Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

by Cal Newport

wasn’t born with an exceptional memory,” Kilov told me. Indeed, during high school he considered himself forgetful and disorganized. He also struggled academically and was eventually diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. It was after a chance encounter with Tansel Ali, one of the country’s most successful and visible memory champions, that Kilov began to seriously train his memory. By the time he earned his college degree he had won his first national competition medal. This transformation into a world-class mental athlete was rapid, but not unprecedented. In 2006, the American science writer Joshua Foer won the USA Memory Championship after only a year of (intense) training—a journey he chronicled in his 2011 bestseller, Moonwalking with Einstein. But what’s important to us about Kilov’s story is what happened to his academic performance during this period of intensive memory development. While training his brain, he went from a struggling student with attention deficit disorder to graduating from a demanding Australian university with first-class honors. He was soon accepted into the PhD program at one of the country’s top universities, where he currently studies under a renowned philosopher. One explanation for this transformation comes from research led by Henry Roediger, who runs the Memory Lab at Washington University in Saint Louis. In 2014, Roediger and his collaborators sent a team, equipped with a battery of cognitive tests, to the Extreme Memory Tournament ...

Memory Training as a Path to Supercharged Attention