The memory game

Did you ever play the old parlour game we used to call Kim’s Game (or more simply, the Memory Game)? You were shown a tray containing about two dozen items. The tray was then taken away. You had to recall as many of the items as you could. If you got halfway there, you were considered to be doing pretty well.

That feat seems pretty amateur compared with the accomplishment of Jainist monk Munishiri Ajitchandrasagarji—we’ll call him M.A., if that’s all right with you). M.A. remembered no less than 500 objects, math problems, or phrases in six different languages offered up to him at random—in the order they were presented to him.

His secret: meditation. In fact, the challenge was part of campaign encouraging children to build brainpower through meditation. “I have sacrificed everything and that is why I can do this,” says M.A. “Anyone can do this, it is not a miracle. When you get rid of your distractions, the power of your mind is immense.”

The feat was watched by a crowd of 6,000, who roared their applause at the achievement in a stadium in Mumbai, India. It took six hours for the intake of the 500 items. It took much less for the regurgitation. Number 81 proved problematic, although only temporarily.

His guru says M.A.’s mind works like a computer: many processes can happen at the same time. M.A. agrees. “When I forgot number 81, the rest of the processes continued and then, later, that one process began and I remembered it. It takes no effort. I’m simply able to extract it from my subconscious.”

M.A. has already memorized 800 items in practice, and is working his way up to going for 1,000 in public—a feat his guru claims has not been accomplished in over six centuries.

The way M.A. describes his training sounds ambiguous. One the one hand, anyone can do it. On the other, all you have to do is sacrifice everything. Sounds like the sort of challenge most of us would be intrigued to know we can do if we want to, without actually wanting to. In fact, I think most of us would be happy if we just developed sufficient powers of concentration to extract from our subconscious where we left the glasses we were wearing a couple of minutes ago, or the car keys we just put down somewhere, or the name of the person we have just shaken hands with. You would only have to get rid of one or two minor distractions in order to gain his power, wouldn’t you? Just a second, my phone’s ringing.

Come to think of it, though, there’s probably a cell phone app that does the meditation for you. It probably just downloads the results straight into your subconscious. And there’s the rub. The memory feat itself pales by comparison to the facilities of the humble computer, to which M.A.’s guru likened M.A.’s mind. Even back before the days of Big Blue, the chess player, and Watson, the Jeopardy wizard, the computer could easily remember all 500 items thrown at it, and could probably master 1,000. So in a way, you have to ask, why did he bother? Why set up an endurance feat that could so easily be outflanked by a machine? If you’re going to sacrifice everything, why not choose some skill unique to the human mind, like telling us the meaning of life, or describing the smell of a rose, or cracking the secret of the missing sock in the laundry.

The other intriguing thing about M.A.’s feat is the size of the audience before which he performed it. I’ve already written about chess as a spectator sport. Who knows, maybe competitive memory contests resulting from intensive meditation training will become popular on Sunday afternoons in North America and supplant football, a sport my daughter quite accurately describes as “big, fat, men falling on top of one another and getting injured, leading to beer commercials.”

So can you picture this: “Wearing number 81 in the saffron robes, a product of Nebraska University of the Enlightened Spirit and weighing 158 pounds, please welcome Norbert Wasanskosivi, a disciple of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Current personal best: 244 items. And wearing number infinity, in the white robes, from the University of Alabama School of the Crimson Tide and tipping the scales at 144 pounds, please welcome Bo Boysenbacker, a follower of Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. Current personal best: 199 items.”

The Las Vegas oddsmakers would have a field day with it. And that’s just one meditator against another. What if teams of memory challengers were pitted against one another? It would be almost as exciting as Reach for the Top.

Having made sport of his feat, and if I have a shred of credibility left, it would be churlish of me to fail to acknowledge a mind far superior to my own and to tip my hat to—what was his name again?

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca