Hack your brain to remember almost anything – CNN.com

The reigning World Memory Champion, Alex Mullen, can memorize the order of a deck of cards in 17 seconds. But in some ways, he’s just as forgetful as the rest of us.

“I still forget plenty of basic things, like where I left my keys,” said Mullen, a medical student at the University of Mississippi.

Memory champion Alex Mullen memorized the order of a deck of cards in 21.5 seconds at the 2015 World Memory Championships. He later set the current world record under 17 seconds.

Memory athletes such as Mullen can remember hundreds or even thousands of random words, numbers and images — a feat that may seem unbelievable to onlookers. But according to a study published today, anyone can train their brain using the same tricks as the world’s top competitors, reshaping their brain’s networks in the process.

For the study, researchers recruited 23 of the world’s top-ranked memory athletes and compared their brains with those of people who had never practiced memory techniques at all. Then, they put some of the newcomers through a memory training program and observed how their brains changed.

The more the rookies practiced the techniques, the more their brain scans started to resemble the memory athletes’ — and it took only six weeks.

MORE: Hack your brain to remember almost anything – CNN.com