Memory is often placed in opposition to technology when actually technology can be used to enhance memory, argued Ed Cooke, CEO of Memrise, speaking at Wired 2012.

Cooke is a Grandmaster of Memory, which means he can learn a 1,000-digit number in an hour and a pack of shuffled cards in 45 seconds. He set up Memrise to help make learning things fun using mnemonics -- be it a language, the members of the cabinet or the periodic table.

He explained that the art of memory was perfected around 2,000 years ago, but the science of memory is "actually really rubbish". He said that the art is "way ahead of cognitive science" and that it is "partly a very creative thing". 

To showcase his abilities, Cooke learned the last six digits of the phone numbers of every delegate at Wired 2012. He had suggested the stunt after discovering that Lily Cole was speaking in the hope of getting hold of her phone number. He asked several members of the audience their surnames and then correctly recalled their phone numbers. However, he admitted that remembering a load of numbers like this "is a fairly pointless life skill".

He then proceeded to teach the audience how to remember the names of all of the speakers at the conference on the second day. He started by allocating different sessions to different rooms of The Brewery venue. He then described mnemonics he had created for each speaker, creating badly photoshopped pictures as visual aids. For example, to remember Wired magazine's editor David Rowan, he connected David with David and Goliath and Rowan to the word "rower". He created a picture of David Rowan's head on David of David and Goliath fame's body in a boat.

"You get an enormous amount of interference between memories," he said. "That kind of interference needs to be fought against." Attaching memories to spaces and emotions that we know helps with this. As a result, David was placed in the River Thames, with other people placed in different parts of the city.

Other speaker mnemonics include thinking of a "Trojan song" to remember Hojun Song; "a whole man made of pebbles" for Pablos Holman.


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