Moonwalking With Einstein Part 8

Kim likes to be called the "Kimputer," but his full name is Laurence Kim Peek. "We named him after Laurence Olivier and Rudyard Kipling's Kim," says Fran. When Kim was born, after a difficult pregnancy, it was immediately clear that something was deeply off. His head was a third larger than normal and sprouted a fist-size blister on its backside that the doctors were afraid to remove. For the first three years of his life, Kim dragged his head on the ground as if it were loaded with a heavy weight. He didn't walk until he was four. His parents were urged to consider a lobotomy. Instead Kim was put on heavy sedatives until he was fourteen. Fran recalls that it was only when Kim was taken off the sedatives that he first started to show an interest in books. He's been memorizing them ever since.

But even though Kim has access to a larger store of knowledge than perhaps anyone else on the planet, he doesn't seem able to put it toward any end other than itself. He has an IQ of just 87. And no matter how many books of etiquette he may have memorized, his sense of what's socially appropriate is, to put it generously, esoteric. Standing in a crowd of people in the lobby of the Salt Lake City public library, Kim wrapped his thick arms around my shoulders and gripped me against his paunch and then forcibly gyrated against me. "Joshua Foer, you are a great, great man," he told me loudly enough to startle a pa.s.serby. "You are a handsome man. You are a man of your generation." And then he let out a deep roar.

How Kim can do what he does is a mystery to science. Unlike Dustin Hoffman's character in Rain Man Rain Man, Kim is not, apparently, autistic. He's far too sociable for that diagnosis. He's something else entirely. In January 1989, the same week that Rain Man Rain Man was released, a CT scan of Kim's brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It's an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn't at all clear. was released, a CT scan of Kim's brain revealed that his cerebellum, an organ crucial to sensory perception and motor function, was severely distended. An earlier scan had discovered that Kim also lacks a corpus callosum, the thick bundle of neurons that connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and allows them to communicate. It's an incredibly rare condition, but how it might contribute to his savantism isn't at all clear.

Kim and I spent the better part of our afternoon together sitting at a table in the back corner of the Salt Lake City public library's fourth floor, where he has spent almost every weekday of the last ten years reading and memorizing phone books. He took off his gla.s.ses and laid them on the table. "I'm just going to do a little scanning," he announced. I looked over his shoulder as he leafed through a phone book from Bellingham, Was.h.i.+ngton. I was trying to keep pace with his memory. I did what Ed would have coached me to do had he been there: I set up a memory palace and converted each person's phone number into an image, did the same thing with the first and last name, and then quickly tried to tie all those images together in a memorable way. It was hard work, and when I tried to explain it to Kim, he didn't seem to understand what I was talking about. Every time I'd get to the fourth or fifth name in the first column, he was ready to move on to the next page. I asked him how he was able to do it so quickly. He looked up from the book and peered over his gla.s.ses, agitated by my interruption. "I just remember!" he screamed. And then he reburied his head in a column of phone numbers, and ignored me for the next half hour.

One of the challenges of developing a theory to explain savant syndrome is that it expresses itself so differently in different individuals. However, there is one neuroanatomical anomaly that turns up again and again in savants, including Kim: damage in the brain's left hemisphere. Interestingly, the exaggerated abilities of savants are almost always in right-brain sorts of activities, like visual and spatial skills, and savants almost always have trouble with tasks that are supposed to be primarily the left-brain's domain, such as language. Speech defects are extremely common among savants, which is part of the reason that loquacious, well-spoken Daniel seems so extraordinary.

Some researchers have theorized that shutting off certain left-brain activities somehow liberates right-brain skills that had been latent all along. Indeed, people have been known to suddenly acquire savantlike abilities later in life, after a traumatic injury to the left side of the brain. In 1979, a ten-year-old boy named Orlando Serrell took a baseball pitch to the left side of his head and came to with a remarkable capacity to calculate calendar dates and remember the weather on every day of his life. Bruce Miller, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, studies elderly patients with a relatively common form of brain disease called frontotemporal dementia, or FTD. He's found that in some cases where the FTD is localized on the left side of the brain, people who had never picked up a paintbrush or an instrument can develop extraordinary artistic and musical abilities at the very end of their lives. As their other cognitive skills fade away, they become narrow savants.

The fact that people can become savants so spontaneously suggests that those exceptional abilities must lie dormant, to some degree, in all of us. There may be, as Treffert likes to put it, "a little Rain Man" hiding inside every brain. He's just kept under lock and key by the inhibitory "tyranny of the dominant left hemisphere."

Treffert further speculates that savants with exceptional memories may somehow hand over the duties of maintaining declarative memories, like facts and figures, to the more primitive nondeclarative memory systems, like those that help us recall how to ride a bike or catch a fly ball without consciously thinking about it (the same systems that allow the amnesic HM to draw in the mirror and EP to navigate his neighborhood without knowing his address). Consider how much mental processing must take place just to position one's hand to catch a fly ball-the instantaneous calculations of distance, trajectory, and velocity-or to recognize the difference between a cat and a dog. Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening.

