How Many Numbers Can You Remember?

There all kinds of world records – the Guinness Book is probably the most famous authority and those records have to be verified.

Some of the most incredible records involve memory.  How many numbers could you remember if they flashed on a screen for just one second? Ramon Campayo of Spain was able to recite 19 numbers correctly after seeing them for just one second back in 2005.

He also holds the record for memorizing 23 numbers after seeing them for two seconds.

When given one minute to memorize a series of numbers, Gunther Karsten of Germany was able to correctly recite 102 of them.

Johannes Mallow of Germany was given 30 minutes to memorize a series of numbers and he correctly recited
1,284 during the German Memory Championships in 2010.

How about Ben Pridmore of Great Britain – he memorized 1456 playing cards (28 full decks) at the World Memory Championships in  China in 2010.

Here’s an unusual feat – back in 1998, after 16 years and 7 months at the typewriter, Les Stewart of Australia finally finished off his goal of typing every number from one to one million - in words (not numbers) on a manual typewriter.   After a serious illness, he began the project as a kind of therapy for himself back in 1982.  He went thru seven manual typewriters, 1,000 ink ribbons and 19,890 pieces of paper.  He typed an average of three pages a day – he says by typing for 20 minutes on the hour, every hour he was awake.  And he did it all with one finger.

SOURCE: The Book of Alternative Records