Memory Contest Comes To MIT, Where Brain Scientists Explain Why Training Works

Repeat memory champ Nelson Dellis, new record-breaker Xuanxi Yang of Hershey Middle School, and USA Memory Championship founder Tony Dottino (Courtesy of USA Memory Championship) For the last few months, 13-year-old Claire Wang of Los Angeles has been training her memory with playing cards, phone numbers, software — "whatever I can get my hands on," she says. She’s been buffing up her skills to compete in an annual sporting tournament where the athletes are not physical but mental. Known as the USA Memory Championship , the competition is in its 20th year and hosted for the first time this Saturday at MIT, which is also home to one of the biggest collections of brain scientists in the world. USA Memory Championship competitor 13-year-old Claire Wang of Los Angeles (Courtesy). "The point is, memory is a skill, it’s not an innate capacity," says Robert Ajemian, a research scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. "And that’s the message that we want to get out, both to the scientific community and to the lay community." Particularly, he adds, "since all of us would want to improve our memory in our own lives, and also, with the scourge of various forms of dementia, this needs to be investigated as a possibility to maybe ward it off." The evidence is inconclusive on whether memory training can help prevent dementia but it’s worth researching, Ajemian says; long-term studies could find that memory training helps defer cognitive decline just as physical exercise protects against heart disease, he says. Thus far, neuroscientists have paid little attention to the kinds of super-memorizers who compete in championships. But last year, a study in the journal Neuron scanned the brains of some of these "mental athletes" and did pick up some differences. It also found that […]

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