There are people with such impressive memories, you'd think they're non-human.
In this newsletter, we're going to list out 3 of those people and what they managed to memorize in such a short time.
What makes this so interesting is that these people are not special and that if you truly really genuinely wanted to... you could achieve similar feats.
1. Doug Hegdahl
He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam who memorized the names of 256 fellow POWs.
With assistance from Joe Creeca, a US Air Force officer and fellow captive, Doug was able to recall names, personal details, and even the dates and methods of capture for these individuals.
He cleverly set this information to the melody of the classic nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” which helped him memorize it.
Upon his release, he was able to provide crucial information about those who were still imprisoned.
2. Ron White
Ron is a Navy veteran and a two-time world champion in memory competitions.
He holds the record for the fastest time to memorize an entire deck of cards in the United States.
In 2012, he took on the challenge of memorizing the first and last names, along with the ranks, of every fallen US military member who lost their life in Afghanistan—totaling 2,300 individuals and over 7,000 words.
It took him ten months to commit all of this to memory and it takes him over ten hours to write the list out from memory.
Ron also memorized and wrote out the US constitution word for word.
3. Akira Haraguchi
Akira unofficially holds the record for the most digits of PI memorized.
On October 3, 2006, at 9 am, he began the process of reciting 100,000 digits.
By nightfall, he had already recited 83,431 digits.
He completed his challenge with the 100,000th digit at 1:28 am on October 4, 2006, almost 16 later.
The official Guinness World Record for memorized digits is 70,000, set by Rajveer Mena from India.
