Welcome to Braden Adams' memory palace

Chilliwack’s Braden Adams knows how to flex his muscles. He trains. He strategizes. He has world records he aspires to break. His competitions, however, aren’t as spectator-friendly as hockey games or tennis matches.

Adams is what people in the competitive remembrance circuit call a memory athlete—someone who memorizes card decks and lists of numbers in pursuit of competitive excellence. This November, Adams won his sixth consecutive Canadian championship, memorizing 605 numbers in 10 minutes, 294 images in five minutes, and numerous fake facts. He has also been dubbed the “showman of memory sports” and applauded for his entertaining style in a field that is often lacklustre for audiences. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEKuY-8KRU0

But even after breaking his own Canadian records this year, he has bigger goals in mind—record-shattering feats on the world stage that he believes he can accomplish with enough practice (and a plane ticket to Europe).

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Fraser Valley Current: We got an email from the organizer of the National Memory Championship about your recent win there and I found it super interesting. It made me think of the book Word Freak, which is all about the competitive Scrabble scene. And this seems like another kind of example of a competitive community that most people don't even know exists. How did you get started in competitive memory sports?

Braden Adams: My testimony, or whatever you want to call it, is similar to a lot of memory athletes. [I got] the book Moonwalking with Einstein for Christmas in 2015 … I read it faster than anything I'd read as an adult. So the competitive person in me was like, ‘I wonder if there's a scene in Canada.’

I found out there was, at the time, a relatively small [scene]. There's a Canadian Memory Championship. So I looked into that. I registered for the BC Memory Championships, which were occurring two months down the road. So I got to work. I created a card system. Within a few weeks of doing that, I was able to memorize my first deck of cards. I worked really hard at it. I won the BC Memory Championships back then, which was really crazy to me. If you had told me a few months before that I'd be doing this, I would have been like, whoa.

That first win sparked a cavalcade of competitions for Adams. The following year, he entered and won the BC Memory Championships, and went on to place second in the nationals. After that, he told himself he was never coming in second place again.

So far, that has been the case. Adams currently holds national records—having memorized 605 digits in 10 minutes and 326 images in five minutes—and has won six national competitions across two memory sport associations.

FVC: What is the vibe at the memory championships? Are you going there and there's a whole bunch of people and you're all standing on a stage, memorizing things?

BA: No. What you're describing there, that's like the US memory championships. They make a pageantry out of it. …. Ours [the Canadian championship] follows the traditional format that the other international organizations would do, where we're all gathered in a classroom, basically. We're sitting at a desk memorizing.

In short, the Canadian championships, organized by the Canadian Mind Sports Association, are dull to watch. The American competitions are much more spectator-friendly, Adams said, with participants competing in qualifier rounds before heading onto a stage for the finals. Some “memory elitists,” as Adams called them, don’t consider the American championships a true memory sport.

Canadian competitions, and most international challenges, are also in-person events, but much less audience-focused. The competitors meet in person for a weekend of mini events. The competitors spend time, sometimes more than an hour, studying sheets of information before putting the book away and writing down their answers. (“It looks like people just studying and writing a test, really,” Adams said. “I wish we could show what’s going on upstairs, because I could probably blow people’s minds.”)

One international competition that does place a priority on spectators: Memory League, which has its own channel on Twitch—the platform many gamers use to share streams of their video games. Memory League participants compete one-on-one to see who has the best recall. There are playoff matches, scoreboards, and eager viewers wanting to see how the best in the league can memorize their information so quickly.

Adams prefers “long-card” events in which a person tries to memorize as many decks of cards over a set period of time—between 10 minutes to an hour, depending on the competition.

FVC: Why does card memorization appeal to you?

BA: I feel like I was built to do those events. Most people don't like the long events. They're hard, right? They're very mentally taxing. I love cards and the long card events. I practice very minimally.

I did a charity event back in 2021, in August, for the Alzheimer Society of BC. There are estimates where there's about 70,000 people in BC that have some form of dementia. I've been affected in my own life: my granddad passed away, my wife has had family members with dementia. It’s affected both of us. So I wanted to do a charity thing. I decided, with the 70,000 in mind, I was going to memorize 70 decks of cards. And it wasn't like, memorize the deck, recall it, memorize the second deck. No, I was going to memorize all of them, hit the submit button, and then recall all of them. So way, way different.

Leading up to it, I started building up my tolerance, my mental capacity. So I was practicing 10-minute cards and then 30-minute cards for a few weeks, and then hour cards. I even did a two-hour one. And I stream all my training [on Twitch], I hit all these personal bests, and in doing this, I was like, ‘Holy cow. This is fun.’ Which is psycho because, again, it's very mentally draining and very mentally taxing. But I was good at it. I've only attempted those long trials during this training, as I was building up this event. So I think if I stuck more time into it, I could do really good.

