was involved in memory training with the n-back method, a method that does not use for long-term memory. And the control group 2 didn't receive any training.

After the training process, the researchers found that the experimental group significantly improved memory. While both control groups had no progress. Even so, none of the 51 people had a physical change in the brain structure.

Only thing, the training team with the method of Loci demonstrated brain connection patterns similar to those of professional memory athletes. This is noted on the magnetic resonance image in the resting state and using their memory.

" I think the interesting part is that you can not only improve your memory, according to the memory champions often use , " Dresler said. "But at the brain level, you will also observe the level of reflection of the effectiveness of the practice." You can track the process of transforming from a "goldfish" brain into the brain of memory champions.

By practice, a "goldfish" brain becomes the brain of memory champions.

James McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the University of California, said Dresler and colleagues' research is similar to what is found in London's taxi drivers.

However, there is an important difference: Instead of identifying a specific area of ​​the brain, the study finds an overall change in brain connections."All of our brains are very flexible at all times, and this is evidence to show that," he said. "If you learn something new and you learn well, your brain will change."

Craig Stark, a colleague of James at the University of California, agrees that research continues to prove: For humans, there is never a stop for learning."Research shows that learning something new changes your brain, and how you perceive, handle everything around. This will change the way you look at the world , " Stark said.