The Only Skill that Matters: The Proven Methodology to Read Faster, Remember More, and Become a SuperLearner

by Jonathan A. Levi

But surely, the folks who succeed with these techniques have some type of genetic advantage. After all, the only reason that Michael Phelps has won so many gold medals is his freakishly long arms. It must be the same with competitive memory, right? Nope. In fact, a 2017 study by Radboud University sought to determine just that. For forty days, participants with average memory skills and no prior training spent thirty minutes a day practicing mnemonic techniques. At the end of the study, participants had, on average, doubled their memory capacity. What’s more, they were able to reproduce these results four months later—with no further training. Just to be sure, researchers compared the brains of five memory champions to “average” people using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In doing so, they expected to see notable differences in brain anatomy, similar to the differences between an athlete’s body and a nonathlete’s. What they found, however, really surprised them. The hardware was exactly the same. The memory athletes were just using their brains differently.