Braden Adams is the reigning Canadian memory champion.
"I'm a normal dude still," he told CTV’s Your Morning from Chilliwack, B.C. "I'm just really good at memorizing things."
The three-time National Memory Championship winner set two new Canadian records during his 2022 victory, when he memorized a full deck of cards in 30.4 seconds and 474 digits in 10 minutes.
To accomplish mental feats like these, Adams uses the "memory palace" visualization technique, which dates back to ancient Greece and Rome.
"It's pretty simple," Adams explained. "You pick a place you're familiar with, you kind of imagine it in your mind, and then walk a set path through that area."
He gives the example of a grocery list: imagine putting carrots at the door of your home, then broccoli with your keys. As you go through the home, you would then mentally place different items throughout the house in the order you need to recall them.
"Set maybe five or 10 locations if you want," he continued. "And then when you're ready to recall that information, you just walk that set path, recalling all those images you placed around your house, and essentially that's how you could remember any type of information."
Before they were both eliminated, Adams was one of two Canadians to compete in the 2023 Memory League World Championship, which runs online from Jan. 8 to 29 and sees competitors memorize everything from cards to words to numbers in set periods of time.
In Aug. 2021, Adams memorized nearly 70 decks of shuffled cards to raise money for the Alzheimer Society of British Columbia, recalling all but four out of 3,640. He also teaches memory training strategies online, advertising himself as "the personal trainer for your mind."
"I wish I had known about these memory techniques earlier," he says on his website. "I would have had a much easier time with work and university. These tools are a serious game-changer, and now I’m determined to help others strengthen their minds so they can experience the freedom of a powerful memory."
