Total recall: How to remember almost anything

Most people stuck in hospital watch TV. Or they read crime thrillers, stare out of the window and listen to the radio. Ed Cooke, however, learnt to become a Grand Master of Memory.

"I had something wrong with my leg and was stuck in hospital for a couple of months when I was about 18," he says. "Hospitals are pretty boring, so I was looking for a way to entertain myself; someone brought me a book called Learn to Remember, which was a collection of memory techniques. I experimented with them and tried to understand how they worked; they were also very useful for impressing all the pretty nurses."

By the time he left hospital, Cooke, now 26, could learn the order of a pack of cards in 60 seconds. He took his secret weapon first to Fiji and the Cook Islands on his gap year after school, where it became a "powerful party trick", and then on to Oxford University, where he studied for a degree in psychology and philosophy. "I used to go through the bars winning champagne off credulous barmen. I would memorise packs of cards or learn everyone's name in the bar.

"My family thought it was a pretty weird thing to be doing with my time, until I started teaching them how to do it. One of my four sisters is a doctor, and when she was a medical student we came up with a plan to help her learn for her exams, and I think she saw it was useful after that."

By the end of Cooke's second year at university, his friends persuaded him to put his skill to good use by entering the World Memory Championships in Kuala Lumpur.

"After passing a qualifying round in Manchester, I went to Kuala Lumpur and came 10th; I've been improving every year and in the most recent competition I came seventh."

His accomplishments are all the more impressive given the growth of the memory- training community. "All sorts of nations send large delegations now," he says. "I always worry that this is the year I'm going to be booted out of the top 100 by all these Chinese and Germans entering."

The competition is spread out over three days and takes in 10 events, remembering everything from names and faces to random images, lists of words, dates and cards. "It's hilarious, good fun, and I've made a lot of friends there," says Cooke. "It's really not what you'd expect: there's academics, a chess-playing lawyer, a Danish clown and this hippie Austrian girl. The competition attracts people from all sorts of professions."

The prize money has traditionally been quite small, but recently rose to $10,000. Winners also receive personal sponsorship opportunities, but being able to win a memory competition "requires quite a specific set of skills," says Cooke – and not necessarily sponsorship friendly ones: "a 100m sprinter might not be much good at guiding walking tours," he points out.

When Cooke returned from his first visit to Kuala Lumpur and began the final year of his degree course, he found the techniques he'd learnt helpful in his studies – even in philosophy, which isn't necessarily about hard facts: Cooke got creative when it came to getting to grips with one particularly tricky philosophical text by inventing and memorising a network of highly coded imagery.

"I gave every concept its own café in a town to remember the theory about authenticity being linked with truth, for example, there would be a porthole in my Authenticity café to the Truth café. So, during the exam, all I needed to do was 'go into' these cafés and reassemble the state of understanding I'd had when I'd read the text, and then I could think freely. It meant I was in quite a serene frame of mind when I went into my finals." He left Oxford with a First.

As well as ranking highly in the World Memory Championships, Cooke became a Grand Master of Memory at the age of 23, for which he had to memorise 1,000 numbers in an hour, then 10 decks of cards in an hour and one deck in under two minutes. He has also won the US Memory Championships. Although he could be forgiven for being tempted into the money-making aspect of his ability (an excellent memory can prove useful in certain casino card games), Cooke decided on a more altruistic path and now tours schools, teaching memory techniques to children.

Academic achievements, he explains, do not necessarily relate directly to raw intelligence. How interested someone is in a subject can be much more important, he believes: "The cool thing about memory techniques is that it is about exploiting the stuff you're interested in and know, in order to animate and transform what you don't. That works well for teenagers who are interested only in their social lives. The truth is that everyone finds their own lives most interesting, which means everyone has a resource of material to help their memories.

"For example, if you needed to teach someone the plot of a Shakespeare play, they are far more likely to be interested and retain the plot if you replace some of the names with characters more relevant to them – so you could exchange Juliet for Coleen McLoughlin. It doesn't matter if the characters don't fit exactly."

Thus, rather than rote learning, Cooke turns the process into a comic, sociable one. When he arrives in a classroom, he tells the students a story, then tests them on how much of it they remember, to show them how easy it is to recall stories. He also uses word associations to teach, for example, the countries of Africa. "A word such as Botswana is probably unfamiliar and difficult to learn, but most of the students will be familiar with 'Bot', as in a robot, and 'swan', the bird; you give the word visual associations to make it easier to remember."

While recently teaching in Northampton, Cooke found himself with 15 minutes to spare at the end of a session. To keep the pupils entertained, he asked them to come up with a 100-digit number, which he then memorised in under a minute. He then asked them whether they had the hang of memory techniques and they said they had, but that they'd never be able to memorise such a long number. "So I taught them all the first 50 digits of pi in about 15 minutes and had 100 students all chanting the numbers perfectly. That was pretty powerful."

He concedes that there are downsides to his extraordinary memory – "the most obvious being that you are expected to remember everyone you've ever met". However, he remains excited about the ways in which anyone can become better and more ordered in their thinking by using their memory. It can come in handy at dinner parties, for example. "Unless you know a subject very well, whenever you argue a point you're always improvising because you don't have all the information to cover all the bases. Memory techniques mean you can argue a point in a subject you aren't familiar with."

But it's not just about hard facts: "Everything is full of memory – your emotions and your actions," says Cooke. "Memory is not just recalling packs of cards; it's the internal architecture of the mind."

'Remember Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could', by Ed Cooke, is published by Viking, at £18.99

Refresh your memory: Ed Cooke's top five tips

1. Concentrate When you meet someone new you might not even look at their face properly, so it's not surprising that you might forget them. That relates to everything: words, ideas, numbers. If you concentrate on something, you are more likely to remember it

2. Identify whether you are interested in something or not For example, you might not be interested in the name "Catherine" because you have heard it many times before. But if you know that, you can associate something else that you are interested in with the name "Catherine", if it's a name that you need to remember

3. Forge links If you have to remember a series of things, try linking each thing to a moment in a familiar story

4. Rummage your outer memories Practise recalling things that might be on the fringes of your memory, such as recently learned words or recipes

5. Practise daily At the end of each day, go through in your mind everything that has happened during the day. Memories are designed to disappear if you don't repeat them