The memorization [for the charity event] took nine and a half hours. Then the recall took about five. I have a video of it up on my YouTube. And … out of 3,640 cards. I got 3,636 correct. I had a card swap on Deck Five. I had two cards just flipped, and I had a card swap, same thing, on Deck 57, and that was it. So out of that many cards, I had four misplaced. So I got 68 decks completely correct.

…

When I did that, I was like, ‘Okay, I could do this. I think I could. I could break some world records.’

That was a few years ago now and my kids were very young at the time when I did that. So now that they're older, maybe I can start working towards this. But it's something that I've been thinking about more lately. I don't know what that'll look like, or how I'll do that, but there's something I think about.

How he does it

FVC: Let's take a moment here to pivot to how you actually go about remembering this, and I'm afraid I'm going to start with a pop quiz. I mentioned the title of the book at the beginning of the interview. Do you remember what book that was?

BA: Word, something.

FVC: Close, yeah. It was Word Freak.

The reason why we wanted to ask was not to necessarily put you on the spot and say, ‘We got you; you can't remember it.’ But a question we had is: are you thinking about your everyday life in the same way that you're memorizing these cards? Is it just that you just have amazing short-term memory, or is it something different? How do you go about memorizing things?

BA: These are great questions. What your question demonstrated was that these techniques are great when you're consciously, actively trying to memorize information. Generally speaking, aside from this, my natural memory has always been pretty good, so that's why this stuff was really appealing to me; because I was like, ‘Oh, I thought my memory was good.’ And I read about all these freaks memorizing all this stuff, like ‘I could do this.’ It was almost like I was self conscious about it.

It turns out, a lot of memory athletes like to joke that they're memory normally sucks. That's a common joke. So anyone can learn to do this.

It's hard …. The reason I remembered the one word [was] because I remember being surprised by the name. But you would think I would remember the word Freaks over the word Word, right? So I don't know what about that stood out to me, but had I known that I needed to remember that, then I would have just come up with some sort of visual cue.

If I'm not dialed in, I'm not focused, I'm not actively memorizing things, yeah, I forget stuff. Because I'm not using those tools all the time. So do I use it in everyday life? I do when I need to, but I don't always, and then sometimes I forget stuff because of it. If you're trying to commit every second of your life to this, you wouldn't get anything done. We have working memories for a reason. Some people's [memories] are really bad, but generally you know you should lean on [your working memory] when you can.

FVC: Now that we've talked about the difference between actively memorizing things and just having a decent memory in general, what are the methods that you use for memorizing cards, numbers, or images? What are the systems that you have in place to do that?

BA: I'm not going to get into the weeds. I did do a two-and-a-half hour interview on a Spotify podcast I was on, and that one I got way, way, way, way, way into it.

I'll give you a short version. The pillar of memory sports is using memory palaces. So that's the first thing we should probably talk about.

Joshua Foer’s book [Moonwalking with Einstein] is where I learned that. It's a very basic concept, like the show Sherlock. He calls them mind palaces or something—something different, but it’s the same idea. Basically, it's a way to store information and recall it easily using our visual memory, visual spatial parts of our brain, which is why it's so easy to remember stuff.

I always use the very easy example of a shopping list. Now, the order of a shopping list isn't really important, but memory palaces are great, especially when the order of the information is key. So if I keep memorizing an order of events or a phone number, that's kind of important, the order of the digits matter. But generally speaking, even if the order is unimportant, if it's a thing where the information needs to be recalled, they're still great.

We would make a memory palace out of somewhere familiar to us. So use your home. Pick a place that you know very well. You [mentally] walk through it in an order that makes logical sense. You don't want to just pick a random order. So you walk through it, and let's say you start at the front door and the first item on your grocery list is [eggs].

You can imagine this a bunch of ways. You can imagine, literally, the eggs sitting there. I add human features to it. It's ringing the doorbell. Or I can imagine a bunch of kids throwing eggs at the front door, like a bunch of pranksters. Then you walk in and there’s the foyer. My coats are hung up, my shoes. Okay, the next thing is, I need to get a jug of milk. So I'd imagine pouring a bunch of milk all over that stuff, which would be awful. I'd be filling up my shoes with milk. Then maybe I'm just putting my shoes on, and I'm gonna get all squishy, and how gross that would be. So that would remind me to get milk.

The next location is, in my home, I turn right and my kitchen's right there. So I can imagine, I open the fridge, and the next item is a bunch of peanut butter. And I just imagine peanut butter just smeared everywhere in there. And I'm like, ‘Oh, I'm pretty hungry.’ And I can grab the next item that I need, which is bread. I could even take the bread and scrape [the peanut butter] off my fridge, start eating it.

You can get really gross or as weird or wacky as you want, as long as you make it a combination of memorable things, getting your senses involved whenever possible. A lot of people prefer violent or gross imagery, which I don't recommend to everyone, but it works.

