How to Develop Perfect Memory

concentration and performance is considerable. My body feels relaxed and I can think clearly and deeply. Sadly, though, the strict regime can sometimes fall by the wayside if I am successful, as I like to celebrate with a drink!

CHESS AND THE MEMORIAD One of the events at the first World Memory Championships (MEMORIAD) in October 1991 was to memorize as many moves as possible from a game of chess. Moves had to be remembered in sequence. We were each given five minutes to study the game and no mistakes were permitted. The moves, were listed on a piece of paper and had to be remembered in sequence.

I managed to recall the first 11 moves. In chess, one move includes the repositioning of a white piece and a black piece. In effect, I had memorized the first 23 individual moves (12 white, 11 black) without error. This was sufficient to win the event and helped me to win the overall championship.

After the MEMORIAD, questions were raised about the legitimacy of using chess as a memory test. Critics argued that those competitors who had a sound knowledge of chess had a distinct advantage over those who had no experience of the game. Accomplished players were familiar with the board, enabling them to visualize moves and remember them more easily.

I appreciated these objections, but I also knew that neither myself nor Jonathan Hancock, who came second, had been thinking of anything to do with chess as we memorized move after move. We had both been lost in our own mnemonic worlds, utterly divorced from the board and its pieces. While I was travelling around a castle in Ireland, Jonathan might well have been engrossed in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

ALGEBRAIC NOTATION No one knows for certain who invented the game of chess. Sir William Jones, writing in his eighteenth century essay 'On The Indian Game of Chess', suggested that it evolved in Hindustan. Known as 'Chaturanga', it consisted of elephants, horses, chariots, and footsoldiers. Chaturanga reached the Arab lands in sixth century AD (where it became known as Chatrang) and was taken up in the west a century later. One thing we can be sure of is that the Arabs, in the ninth century AD, devised the now universally accepted method of recording chess games.

'Algebraic notation', as it is known, divides the chessboard up into vertical ranks of numbers (1-8) and horizontal columns of letters (a-h), giving each of the 64 squares its own co-ordinates.