Ed Cooke: The power of memory and how to train it
The British memory athlete Ed Cooke can easily remember numbers like this one. About the power of our memory.
The criteria Ed Cooke had to meet to become a Grand Master of Memory feel like they come from another planet. He had to memorise 1,000 numbers within an hour, remember the order of 10 decks of playing cards (i.e. the sequence of 520 randomly shuffled cards) in another hour, then commit to memory 52 cards in two minutes.
And as if that wasn’t enough, he didn’t do it all in the privacy of his own home, but at an official International Association of Memory (IAM) competition. This all sounds just a bit too unreal for a mere mortal, but it’s not for memory athletes like Ed Cooke. The goal is to memorise as much information as possible in the shortest possible time.
Ed Cooke resides and does research at Château du Feÿ in northern France.
© Chris Saunders
Now 43, Cooke became Grand Master in 2005, when he was just 23. His passion for competitive memory sport began early. “When I was 18 and studying psychology, I had to spend three months in hospital in Oxford,” Cooke recalls, “and I happened to come across a book by the then memory world master, Dominic O’Brien. To start with, I was memorising series of numbers to try to impress the nurses. But as I had 10 hours a day to kill, I got very good at it, very quickly.” This is typical understatement from the fast-talking Englishman. If you’re interested in mnemonics, you’ll have heard of him already.
I first became aware of Ed Cooke more than 10 years ago, when US journalist Joshua Foer wrote his New York Times bestselling non-fiction book Moonwalking with Einstein, about his attempts to win the US memory sport championships as an absolute beginner, with the then 24-year-old Cooke as his coach. I can’t corroborate Foer’s description Cooke at the time. He called him an eccentric dandy, a legendary party-starter who celebrated his own birthday in a home-made maze the guests had to crawl their way through. When I meet Cooke, he’s sporting a neatly trimmed moustache and answers my questions calmly while seated in front of a wall of books – but he still leads an unconventional life, no doubt about it.
Thinker commune
Cooke lives in Feÿtopia, a utopian commune you could describe as a 24-hour think tank. The residents, most of them artists or scientists, share a kitchen, lounges, gym and the countryside on the sprawling estate of the Château du Feÿ in Burgundy, eastern France, which Cooke’s wife runs as she tries to work out an alternative way for people to live together.
I immediately think that the château and its winding paths must be the ideal backdrop for the loci (Latin for places) memory technique. The technique all of Cooke’s feats of memory are based on has been known for more than two millennia. It is thought to have been invented in 500 BCE by the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos. The loci method entails storing chunks of information, such as series of numbers, along a mental route – a walk through the rooms of your home, say – and linking them to the most memorable images possible (see illustration). Cooke thinks that spatial organisation combined with what makes an image memorable – Cicero said that the association should be as extreme, funny or even as embarrassing as possible – picks up on something about the way we humans generally remember things.
The New York Times best-selling author described Cooke as a dandy, eccentric and legendary party-starter who celebrated his birthday with a home-made maze.
But back to Cooke’s career: “I competed in world championships for a few years after I was awarded my Grand Master title,” he says. “The people who took part were an experimental bunch who supported each other with their own tricks. In the ’90s, the fastest time in which anyone could memorise a deck of cards was around five minutes. A few years later, that had come down to 30 seconds.”
The memory events these athletes compete in are a decathlon of various disciplines, such as memorising as many binary and decimal numbers as possible or memorising a randomly generated set of words in 15 minutes. But there are also disciplines that require a completely different way of thinking, such as retaining pictures of faces and the names that go with them, or abstract images. Reigning world champion Tenuun Tamir of Mongolia says her personal best is remembering 1,122 digits in five minutes.
Cooke stopped wanting to chase these records after a few years: “To my mind, the interesting thing was never the speed at which you can memorise things but rather learning how all the aspects of our perception come together to create a memory of the world. I think we are human, mnemo-centric knowledge machines.” Translation: if mnemonics also has a place outside sports halls where the core community gets together once a year and it reflects the structure of human perception per se, Cooke thought, then it’s worth making the techniques known to a wider audience.
Brain training for the masses
In 2010, Cooke was able to put his passion for memory training into developing an app with neuroscientist Greg Detre that conveys the multisensory nature of memory to the bog-standard consumer, promptly becoming a start-up founder in the process. Memrise – which now has 72 million registered users – helps people learn a new language using tricks gleaned from mnemonics and neuroscience. With “spaced repetition”, Cooke explains, the learner is asked to memorise vocabulary at certain intervals, which, according to studies, improves memory. Initially, mnemonic images such as the ones used to memorise a deck of cards were also used. Now, the app relies more on incorporating situations that you might actually encounter abroad, such as dinner with a native speaker.
Memrise is by no means the only project Cooke is working on: his passion for training all aspects of consciousness and marketing the methods discovered in the process is all too apparent from the few hours we have been speaking. Cooke is bubbling over with ideas and has been ever since he was young, which you can see in his blog archive.
Remembering cards: A special Ed Cooke discipline.
© Chris Saunders
You could call him an early biohacker who was using behavioural therapy, attention modification and cognitive science methods before 2010 – like the alarm clock trick he developed where you train your mind to get up on time. “Even as a child, I was interested in things that could change your perception,” he says. Cooke thinks that his latest invention fits in perfectly with this home-grown tradition, too. Sonic Sphere is a portable, multisensory concert hall in spherical form where guests can immerse themselves in a 3D sound experience. It creates a memorable situation, very much in keeping with the Cooke credo.
In all these endeavours, however, there’s an elephant in the room. Memorising things hasn’t just gone out of fashion in the world of education; in the age of Google and ChatGPT, most people think the ability to memorise information is superfluous. Do we still need mnemonics in today’s world?
“The question had actually already arisen in the Middle Ages, when preserving knowledge meant copying individual manuscripts out by hand,” says Cooke. “Yet there were people who learnt huge passages of the Bible by heart, and even then there was criticism as to why someone would do something so seemingly nonsensical. Memory researcher Mary Carruthers says that these people wanted to carry the fundamental logic of the scriptures within them so as to be able to perceive God in the world, which is exactly what happens in professional training.”
What you store in your memory determines how look at the world.
Which means that looking something up is fundamentally different from knowing something already. Cooke explains: “What one carries in memory determines where and how long, and with what agenda, one investigates and examines things at all.”
Which is why Cooke isn’t pessimistic when it comes to technology. On the contrary, he believes that big data highlights the importance of memory. “It also explains why AI will never achieve infinite intelligence. Yes, it can memorise millions of times what a person can, but then it knows everything that people have ever thought and said, like a huge archive. I’ve even come up with a positive answer to such questions,” says Cooke, who then opens another app on his computer.
Ask Shakespeare
On MindMax, an interface appears where you can click on an extremely broad range of topics, from quantum computing to ancient civilisations. You can also enter any area in the search field that you would like to learn more about. Artificial intelligence then suggests tutors, who range from William Shakespeare to TV characters, to interactively give you an understanding of your chosen area in a somewhat absurd and literally strange way.
“I’ve only been working on it for a month,” Cooke explains as a virtual William Shakespeare explains my favourite sport – rowing – to me with a bizarre choice of words. It also creates constant new incentives for you to memorise otherwise dry data through unusual words, quizzes and other fictitious students in the digital classroom.
“It’s sensitising the mind to train us to pay attention to the right thing,” Cooke says. And since the ability to memorise hasn’t made itself redundant since the days of Simonides of Ceos, it probably won’t in the next 2,000 years either.