THE MIND GAMES.(Frank Felberbaum teaches people how to remember things; the Memoriad competition)

If you had been sitting next to Frank Felberbaum at the U.S.A. Memory Championship, at Con Edison's headquarters, on Irving Place, the other day, you probably would have heard him recall his gold-medal performance at the World Memory Championship in London in 1995, or his work as president of Memory Training Systems, Inc. (where, for example, he teaches Marriott Marquis employees how to remember guests' names for months), or his decision, a few years ago, to start teaching memory to kids in schools, which explained what he was doing in the Con Edison auditorium: he was there to see his team of high-school and college students compete in the Memoriad, which is what the U.S. memory championship is called. Days later, you might remember what Felberbaum had said about memory in general ("The ability to remember helps lubricate all of life's transactions"), and about memory competitions like the Memoriad ("I think you're gonna see memory in the Olympics within six years, and you can write that down"). But if you were struggling to remember Felberbaum's name you would simply do as he suggested and think of his nose. "Here's how you remember my name," he said. "You have 'fel,' and that sounds like 'fell,' and the 'ber,' which is like 'beer,' and then 'baum,' which sounds like 'bomb,' as in bombs falling from the sky. So you say, 'Falling beer bottles falling from the sky!' And then you look at me and you see my nose, and maybe it's a big nose. So you would look at me and you would have the beer bottles falling and exploding all over my face, with beer running down my nose. That's how you would remember. There's no other way to do it."

As Felberbaum spoke, his students were sitting at small tables, preparing to devise similar mental images for the first event of the day: the Names and Faces competition. Contestants have fifteen minutes to study ten pages of faces and names, and then twenty minutes to identify as many of those faces as they can. At 9:30 A.M., Ed Pinson, the head judge, looked at his stopwatch and said, "Mental athletes, you may begin." The competitors began staring intently at their pages of faces and names, like golfers standing over putts, but without putters or balls.

Felberbaum went into memorycontest whispering mode. "This is like watching a tree fall in the forest," he said.

"Here's a stat for you," Tony Buzan whispered. Buzan, the founder and chairman of the World Memory Championship, held in England each year, is the biggest name in memory. The mental image that he has in his head about the time he and Tony Dottino, the organizer of the Memoriad, came up with the idea for the Memoriad is capellini: they brainstormed at an Italian restaurant. "In a top-level memory competition," he said, "all of the athletes will use as much physical energy as an athlete in a physical ...