But with enough effort those lower levels of cognition can sometimes be accessed. For example, when students are taught to draw, often the first two exercises they're made to master are tracing negative s.p.a.ce and contour lines. The aim of these exercises is to shut down the top-level conscious processing that can't see a chair as anything but a chair, and activate the latent, lower-level perceptual processing that sees it only as a collection of abstract shapes and lines. It takes a great deal of training for an artist to learn to deactivate that top-level processing; Treffert believes savants may do it naturally.

If the rest of us could turn off that top-level processing, would we become savants? There actually is a technology that can selectively, and temporarily, turn off parts of the brain. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, and it works by using focused magnetic fields to wreak havoc on the electrical firing of targeted neurons. The deadening effect can last for upwards of an hour. Although TMS is relatively new, it has been used successfully as a noninvasive means of treating problems as diverse as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and migraines. But in many ways, TMS's experimental potential is even more exciting than its therapeutic uses. There are obviously some intractable ethical problems with experimenting on the human brain. Since you can't go in and mess around with a living brain (HM taught us that), much of what neuroscientists have been able to learn about the brain has been the result of a few "natural experiments" caused by extremely unlikely forms of brain damage (like EP's). Because TMS allows neuroscientists to turn regions of the brain on and off at will, they can use it to perform repeatable experiments without waiting for someone to walk into their office with a rare lesion that just happens to affect the specific part of the brain they want to study. Allan Snyder, an Australian neuroscientist who popularized TMS as an experimental tool, uses the technique to temporarily induce savantlike artistic skills in otherwise normal people by targeting the left frontotemporal lobe (the same region that is often damaged in savants). After having the left temporal lobe zapped, subjects can draw more accurate pictures from memory, and can more quickly estimate the number of dots flashed on a screen. Snyder calls his device a "creativity-amplifying machine." He might as well call it the savant cap.

In the Brainman Brainman doc.u.mentary doc.u.mentary, I had watched Daniel divide 13 by 97 and give the result to so many decimal places that the answer ran off the edge of a scientific calculator. A computer had to be brought in for verification. He multiplied three-digit numbers in his head in a few seconds, and quickly figured out that 37 to the fourth power was 1,874,161. To me, Daniel's mental math seemed much more impressive than his memory.

As I began looking into the complicated subject of mental math, I learned that just like mnemonics, the field has its own vast literature, and even its own world champions.h.i.+p. Indeed, with a bit of Googling and a whole lot of practice, anyone can teach themselves how to multiply three-digit numbers in their head. It is by no means easy-believe me, I tried-but it's a skill that can be learned.

Though I asked him repeatedly on several occasions, Daniel refused to perform even a single mental calculation for me. "One of my parents' big fears was that I would become a freak show," he said when I pressed him. "I had to promise them that I wouldn't do calculations for people who ask me. I only do them for scientists." But he did perform some mental math for the cameras in Brainman Brainman.

As he was performing those calculations, I was struck by something odd that Daniel seemed to be doing with his fingers. While he's supposedly watching the answer crystallize in his mind's eye, the camera captures his index finger sliding around on the surface of the desk in front of him. Given his descriptions of shapes melting and fusing in his mind, that little bit of finger work just struck me as strange.

Talking to a few experts, I learned that anyone who has done mental multiplication might have suspicions about those sliding fingers. One of the most common techniques for calculating the product of two large numbers is known as cross multiplication. It involves doing a sequence of individual multiplications of single-digit numbers and then combining them together in the end. To my eye, this appeared to be what Daniel may have been doing on the table. Daniel denies this. He says it's just a fidget that helps him concentrate.

"There are a lot of people in the world who can do those kinds of things, but they're still pretty impressive," Ben Pridmore told me. In addition to competing on the memory circuit, Ben also competes in the Mental Calculation World Cup, a biennial contest in which partic.i.p.ants carry out mental calculations far more extreme than Daniel's, including multiplying eight-digit numbers without pencil or paper. None of these top calculators make any claims about seeing numerical shapes that fuse and divide in their minds' eyes. They all readily admit to using techniques detailed in countless books and Web sites. I asked Ronald Doerfler, author of one of those books, Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, Dead Reckoning: Calculating Without Instruments, to watch to watch Brainman Brainman and tell me what he thought. "I'm not fantastically impressed with any of that," he said of Daniel's mathematical talents, and added, "The lore of mental calculators is rife with misdirection." and tell me what he thought. "I'm not fantastically impressed with any of that," he said of Daniel's mathematical talents, and added, "The lore of mental calculators is rife with misdirection."

What about the fact that Daniel knows all the prime numbers less than 10,000? Even this doesn't impress Ben Pridmore. "Just basic memorization," he says. There are only 1,229 primes less than 10,000. That's a lot of numbers to commit to memory, but not compared to learning 22,000 digits of pi.

Calendar calculating, the only savant skill Daniel was willing to perform in front of me, turns out to be so simple that it really shouldn't impress anyone. Savants like Kim, who can tell you the date of every Easter in the last thousand years, seem to have internalized the rhythms and rules of the calendar without explicitly understanding them. But anyone can learn them. There are several very simple calendar calculation formulas, published widely on the Internet. It only takes about an hour of practice to become fluent with them.

