in the netherlands, boris conrad sits down with a deck of cards and memorizes them. he s a top ranked memory athlete. he s also a neuroscientist. we all want to have a healthy brain through all of our lives. as the field of scientific research shows us, if you don t challenge your brain, your memory, the risk to get dementia or other diseases also increases. boris works at the donders institute in the netherlands with fellow neuroscientist martin dressler. their latest study, to understand the brains of memory athletes. we were interested in what makes a memory athlete on the neurobiology level. we do know that they use certain strategies but we don t know what happens in their brains.
robert fajamian from m.i.t. in boston. like martin and boris in the netherlands, he recognized a gap in the research. there is no scientific explanation for why that happens. so my interest has been trying to figure out not that this works, which has been known since the time of the ancient greeks, but why does it work? what excites me act thbout this this is the biggest behavioral phenomenon i ve seen, where anybody can do a minimal amount of training, say a half hour a day, for two to three months and all of a sudden, you can do things like memorize the order of cards and a deck of cards, that you would have sworn were not possible. what they are going to get is a person s name. person comes up on stage, gives their name. they will then give their date of birth. the day long competition is a true test of stamina. the weekly practices and focus training at the pizza restaurant paid off.
the study enrolled 23 top ranked memory athletes, including boris. he helped design a regimen for the participants to train like the athletes do for 30 minutes a day for six weeks. there was also a control group. the brains of all three groups were then examined through a series of mris. you can do a lot of different things. first we looked at the brain structure. we could see by size of brain did not differ from control group. we looked at activation during tasks, which part of the brain gets more active when you use such memory technique. we were surprised that the brain s structure actually doesn t differ that much from normal people. so there isn t any single structure, any single connection that really stuck out. the researchers found over the course of six weeks the brains of the newcomers to memory training began to resemble the memory athletes meaning this may not be a special talent we are born with but one that we can train our brains to do. what s hard for us to memo