MiamiNelson Dellis remembers things. Useless things—strings of random digits or the order of the cards in a shuffled deck—and useful things like names and phone numbers. Mr. Dellis, 34, describes himself as a “memory athlete,” meaning he trains intensively and participates in organized competitions of recall. He won the annual USA Memory Championship four times in five years starting in 2011, and once set a record, since surpassed, by memorizing 339 digits of pi in five minutes. In 2016 he spent 10 days committing pi’s...

Source: Wall Street Journal January 18, 2019 23:15 UTC