2005 World Memory Championships

Via Mindhacks:

The World Memory Sports Council has announced that the 2005 World Memory Championships will take place in the Oxford University Examinations School on August the 13/14/15th. The event will be hosted by the UK Festival of the Mind 2005 which is being organised by The Buzan Organisation and will be open to the public.

What will they be memorizing? Some highlights of the competition:

Decks of playing cards (one hour time limit);
Strings of random numbers;
Strings of binary digits (011010001 etc.);
"Fictional historic and future dates and events" (between 1000 and 2099);
Non-rhyming poems;
Names and faces; and
Lists of random words.

Don't look for me there! (Although much of medical school seemed like a massive exercise in memorization.) Try their online memory games: Random Card Test and Random Number Test. So that's how some patients feel when I test their memory!