Chilliwack's memory champion has done it again.
Braden Adams has won the 2024 National Memory Championship for the fifth consecutive year, breaking his own previous record in one portion of the competition by memorizing 605 digits in 10 minutes.
The championship took place simultaneously in Vancouver, Edmonton and Montreal, and included various memory tests for each participant.
Adams also had to memorize images, and managed to get 294 images in five minutes. He acheived 88 per cent in an "exam" where he had 15 minutes to memorize 50 difficult fake facts. These would be "facts" such as made-up words in an imaginary language or countries' names on a fake map, said championship organizer Francis Blondin.
"And he memorized a full deck of cards in 39.5 seconds, which is actually a 'bad' result for him as he has done the same feat literally twice as fast in practice," Blondin said in a press release.
He also noted that while Adams has won the last five championships, he won other iterations of nationals in prior years, going back to 2020. His wins, and the 'memory palace' technique for memorizing so quickly, have been featured through the years in The Chilliwack Progress.
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"This year I would say that at least seven other participants managed memory feats that would seem humanly impossible to people who don't know what is possible with memory techniques and training," Blondin said.
For example, Mandy Wang,18, memorized 432 digits in 10 minutes, without a single mistake. And Don Michael Vickers from Nova Scotia broke two national records by memorizing 65 names and faces in five minutes and 188 random words in 15 minutes.
