Memory champion explains how she memorizes 1,080 numbers in 30 minutes
- Katie Kermode — a memory athlete with four world records — tells Big Think about her unique spin on an ancient technique to memorize unfathomably long lists of information.
Big Think and Stephen Johnson
Aug 05, 2025
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What image does the number 693 produce in your mind? For Katie Kermode, who holds four world records in memory championships, the answer is a theatrical showman. She has a mental image handy for all numbers between 1 and 999. The number 522, for instance, makes her visualize red lentils “spilling everywhere.” And 711 conjures a cat.
These images aren’t arbitrarily selected. If you’ve ever wondered how it’s humanly possible for someone to recite 70,030 digits of pi from memory, as Suresh Kumar Sharma did in 2015, the answer is that they’re almost certainly using a mnemonic technique — a strategy that helps you remember and retrieve long lists of information by simplifying it into more relatable or easily visualized concepts.
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Quite amazing to me. I can usually remember a phone number. BUT, (and there is always a BIG butt), a credit card number … … nah. I may try this system.
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Reinke Faces Life 
