Meet Indian Student Vishvaa Rajakumar, Memory League World Championship Winner
New York: Memory tests, one of the most common competitive items in Indian educational institutions, are associated with testing the memory capacity of individuals, especially the volume and the cognitive skills. Recently, a 20-year-old Indian student created history by winning the Memory League World Championship, where competitors race for memory challenges by rapidly memorising given objects.
Studying in Manakula Vinayagar Institute of Technology (MIT) in Puducherry, the 20-year-old Vishvaa Rajakumar memorised 80 random digits in just 13.50 seconds, suggesting an astonishing speed of nearly six digits per second.
A memory test prodigy, Rajakumar introduces himself as self-trained international memory athlete, with the details of myriads of achievements in his LinkedIn profile.
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Rajakumar is currently ranked first with a score of 5,000 as per the Memory League website. He has been practising various exercises to keep his memory power higher for a very long time.
During the competition, the contestants memorise the objects, including numeric, and after memorisation, they need to enter their answers on a recall sheet with complete accuracy. Rajakumar completed the challenge with 100% accuracy at a record speed while excelling in all other rounds, including image memorisation. Memory League World Championship monitors participants in various recall tasks, including numbers, words, and images.
Rajakumar Shares Techniques He Applied To Increase Memory Power And Cognitive Skills
Proving the adage ‘practice makes a person perfect,’ the achievement that came along the way of an Indian student in the international platform is not a luck or casual one, but the result of consistent training. Rajakumar uses several practice methods including the memory palace technique, an ancient method dating back to Roman times, to train his memory. The memory palace technique refers to associating pieces of information with specific locations, like rooms in a house. The person then mentally walk through them to recall information in sequence, strengthening memory power.
The visualisation of a large house and assigning memories to rooms, and mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, the seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain. Elaborating the memory palace method, the young memory prodigy said that his first location is his room where he sleep while his second location will be the kitchen. And the third location is all; fourth location is veranda; and, another location is his bathroom.
“Let’s say I am memorizing a list of words. Let’s say 10 words. What I do is, I take a pair of words, make a story out of them and place them in a location. And I take the next two words. I make a story out of them. I place them in the second location. The memory palace will help you to remember the sequence,” he said, adding that if he uses memory palace, he can easily remember which came first and which came second.
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The Rajkumar also attributed his performance to the water intake, corroborating the role of hydration in the memory performance. Staying well-hydrated increases internal vocalisation, expediting the memory. “Let’s say you’re reading a book. You’re not reading it out loud, but you are vocalizing within yourself. If you don’t drink a lot of water, your speed will be a bit low. If you drink a lot of water, it will be more and more clear and you can read it faster,” the New York Times quoted Rajakumar.
He now plans to start a memory training institute, imparting tricks to train memory and help increase its volume and improve children’s cognitive abilities through various techniques.