The more Daniel and I talked, the more his own statements began to cast doubt on his story. When I asked him on different occasions two weeks apart to describe what the number 9,412 looked like, he gave me two completely different answers. The first time he said, "There's blue in there because it starts with a nine, and a drifting motion as well, and kind of like a sloping as well." Two weeks later, he said after a long pause, "It's a spotty number. There's spots and curves as well. It's actually a very complex number." Then he added, "The larger the numbers are, the harder they are to put into words. That's why in interviews, I usually concentrate on the smaller numbers." Indeed, synesthetes are never entirely consistent, and to his credit, Daniel described several smaller numbers consistently over the course of our meetings.

But what about those "Mindpower and Advanced Memory skills" courses that Daniel used to advertise on the WWBC? Back at his home in Kent, I handed him a printout of his ad from 2001 and asked him what I was supposed to make of it. If his extraordinary memory came to him entirely without effort and he didn't need to use mnemonic techniques, why was he selling a course on exactly that subject? He uncurled his feet from under him and put them back on the floor. "Look, I was twenty-two at the time," he said. "I had no money. The one thing I had experience in was competing in the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p. So I wrote a course on improving your memory. When I went to the world champions.h.i.+p, I found out that the people taught themselves to remember. None of them had good memories. I thought at the time that they were lying, but it did give me the idea that this was something you could teach. I was in a position where I had to sell myself. The only thing I thought was sellable was my brain. So I used Tony Buzan kind of stuff. I said, 'Expand your brain,' and that sort of thing, but I didn't like doing it."

"You don't use memory techniques?" I asked him.

"No," he a.s.sured me.

If Daniel had concocted his story of being a natural savant, it would have required a degree of mendacity that I couldn't quite bring myself to believe he possessed. If he was merely a trained mnemonist trying to cloak himself in the garb of a savant, why would he so willingly subject himself to scientific testing?

How could one ever know whether Daniel is what he claims to be? For a long time, scientists were skeptical that synesthesia even existed. They dismissed the phenomenon as fakery, or nothing more than lasting a.s.sociations made between numbers and colors in childhood. Despite all the case reports in the literature, there was no way of proving that something so seemingly far-fetched was actually taking place in someone's brain. In 1987, Baron-Cohen developed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, the first rigorous a.s.sessment of the condition. The test measures the consistency with which a purported synesthete reports color-word a.s.sociations over time. When Baron-Cohen administered a version of this test to Daniel, he pa.s.sed it with ease. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if any trained mnemonist would have been able to do as well. Other results from Daniel's scientific testing struck me as odd. When Baron-Cohen tested Daniel's memory for faces, he performed abysmally, leading Baron-Cohen to conclude that "his face memory appears impaired." That sounds like just the sort of thing a savant might be bad at. And yet when Daniel Corney competed in the World Memory Champions.h.i.+p, he won the gold medal in the names-and-faces event. It just didn't make sense.

One test that might help demonstrate Daniel's synesthesia more conclusively would be an fMRI scan. In many number-color synesthetes, you can actually see brain areas a.s.sociated with color processing light up when the subject is asked to read a number. When Baron-Cohen teamed up with fMRI experts to look at Daniel's brain, they didn't find this. Their test subject "did not activate extra-striate regions normally a.s.sociated with synaesthesia suggesting that he has an unusual and more abstract and conceptual form of synaesthesia," the researchers concluded. Were it not for the fact that he'd pa.s.sed the Test of Genuineness for Synesthesia, another reasonable conclusion might be that Daniel is not a synesthete at all.

"Sometimes people ask me if I mind being a guinea pig for the scientists. I have no problem with it because I know that I am helping them to understand the human brain better, which is something that will benefit everyone," Daniel writes in his memoir. "It is also gratifying for me to learn more about myself, and the way in which my mind works." When Anders Ericsson invited Daniel to visit FSU to be tested according to his own exacting standards, Daniel said he was too busy to make the trip.

The problem with all the tests given to Daniel is their null hypothesis-the working a.s.sumption that would be true if their alternative hypothesis were proven false: namely, that if Daniel wasn't a savant, then he must be just a regular guy. But what needs to be tested, especially in light of his unusual personal history, is the alternative possibility that the world's most famous savant might actually be a trained mnemonist.

About a year after my first meeting with Daniel, his publicist e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with him again, this time over breakfast at the stylish midtown hotel he was staying at in New York. He was in town to do an appearance on my first meeting with Daniel, his publicist e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with him again, this time over breakfast at the stylish midtown hotel he was staying at in New York. He was in town to do an appearance on Good Morning America Good Morning America and to promote his book, and to promote his book, Born on a Blue Day Born on a Blue Day, which had debuted in America in third place on the New York Times New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. nonfiction bestseller list.

After a cup of coffee and some pleasant chitchat about his life in the spotlight, I asked him again-for the third time-what the number 9,412 looked like to him. There was a flicker of recognition in his eyes before he closed them. He knew I hadn't pulled those digits out of thin air. He put his fingers in his ears, and held them there for two very long, uncomfortable minutes of silence. "I can see it in my head. But I can't break it down," he said, finally.

"Last time I asked, you were able to describe it almost immediately."

