Abstract
Participants of the annual World Memory Championships regularly demonstrate extraordinary memory feats, such as memorising the order of 52 playing cards in 20 s or 1000 binary digits in 5 min. On a cognitive level, memory athletes use well-known mnemonic strategies, such as the method of loci. However, whether these feats are enabled solely through the use of mnemonic strategies or whether they benefit additionally from optimised neural circuits is still not fully clarified. Investigating 23 leading memory athletes, we found volumes of their right hippocampus and caudate nucleus were stronger correlated with each other compared to matched controls; both these volumes positively correlated with their position in the memory sports world ranking. Furthermore, we observed larger volumes of the right anterior hippocampus in athletes. Complementing these structural findings, on a functional level, fMRI resting state connectivity of the anterior hippocampus to both the posterior hippocampus and caudate nucleus predicted the athletes rank. While a competitive interaction between hippocampus and caudate nucleus is often observed in normal memory function, our findings suggest that a hippocampal–caudate nucleus cooperation may enable exceptional memory performance. We speculate that this cooperation reflects an integration of the two memory systems at issue-enabling optimal combination of stimulus-response learning and map-based learning when using mnemonic strategies as for example the method of loci.
Highlights
IntroductionParticipants of memory championships—memory athletes—exhibit a completely different scale of memory performance
People differ in their ability to memorise information
2 Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Munich, Germany 3 Human Neuroanatomy Laboratory, School of Medicine and Regional Centre for Biomedical Research, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain competitive interaction between hippocampus and caudate nucleus is often observed in normal memory function, our findings suggest that a hippocampal–caudate nucleus cooperation may enable exceptional memory performance
Summary
Participants of memory championships—memory athletes—exhibit a completely different scale of memory performance They are able to memorise more information quicker and more reliably than what is within the normal range of memory performance: Remembering 300 random words in only 15 min without a single mistake is not a feat one can just perform. One central pillar of their success is a mnemonic strategy that is known for its encoding efficacy since ancient Greece: the method of loci (Roediger 1980; Yates 1966). Users of this strategy mentally navigate a familiar route and at separate loci—distinct landmarks along the route— visualise placing the information there. This combination of map-based spatial memory and associative memory has repeatedly been demonstrated to enhance memory for a broad variety of information (Worthen and Hunt 2011)
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