A blend of personal account and non-fiction inquiry about how memory works. The author stumbles across the U.S. Memory Championships as a journalist, then decides to train and compete the year after. I can see how the book can be criticized for trying to be both storytelling and well-researched reporting, but I didn’t mind. I heard the author speak about this book years ago, remembering several of the techniques for memory he shared at that time. Most of the techniques are riffs on the idea of a Memory Palace–embedding things you want to remember within a familiar visual world (like your home). If I want to remember topic A, I visualize it at the front door of the house, I visualize the next item I want to remember in the entryway, etc. What I learned from this book: memory in these contests is mostly applying the techniques, not being “super smart” or savant-like. The techniques require work to learn and apply, so they aren’t magical. Their applicability to real-life scenarios is limited. Memorization isn’t learning as much as an aid to learning by giving us a framework, associations and context from which to place new concepts (things we encounter and learn). A worthy read, but it didn’t carry as much practical utility as I had hoped.