Before meeting World Memory Champion Yanjaa Westgate, I had so many misconceptions about memory. I thought it was all about brute force, and that it was one of the least fun or creative parts of the learning process.
Let’s start with a cliche I’m sure you’ve heard:
“I’m terrible with names, but I never forget a face”
But who has said the opposite?
“I’m terrible with faces, but I totally remember your name.”
On the GRID podcast, Yanjaa told me it’s a false equivalency. Faces are more about recognition, while names require active recall and reproduction. It’s a legitimately more difficult task, so it makes sense to have more trouble with it—you need to work harder to grow the face-naming muscle. Yanjaa should know better than anyone in the World. She broke the World Record in 2017 for memorizing the most names and faces: 212 in 15 minutes. Now you have no excuse to forget the names of your neighbors Jolene and Matt1.
Yanjaa also taught me that memory is largely about creativity and focus, not inherent talent.
Four other key things I learned from Yanjaa:
Sleep: Yanjaa is obsessed with sleep and its connection to memory and mental health. More and more mental athletes are catching on to this one. Take it from Magnus Carlsen, who is more concerned with nine hours of sleep a night than early wake up calls to cram lines. Blackout shades, BYOB (Bring your own bedding), phones set to airplane mode and limits to caffeine in the afternoon are all straightforward ways to improve sleep on the road.
This is not only important for performance, memory and happiness, but it also helps your personality. Why?
What’s the only thing more boring than talking about sleep?
Talking about not sleeping.
Organization: I came across a fun book during my research on memory and chess: The Chess Memory Palace by John Holden. The concept of the book is to create a code for each square of the chessboard, so that you can remember chess openings in a fresh way: by a story, where the squares correspond to words, like shark or lol or heart. The author uses the Schliemann Ruy Lopez as a model opening for these methods. A nice choice: I always found that particular opening hard to remember for White. Here’s an example of a story Holden tells to walk us through the opening:
After watching the frog (h4) chewing gum (g3), you continue walking along your memory palace, to discover your next pair of picture words: a vampire (h3) biting a samurai (c4).
I met Yanjaa for Korean BBQ when reading the book, and told her that I was enjoying it, but never felt a need for a code or memory palace to memorize chess openings. Writing out the point to the moves, along with practicing in blitz and rapid games, was the best way for me to remember. Sometimes, I used flashcards. Nowadays, chess improvers often use Chessable for its spaced repetition technique2.
If I was asked to give a blindfold simul, I’d strongly consider training using the techniques from Holden’s book. The tools I am used to would not suffice. Even solo blindfold games can be challenging. In my first, jackhammers started as I played 1.e4. Check out the video of the event for evidence!
Here I’m playing a blindfold chess exhibition, against author and artist Aaron Tucker, Philadelphia 2017
Yanjaa agreed that memory palaces and visual storytelling aren’t necessarily best for everything. But organization is a key part of the process, whether it’s memorizing a key that translates numbers to shapes or letters (see Yanjaa’s video on memorizing a long list of numbers like digits of Pi), or writing and setting up flashcards. My brother has almost 100,000 digital cards for his trivia training, and my friend Grandmaster Sam Shankland has thousands of well organized opening files.
Top poker players echo this. It’s easier than ever to access great poker content, but organizing it to best understand and execute is not easy or straightforward.
Yanjaa at the WSOP, 2022
Focus: Focus is essential, especially for devising that organizational system. In New York, I once saw Yanjaa memorize a tech catalog in an hour (here’s a famous clip of her memorizing the entire IKEA catalog in a week.) She entered into another realm of deep focus as soon as she began the task, in a way that any chessplayer will recognize.
As Walter Tevis put it in The Queen’s Gambit:
“(her) mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen.”
Active: When I first met Yanjaa in person, I was flattered and surprised to see her copy of Chess Bitch / Chess Queens, all marked up with notes and questions. When we spoke about other books she loved, like Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein (a memoir that inspired her to become a memory athlete) or Maria Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff, I saw the same in-depth approach. For Yanjaa, the value of reading one book deeply is more important than reading many books. I often find books disappear from my memory a few weeks after I read them —unless I take notes or proactively make them personal to me. The checklist mentality, of ticking off as many things as possible on a reading list usually leads me to zero retention. There can still be value in reading, then forgetting. Isn’t that the essence of a summer read? Pleasurable, but ephemeral. But in Winter, Spring and Fall, it can be frustrating.
In chess, I also hit a wall with a checklist. When I was a kid, I was terrible at endgames. I read some endgame books, and got a bit better at them. But what really moved my endgame to master level, was a seemingly rudimentary book of endgame positions, with little analysis or feedback, not even which player was on move3. The idea: I’d fill in the analysis and words, and ultimately, I would memorize them. This helped me more than anything else. I learned those positions well enough to execute in my sleep.
We’re back to sleep again: did you notice that the four items are an acronym for SOFA? (Sleep, Organize, Focus, Active). Have a nice nap, and retain some good memories.
For recalling Jolene + Matthew’s names, briefly imagine Jolly Matters, a new podcast about happy things that happen to your neighbors, or Jolly Matters Candy, similar to Jolly Ranchers but more meaningful.
Spaced Repetition is a learning technique that tests you on material at spaced out intervals, based on variables like how many times you got the answer correct/wrong and how many times you’ve reviewed it.
Not sure the book I used, by GM Rashit Ziatdinov, is still in print. He does have a similar book out called GM-RAM. Fitting that RAM literally means Random Access Memory. The Polgar book, 5334, also has a chapter on “Simple Endgames” which can be used the same way.
As I get older I need all the help I can get!
Fantastic post. Thanks Jennifer.