He thought about it a bit longer. "It would be dark blue, and it would be pointy, and s.h.i.+ny, with a drifting motion. Or I could picture it as ninety-four and twelve, in which case it would look like a triangle and this sort of shape." He made a kind of quadrilateral with his arms. His face was cherry red. "It depends on all sorts of things, like whether I heard the number OK, and how I decided to break it up. It depends on whether I'm tired. I make mistakes sometimes. I see the wrong number. I mistake it for a number that looks similar. That's why I prefer to do tests with actual scientists. There isn't the same stress."

I read back to him the descriptions he'd given me of 9,412 the last two times I'd seen him. They could hardly have been more different. I told him my theory, which I realized would be very difficult to prove: that he was using the same basic techniques as other mental athletes, and that he invented these far-out synesthetic descriptions of numbers to mask the fact that he had memorized a simple image to a.s.sociate with each of the two-digit combinations from 00 to 99-one of the most basic techniques in the mnemonist's tool kit. It was one of the most uncomfortable sentences I'd ever spoken to anyone.

For some time, I agonized over whether to include Daniel in this book. But late one night, not long before I was supposed to turn in a draft of this chapter, I decided to do one last Internet search for his name-just to see if I might have missed something, or at least to refresh my memory about a story that had been sitting in a folder in my filing cabinet for over a year. Somehow-and I don't know how I missed this before-I found a cached version of danieltammet.com, a Web site created in 2000 that hadn't been online for at least three or four years. The seven-year-old "About" page describing Daniel included a surprisingly forthright bit of autobiography that didn't make it into Born on a Blue Day Born on a Blue Day: My own interest in memory and conversely memory sport was sparked by my casual acquaintance with a children's book on broad memory concepts for better exam performance at the age of 15. The following year I pa.s.sed my GCSEs with some of the year's best results and subsequently performed well at A-level, mastering French and German along the way with the help of these tried-and-tested techniques ... My obsession with the sport grew, and following months of strenuous training and hard work I climbed into the World's Top-5 rated Memory sportsmen.

Earlier, I had also found something else, a series of messages posted several years ago from the same e-mail address used by Daniel Corney, but sent by someone named Daniel Andersson, who claimed to be "a well-respected and gifted psychic with more than 20 years of experience helping and empowering others." The messages explained that Daniel Andersson had received his psychic powers during a series of childhood seizures. There was a link to a Web site where you could arrange a phone reading with Daniel for "advice on all manner of topics, including relations.h.i.+p problems, health and financial matters, lost love and contacting those who have pa.s.sed over."

I asked Daniel what I was supposed to make of those e-mails. Six years ago he was claiming that his epileptic seizures gave him psychic powers. Now he was claiming that they'd made him a savant. "Do you see why someone might be suspicious?" I asked.

He paused to collect himself. "G.o.d this is embarra.s.sing," he said. "After I offered myself as a tutor and that wasn't successful, I read an ad for someone who could do psychic readings. You could work from home and use the telephone. That was ideal for me. I wasn't a psychic. I did it for about a year because I had no income otherwise. I was regularly told off, because I wasn't giving advice. I was mostly just listening. I treated it, start to finish, only as an opportunity to listen to people. With hindsight, I wish I hadn't done that work. But I was desperate. Look, life is complex. I never thought I would come into the public eye. I promise you that I've done tests for consistency with scientists who are well placed to determine whether I'm putting it on, and they're opinion-not just one scientist's opinion, crucially-is that I'm for real."

Toward the end of our final meeting, I told Daniel all the reasons I couldn't bring myself to believe that he, the world's most famous savant, was truly a savant. "I want to be convinced," I told him, "but I'm not."

"If I wanted to trick you, if I wanted to pull the wool over your eyes, I would practice immensely," he said frankly. "I would come out all guns blazing. I would jump through every hoop. But I sincerely don't care what you think about me. I don't mean that in a personal way. I mean that I don't care what anybody thinks about me. I know myself. I know what goes on in my head when I close my eyes. I know what numbers mean to me. These things are hard to explain, and hard to put into terms you can easily a.n.a.lyze. If I was some very good person at defending something, then I would think very carefully and make some great impression on you and everyone else."

"You have have made a great impression on everyone else." made a great impression on everyone else."

"People trust scientists and scientists have studied me-and I trust scientists. They're neutral. They're not media. They're not interested in writing a particular angle. They're interested in truth. With media, I am just who I am. Sometimes I'll come across very well, other times I will be more nervous, and I won't make such a good impression. I'm human. I'm inconsistent because I'm human. Of all the people who've interviewed me, you have treated me the most like a normal person. You've not idolized me. You've treated me on your level. I respect that. I feel more comfortable being a human than being an angel."

"That may be because I suspect you are just a normal person," I said. As those words came out of my mouth, I realized I didn't really mean them. What frustrated me about Daniel was that I knew he wasn't wasn't normal. In fact, the one thing I know I can say for certain about him is that he is exceptionally bright. I know how much work it takes to train one's memory. Anyone can do it, but not just anyone can do it to the degree that I suspected Daniel had. I believed Daniel was special. I just wasn't sure he was special in the way he was claiming. normal. In fact, the one thing I know I can say for certain about him is that he is exceptionally bright. I know how much work it takes to train one's memory. Anyone can do it, but not just anyone can do it to the degree that I suspected Daniel had. I believed Daniel was special. I just wasn't sure he was special in the way he was claiming.