Let's just say that's our list right now. It's very basic, but we're starting at the beginning. I’m gonna close my eyes. What's my first location? Oh yeah, it's my front door. What was that my front door? Oh yeah, bunch of kids were throwing eggs at my door. I need eggs. I walk in, put my shoes on. There's milk everywhere, because I visualized it in detail. So the next item is milk, and so on, right? And then we add peanut butter in the fridge. I needed bread, so I wiped the bread on it. And then you can keep going through your home that way, and you're just placing items.

In the case of cards or numbers, I have images associated with different combinations of those things, right? For numbers, I have a unique image from every digit from 000 to 999. I use the major system, so each digit from like zero to nine represents a different consonant, and then a constant sound. So when I get three digits together, you kind of fill in the vowels, and then you make up your own words. It's not always clean, and sometimes it's kind of clunky. So there's probably 20 or 30 where it doesn't really make sense, [and] I've just had to fudge some of the sounds. But generally speaking, it works for a large combination of the images—like 70% or 80%. So ask me a random number.

FVC: 978.

BA: So nine makes a P or B sound. Seven makes a hard G or K. An eight is like F or V. So in that one, I use Pig, and then the letter F is short for the word farm. I just imagine a bunch of pigs. So if I'm memorizing 978 at my door, I imagine a bunch of pigs running around, ringing the doorbell, knocking the door down, or something like that. Then when I walk through my palace—I'm like, Okay, there's a bunch of pigs there. Oh yeah, 978. So I know that 978 was the first group of digits, right?

Cards? Same thing. I have a unique image for every pair of cards. I use what's called the shadow system. … It’s the same idea—each pair has its own image associated with it. So 978 in my cards translates to … either seven of diamonds [and] eight of clubs, or seven clubs [and] eight of diamonds. But that spells the same image, 978, to me.

FVC: It sounds like there's a lot of systems that people have agreed upon, and lots of people use, but it sounds like this is a very personal, very imaginative way to remember.

BA: It's complex. Before I made this system, I didn't always have a huge system. I used the PAO—person, action, object—system when I first got into memory sports. That's what Josh Foer used in his book. So each card, each two digits, has its own person, action, and object associated with it. My old ace of spades, back in the day, was Lemmy from Motorhead. [Editor’s note: Motorhead’s most famous song is called Ace of Spades.] And I can't really remember what my other single cards were, but let's pretend the six of hearts was Michael Jordan shooting a basketball. And then the 10 of diamonds was a goalie and his object is a hockey net, or something like that.

So we can reverse that all. If the order of the cards was ace of spades, six of hearts, 10 of diamonds, it would be Lemmy shooting a basketball into a hockey net. So you're using the person from that set, the action of the next thing and the object to the next thing, and you're making a unique image set.

That's the most popular of the simple card and number systems. And that got me by for a while. In speaking to other people, they're like, ‘If you're serious, this is a marathon. It's not a sprint.’ A two-card system, a three-digit system, it's a pain in the butt. It's a lot of work to build and then learn it and then start using it, and then get good at. It was a whole journey in itself. I started from scratch. I took a year off of competing and just worked on that, but it has changed everything for me.

I didn't take it from someone else. I built all the images myself. I got ideas from some people, but the images are personal to me—that's important, because if you just take an image set from someone else, some of those images, some of those cultural references, those things don't mean anything to you, right? So you want the images to have meaning to you. So that's an important part of it.

FVC: We're almost out of time here, but this has been a quick foray into a world that I know is totally unknown to a lot of people. But in the near future, what is something that you hope you'll be able to accomplish with your memory sports?

BA: Just making it more popular. I think eSports has really taken off in the last five or six years. I see arenas full of people cheering them on. This is in the UK, but there’s guys throwing darts. And there's fans that show up with signs and they're probably wasted, and it's like a sporting event, they're going nuts. … I'm like, ‘How do we do this with memory sports?’ I just hope to help grow the sport. I think it's fun, it's awesome. But it's also one of those things that anyone can learn to do. Again, there's limits. Some people may not be able to be a world champion at it, but anybody can practice this stuff and get good at it fast.

I know not everyone wants to compete, but these are things that apply to everyday life. People use this stuff at work, at school, etc. So growing the sport, I think would be awesome on top of my own personal accomplishments that I want to achieve.

I'm not happy really with any of the national records I still hold. I want to smash all those, and I have yet my own aspirations with the world records. But growing the sport I think is really important, and it’s just trying to figure out how to do that, because our competitions have been growing a bit locally here, but it'd be fun to grow that.

We're still sorting out how we can do that and make memory sports look cool, because it looks kind of lame and kind of niche, but it's a lot of fun. And you're competing against yourself, which I think is the best part.