Sentences with phrase «memory athletes»

Because the human brain is very good at remembering spaces, memory athletes catalogue and store their images in familiar mental spaces.

Among the top - ten memory athletes in the world a few years ago was co-author Boris Konrad, a professional memory trainer who is also a post-doc in Dresler's lab.

In this study, the strategy Dresler chose was memory of loci training, which is employed by most world champion memory athletes.

A study that was just published in the neuroscience journal Neuron compared 23 of the world's most successful memory athletes to 23 individuals whose memory capacities were typical, but who shared similarities in age, health status, and intelligence.

Most of the dedicated memory athletes Foer encountered seem not to have achieved outsized accomplishments either professionally or personally, and Foer's descriptions of his own gruelling training sessions are hardly appealing.

Rather, the differences they detected between memory athletes and non-athletes were in connectivity patterns spread across 2,500 different connections in the brain.

Interestingly, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans that were done before and after the memory training revealed that the practice had altered the brain functions of trainees, showing connectivity patterns in their gray matter similar to those of accomplished memory athletes.

People with normal memory more than doubled their recall by training with a spatial mnemonic technique used by memory athletes, and altered their brain patterns in the process.

World - class memory athletes can rattle off a hundred unrelated words, recite long lists of fictional historical dates, and recall complicated sequences of playing cards.

Brain scans before and after training showed that strategic memory training altered the brain functions of the trainees, making them more similar to those of world champion memory athletes.

To explore the effects of training on the brain, Dresler and his colleagues recruited 51 individuals similarly matched to the memory athletes, but with typical memory skills and no previous memory training.

«Not only can you induce a behavioral change, the training also induces similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in memory athletes.»

Konrad, who had become a memory athlete to improve his academic performance, helped connect Dresler to other top memory athletes for this study.

Martin Dresler at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and his colleagues recruited 23 of the world's top 50 memory athletes, and scanned their brains to identify features that might mark them out from the general population.

«It was already known from previous studies that the method of loci can considerably increase memory performance,» said Martin Dresler, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in the Netherlands and lead author of the study, noting that the loci method is used, without exception, by all world - class memory athletes.