I asked Daniel if, when he looked at himself in the mirror honestly, he really considered himself a savant.

"Am I a savant?" He put down his coffee and leaned in close. "It all depends on how you define the word, doesn't it? You could define 'savant' in such a way that I would be excluded from the definition. You could define it such a way that Kim Peek would be excluded from the definition. And you could define it in such a way that there would be no more savants in the world at all."

It all comes down to definitions. In his book Extraordinary People, Extraordinary People, Treffert defines savant syndrome as "an exceedingly rare condition in which persons with serious mental handicaps ... have spectacular islands of ability or brilliance which stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the handicap." According to that definition, the question of whether Daniel uses memory techniques would be irrelevant to whether he is a savant. All that matters is that he has a history of a developmental disability and can perform phenomenal mental feats. According to Treffert's definition, Daniel would indeed be a prodigious savant, albeit one whose disability is less p.r.o.nounced. However, what Treffert's definition does not capture is the clear difference between someone like Kim Peek, whose incredible abilities are apparently unconscious and perhaps even automatic, and someone who achieves those same skills through tedious, methodical training. Treffert defines savant syndrome as "an exceedingly rare condition in which persons with serious mental handicaps ... have spectacular islands of ability or brilliance which stand in stark, markedly incongruous contrast to the handicap." According to that definition, the question of whether Daniel uses memory techniques would be irrelevant to whether he is a savant. All that matters is that he has a history of a developmental disability and can perform phenomenal mental feats. According to Treffert's definition, Daniel would indeed be a prodigious savant, albeit one whose disability is less p.r.o.nounced. However, what Treffert's definition does not capture is the clear difference between someone like Kim Peek, whose incredible abilities are apparently unconscious and perhaps even automatic, and someone who achieves those same skills through tedious, methodical training.

As late as the nineteenth century, the term "savant" had an entirely different connotation than it has today. It was the highest epithet that could be bestowed on a man of learning. A savant was someone who had mastered multiple fields, who traded in abstract ideas, who "consecrate[d] their energies to the search for truth," as Charles Richet, the author of the 1927 book The Natural History of a Savant, The Natural History of a Savant, put it. The term had nothing to do with singular abilities or a prodigious memory. And yet over the last century the word's meaning has changed. In 1887, John Langdon Down, better known for the chromosomal disorder that bears his name, coined the term "idiot savant." The word "idiot," regarded as politically incorrect, eventually fell away. In a world in which our everyday memories have atrophied and we've become totally estranged from the idea of a disciplined memory, "savant" has gone from being a term of art and an emblem of intellectual accomplishment to being a freakish condition, a syndrome. You'd never hear a polymath like Oliver Sacks described as a savant today, though he, as much as anyone, meets the dictionary definition. Today, the word is reserved for people like the autistic twins that Sacks famously wrote about, who were supposedly able to count 111 matches the instant they spilled onto the floor. put it. The term had nothing to do with singular abilities or a prodigious memory. And yet over the last century the word's meaning has changed. In 1887, John Langdon Down, better known for the chromosomal disorder that bears his name, coined the term "idiot savant." The word "idiot," regarded as politically incorrect, eventually fell away. In a world in which our everyday memories have atrophied and we've become totally estranged from the idea of a disciplined memory, "savant" has gone from being a term of art and an emblem of intellectual accomplishment to being a freakish condition, a syndrome. You'd never hear a polymath like Oliver Sacks described as a savant today, though he, as much as anyone, meets the dictionary definition. Today, the word is reserved for people like the autistic twins that Sacks famously wrote about, who were supposedly able to count 111 matches the instant they spilled onto the floor.

So what about someone like Daniel? One of the oldest myths about savants is that they were destined to be born into this world as geniuses, but by some terrible twist of fate had all of their apt.i.tudes curtailed but one. I wonder about Daniel. I wonder what we would say about him if he was just a guy who had trained himself to memorize 22,000 digits of pi and to multiply three-digit numbers in his head. I wonder what we'd say if he'd achieved those things only through rigorous discipline and enormous effort. Would that make him more incredible than Kim Peek, or less? We want to believe that there are Daniel Tammets walking among us, individuals born into this world with extraordinary talents in the face of extraordinary difficulties. It is one of the most inspiring ideas about the human mind. But perhaps Daniel exemplifies an even more inspiring idea: that we all have remarkable capacities asleep inside of us. If only we bothered ourselves to awaken them.

ELEVEN.

THE U.S. MEMORY CHAMPIONs.h.i.+P.

There was to be a new event at the 2006 U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p, one never before experienced in the history of memory compet.i.tions. It was clunkily called "Three Strikes and You're Out of the Tea Party," and it had been dreamed up specifically to please the producers from HDNet, the cable network that would, for the first time ever, be airing the contest on national television. Five strangers, posing as guests at a tea party, would walk onto the stage and tell the compet.i.tors ten pieces of information about themselves-their addresses, phone numbers, hobbies, birthdays, favorite foods, pets' names, the make and model of their cars, etc. It was a test as true to the demands of real life as there had ever been in a memory contest. I had no idea how I would prepare for it, and frankly I hadn't thought much about it until just a month and a half before the contest, when Ed and I spent a pair of evenings on a transatlantic telephone call inventing a system that would allow me to quickly and easily file away all of that personal information in a specially designed memory palace set aside for each of the strangers.

