Today on Radio 2, Steve Wright interviewed a friend of ours, Ben Pridmore, currently the World Memory Champion. As well as asking him how he managed to remember things (by associating words or numbers with pictures or images), Steve read out a sequence of numbers, then later in the show asked Ben to recall them. He got most of them right, only forgetting the last 2.

Download the interview (memory.mp3 2mb)

Hats off to Ben - he's done something I'll never be able to do. I've got no chance of developing a memory like his - I keep getting 'senior moments' where I walk into a room and then forget why I went there. I've also:

• Opened the fridge door, and not remembered what I wanted
• Opened a web browser window and promptly forgotten what site I wanted to look at
• Gone to the supermarket and forgotten what I needed to buy
• yesterday forgot to bring my lunch with me to work. I went into the kitchen to empty the bin but forget to go into the fridge!

Update:
Sadly, Ben is no longer the World Memory Champion - he came 4th. As he mentioned in the interview, he didn't intend to enter this year. He was going to memorize pi but unfortunately was beaten to it by Akira Haraguchi who memorized it to over 80,000 decimal places.