Unprecedented insight into memory champion’s brain reveals his tricks
Nelson Dellis holds his trophy after winning the annual USA Memory Championships in New York in 2011 DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images Nelson Dellis is a six-time US memory champion who once memorised the order of a shuffled deck of cards in 40.7 seconds and knows the first 10,000 digits of pi. Now, scientists have studied his brain in unprecedented detail, revealing how he achieved such feats and how we can acquire some of the same skills. Dellis claims he had an average memory until around 25 years old, when his grandmother’s decline from Alzheimer’s disease inspired him to start memory training for hours every day, including memorising numbers, names and words. “I still train my memory regularly,” he says. “It’s like a muscle; if you don’t use it, it fades.” While memory impairment – like that which occurs with dementia – has been widely studied, less is known about people with extraordinary memory. To address this gap, researchers – including scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri – have turned to Dellis. Dellis …