I had constructed five imaginary buildings, one for each of the "tea party" guests. Each was built in a different style, but with a similar floor plan based around a central atrium and satellite rooms. The first palace was a modernist gla.s.s cube in the manner of Philip Johnson's Gla.s.s House; the second was a turreted Queen Anne of the type you see all over San Francisco, with lots of frilly scrollwork and ostentatious ornamentation; the third was Frank Gehry-esque, with wavy t.i.tanium walls and warped windows; the fourth was based on Thomas Jefferson's redbrick home, Monticello; and there was nothing special about the fifth except that all the walls were painted bright blue. Each home's kitchen would serve as the repository of an address. Each home's den would hold a phone number. The master bedroom was for hobbies, the bathroom was for birthdays, and so on.

Three weeks before the contest, after reviewing the scores I'd been sending him, Ed phoned to tell me that I needed to stop practicing all other events and begin focusing exclusively on the tea party. I rounded up friends and family and had them make up fictional biographies for me to memorize in my painstakingly appointed new palaces. Several unromantic dinners with my girlfriend were spent with her in character, telling me stories about her life as a Nebraska farmer or a suburban housewife or a Parisian seamstress, which I then recalled for her over dessert.

Then, one week before the champions.h.i.+p, just at the moment when I wanted to be training hardest, Ed told me I had to stop. Mental athletes always halt their training a week before contests in order to do a spring cleaning of their memory palaces. They walk through them and mentally empty them of any lingering images, because in the heat of compet.i.tion, the last thing you want to do is accidentally remember something you memorized last week. "Some compet.i.tors, when they get to a really high level, will not speak to anyone three days before a contest," Tony Buzan told me. "They feel that any a.s.sociation that enters their head could interfere with a.s.sociations they form in the contest."

The plan had always been for Ed to be ringside at the U.S. champions.h.i.+p. But shortly before the contest, he s.h.i.+pped off to Australia, where he'd been offered a unique opportunity to do philosophy research at the University of Sydney on the phenomenological issues raised by the sport of cricket. (He believes that the sport contains even better examples than chicken s.e.xers or chess grand masters to illuminate his thesis that our immediate perception of the world is powerfully shaped by memory.) Suddenly it was no longer certain that he would be able to make the much longer and more expensive trip from the other side of the earth.

"Is there any way I can mediate your disgust at my potential nonappearance?" he asked in an e-mail a couple days before the contest. The emotion I was feeling was not so much disgust as panic. Though I'd told everyone I knew that I was approaching the contest as little more than a whim-"a strange way to spend a weekend morning" was how I put it to a friend-the jokes I sometimes made at the expense of this "kooky contest" concealed the truth that I was dead set on victory.

Ed's last-minute decision to stay in Australia meant that I was on my own to worry about the other compet.i.tors, to speculate on how intensely they'd trained over the last year, and to wonder whether any of them were preparing to surprise us by unveiling a new technique that would take the sport to a level I could not reach. There was Ram Kolli, the cheery and insouciant defending champ, who I knew was the most natural talent of the group. If he had decided to train as hard as a European, the rest of us wouldn't have a chance. But somehow I doubted he had it in him. Mostly I fretted about Maurice Stoll. If anyone might have committed the time to developing a Millennium PAO system like Ed's, or a 2,704-image card system like Ben's, I suspected it would be Maurice.

The evening before the champions.h.i.+p, Ed e-mailed me one last piece of advice: "All you have to do is to savor the images, and really enjoy them. So long as you're surprising yourself with their lively goodness, you'll do just fine. Don't at any stage worry. Take it easy, ignore the opposition, have fun. I'm proud of you already. And remember, girls dig scars and glory lasts forever."

That night, I lay in bed obsessively marching through each of my palaces-first forward and then backward-and worrying about Maurice. I couldn't sleep, which, as Maurice himself had observed at the previous year's compet.i.tion, is for a mental athlete "like breaking your leg before a soccer match."

When I finally did get to sleep sometime around three a.m., with the a.s.sistance of some Tylenol PM, I had a terrifying dream in which Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman, my king and queen of spades, were riding around a parking garage for hours on a pony, the seven of spades, trying in vain to find where they'd parked their Lamborghini Countach, the jack of hearts. Eventually they and their horse melted into the asphalt, while Maurice Stoll looked on with a sinister Dr. Mengele cackle. I got up four hours later, bleary and dazed, and accidentally shampooed my hair twice-an ominous portent if ever there was one.

The first person I ran into when I got off the elevator on the nineteenth floor of the Con Edison headquarters was Ben Pridmore. He had flown in from England for the weekend solely to scout out the American field. At the airport in Manchester, he had splurged on a last-minute first-cla.s.s upgrade. "What else have I got to waste my money on?" he asked me. I looked down at his half-eaten leather shoes, whose soles were now almost entirely detached. "Good point," I said.

"The first event hasn't even started, and I've already lost," I told Ben. I explained about my insomnia and my redundant shampooing, and he seemed convinced that I had done myself no favors with those sleeping pills, whose chemicals, he said, were probably still swimming around in my bloodstream.

