Fellow GoodReader Adrian recommended this to me and I read it fairly quickly. Foer is a journalist who, after covering the U.S. Memory Championships (yes, there is such a thing), decides to train to be a “mental athlete.” After about a year of training, he enters the following year’s competition and wins! He uses ancient techniques taught to him by European memory competitors (the U.S. lags far behind in this competition, routinely finishing near the bottom of the standings in the international events), which includes associating images with the items you are trying to remember and then placing them in a “memory palace.” Using these techniques, competitors can memorize the order of an entire deck of cards in about a minute. This would be cool to learn.