Memory athletes such as Mullen can remember hundreds or even thousands of random words, numbers and images -- a feat that may seem unbelievable to onlookers. The more the rookies practiced the techniques, the more their brain scans started to resemble the memory athletes' -- and it took only six weeks. Gray matter's anatomyBoris Nikolai Konrad , a researcher in Dresler's lab and a memory athlete himself, had expected to find an enlarged hippocampus -- the brain's memory center -- in memory athletes. "It surprised me that we did not find structural differences in the brain," said Konrad, who is ranked 24th worldwide by the World Memory Sports Council. In using this method, Konrad said, memory athletes use a larger number of brain regions -- a practice that changes only brain connectivity, not structure.

Source: CNN March 08, 2017 17:03 UTC