I downed two tall cups of coffee and, in truth, felt more jittery than tired. Mostly I just felt stupid for having so catastrophically screwed up the most important thing I needed to do in order to be compet.i.tive. Meanwhile, Maurice walked in wearing a Texas A&M Aggies baseball cap and a paisley s.h.i.+rt, looking far perkier than he had last year. And frighteningly confident. He recognized me from across the room, and strode straight over to shake my hand and introduce himself to the legendary Ben Pridmore.

"You're back," Maurice said to me. It was an a.s.sertion, not a question. To the extent that I had a strategy, it was to sneak up on Maurice and surprise him. But apparently he'd already been briefed on me. Somebody must have informed him that I'd been training with Ed Cooke.

"Yeah, I thought I'd try competing this year," I said nonchalantly, and pointed down at my name tag, which read "Joshua Foer, Mental Athlete." "It's kind of like a journalistic experiment."

I asked, "How are your numbers looking this year?" I was probing him to see if he'd upgraded his system.

"They're good. And yours?"

"Good. What about cards?"

"Not bad. You?"

"I should be all right in cards," I said. "Still using the same systems as last year?"

He shrugged a nonreply and asked me, "How did you sleep last night?"

"What?"

"How did you sleep?"

Why was he asking me that? How did he know about my insomnia? What kind of head games was Maurice trying to play? "Remember, last year I didn't sleep so good," he continued.

"Yeah, I remember that. And this year?"

"This year, I slept just fine."

"Josh needed sleeping pills," said Ben helpfully.

"Yeah, well, they're basically a placebo, right?"

"I tried to take sleeping pills one time in practice, and I fell asleep the next morning memorizing numbers," said Maurice. "You know, lack of sleep is the enemy of memory."

"Oh."

"Anyway, good luck today."

"Yeah, good luck to you, too."

New this year was the gaggle of TV cameras buzzing about the room and the play-by-play a.n.a.lysts-the boxing announcer Kenny Rice and his color man, the four-time U.S. champ Scott Hagwood-perched in front of the stage on director's chairs. Their presence lent the contest the surreal quality of a mock.u.mentary. Did I really just hear Rice describe the contestants as having "taken mental prowess to a whole new level"?

Unlike the international compet.i.tions I'd been to, where compet.i.tors spent the moments before a contest isolated between a pair of earm.u.f.fs or juggling to warm up their brains, the U.S. compet.i.tors all milled about making small talk, as if they were about to take a test no more demanding than an eye exam. I sequestered myself in a corner, inserted my earplugs, and tried to clear my mind like a proper European mnemonist.

Tony Dottino, a slim, silver-haired, and mustachioed fifty-eight-year-old corporate management consultant, stood at the front of the room to introduce the contest. Dottino founded the U.S. Memory Champions.h.i.+p in 1997 and has run thirteen of them ever since. He is one of Tony Buzan's American disciples. Dottino makes his living consulting with companies like IBM, British Airways, and Con Edison (hence the unlikely location of the champions.h.i.+p) about how their workforces can be made more productive through the use of memory techniques.

"You are the folks telling people in our country that memory is not for geeks," he declared. "You will be the models that people will come to follow. We're like little infants in terms of writing the history of these events. You"-he pointed at us with both index fingers-"are writing the history books." I tuned out for the rest of his speech, put my earplugs back in, and took one last walk through each of my palaces. I was checking, as Ed had once taught me, to make sure all of the windows were open and good afternoon sunlight was streaming in, so that my images would be as clear as possible.

Among those of us who would contribute to "writing the history books" were three dozen mental athletes from ten states, including a Lutheran minister from Wisconsin named T. Michael Harty, about a half dozen kids from Raemon Matthews's Talented Tenth, and a forty-seven-year-old professional memory trainer from Richmond, Virginia, named Paul Mellor, who had run a marathon in each of the fifty states and had been in New Jersey the previous week teaching police officers how to quickly memorize license plate numbers.

The big guns were all put behind desks in the back row. These were the folks that Dottino had predicted might make a run at the t.i.tle. I was flattered to be counted among them, albeit in the last seat at the end of the row. (Dottino and I had spoken several times over the previous year, and I'd kept him updated on my practice scores, so he knew I had a sporting chance.) The lineup included a compact thirty-year-old software engineer from San Francisco named Chester Santos, who goes by the nom de guerre "Ice Man," which hardly befits his soft-spoken, aw-shucks manner. He'd finished in third place the previous year. I had a strong suspicion that Chester didn't like me very much. After I'd written my original article for Slate Slate about the previous year's U.S. champions.h.i.+p, I was forwarded an e-mail he'd penned to Tony Dottino. In it Chester complained that my piece was "HORRIBLE" because I had made Lukas and Ed "sound awesome," while the U.S. compet.i.tors came off as "complete amateurs and slackers." That I now had the impudence to go head-to-head with him after just a year's training must have seemed like the ultimate insult. about the previous year's U.S. champions.h.i.+p, I was forwarded an e-mail he'd penned to Tony Dottino. In it Chester complained that my piece was "HORRIBLE" because I had made Lukas and Ed "sound awesome," while the U.S. compet.i.tors came off as "complete amateurs and slackers." That I now had the impudence to go head-to-head with him after just a year's training must have seemed like the ultimate insult.

From the sidelines, I heard Kenny Rice say, "It must be intimidating, much like the weekend athlete who wants to take on LeBron James in a game of one-on-one." I figured he was talking about me.

Though every other national memory champions.h.i.+p in the world is sewn together from approximately the same standard set of events, according to the same standard set of rules established by the World Memory Sport Council, the United States does things slightly differently. In the international events, everyone's scores are added up at the end of the tournament to determine the winner, but the U.S. champions.h.i.+p is less straight forward. It consists of a preliminary morning round of four cla.s.sic pen-and-paper disciplines-names and faces, speed numbers, speed cards, and the poem-that are used to select six finalists. Those six finalists then compete in the afternoon in three unique television-friendly "elimination" events called "Words to Remember," "Three Strikes and You're out of the Tea Party," and "Double Deck'r Bust," which whittle the field down until there is only one United States memory champion left standing. national memory champions.h.i.+p in the world is sewn together from approximately the same standard set of events, according to the same standard set of rules established by the World Memory Sport Council, the United States does things slightly differently. In the international events, everyone's scores are added up at the end of the tournament to determine the winner, but the U.S. champions.h.i.+p is less straight forward. It consists of a preliminary morning round of four cla.s.sic pen-and-paper disciplines-names and faces, speed numbers, speed cards, and the poem-that are used to select six finalists. Those six finalists then compete in the afternoon in three unique television-friendly "elimination" events called "Words to Remember," "Three Strikes and You're out of the Tea Party," and "Double Deck'r Bust," which whittle the field down until there is only one United States memory champion left standing.

The first event of the morning was names and faces, which I'd always done pretty well with in practice. The point of the game is to take a packet of ninety-nine head shots and memorize the first and last name a.s.sociated with each of them. One does that by dreaming up an unforgettable image that links the face to the name. Take, for example, Edward Bedford, one of the ninety-nine names that we had to remember. He was a black man with a goatee, a receding hairline, tinted sungla.s.ses, and an earring in his left ear. To connect that face to that name, I tried to visualize Edward Bedford lying on the bed of a Ford truck, then, deciding that wasn't distinctive enough, I saw him fording a river on a floating bed. To remember that his first name was Edward, I put Edward Scissorhands on the bed with him, shredding the mattress as he paddled it across the river.

I used a different trick to remember Sean Kirk, a white guy with a mullet, sideburns, and the c.o.c.keyed smile of a stroke victim. I paired him up with the Fox News anchor Sean Hannity and Captain Kirk of the Stars.h.i.+p Enterprise, and painted an image in my mind of the three of them forming a human pyramid.

After fifteen minutes of the contestants staring at those names and faces, a judge came by and picked up our packets, and handed us a new bunch of stapled pages, with the same set of faces arranged in a different order, and this time, with no names attached. We had fifteen minutes to recall as many of them as possible.

When I put down my pen and handed in my recall sheet, I a.s.sumed my score was going to be somewhere near the middle of the pack. The names of Sean Kirk and Edward Bedford had come right back to me, but I'd blanked on the cute blonde and the toddler with the French-sounding name, and a handful of others, so it was hard to imagine I'd done all that well. To my surprise, the 107 first and last names I was able to recall were good enough for a third place finish, just behind Ram Kolli, who memorized 115, and just ahead of Maurice Stoll, who did 104. The winner of the event was a seventeen-year-old compet.i.tive swimmer from Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, named Erin Hope Luley, who'd managed an impressive 124 names, a new U.S. record and a score that would have gotten a nod of respect even from the top Europeans. When her number was announced, she stood up and waved sheepishly. I looked over at Ram, and caught him looking back at me. He lifted his eyebrows as if to say, "Where'd she come from?"

The second event of the morning was speed numbers, always my worst. This was the one event where Ed's coaching had given me little advantage-because I had largely ignored Ed's coaching. He had been prodding me for months to develop a more complicated system for numbers-not quite the "64-gun Man of War" Millennium PAO system he had spent months working on, but something at least a step ahead of the simple Major System that most of the other Americans would be using. I'd indulged him and developed a PAO system for all fifty-two playing cards, but I never got around to doing the same for every two-digit combination from 00 to 99.

Employing the same Major System as the rest of the mental athletes, I used my five minutes of memorization time to go for what I figured was a very safe ninety-four digits-mediocre even by American standards. And still I managed to get the eighty-eighth digit mixed up (instead of Bill Cosby, I should have seen a family playing an oversize version of Milton Bradley's Game of Life). I blamed my poor showing on Maurice, whom I had heard even through my earm.u.f.fs gruffly yelling, "Enough with the pictures already!" at a press photographer who was circulating in the room. Still, my eighty-seven digits left me in fifth place. Maurice had banked 148, a new U.S. record, and Ram had finished in second with 124. Erin was way down in eleventh place, having remembered just fifty-two digits. I got up, stretched, and had a third cup of coffee. "They're known as MAs, or mental athletes," I heard Kenny Rice earnestly tell the camera, "but at this point in the compet.i.tion, MA could stand for something else: mental anguish."