In November 2005, Chinese businessman

Chao Lu became a world record holder by

reciting pi to 67,890 places. It took him a
year to memorise the stream of digits and
over 24 hours to reel them off. Like most
extraordinary memorists, Chao Lu used
a set of formal memory aids, or mnemonics.
To memorise a long list of numbers, for
example, a mnemok the images, which can then
be decoded into the snist might assign
consonants to each number from 0 to 9, then
group the stream into four-digit chunks and
convert these into words by judiciously adding
vowels a mn of diabetes and cardiovascular
problems, says Mattson. In 2007, he found
another benefit too. He put 10 overweight
people with asthma on an alemonic known as the phonetic
system. They might then create an image for
each word . For him, each number had a
different personality 1 was a proud, well-built
man, 2 a high-spirited woman, and so on
while the sounds of other words would
produce vivid colours and tastes, making
them more memorable.
Do mnemonics work in
everyday situations?
The oldest known memory aidand weave these into a familiar
journey or arrange theminto the snist might assign
consonants to each in the rooms of a
mental memory palace . This creation of a
narrative or mental map in which to place
memories is called the method of loci . Later,
retracing the journey or walking through the
rooms brings bactring of digits. A similar
approach can help you to rehas similar benefits, says Krista Varady
of the University of Illinois, Chicago. She has
seen improvements in levels of low-density
lipoprotein cholesterol, sometimes known
as bad cholesterol , and blood pressure, in
volunteers eating either a low-fat or high-fat
diet on feeding days.
For people who are overweight, any kind of
intermittent fasting diet will probably help
reduce the riskternate-day
incomplete fast and found that after just a
few weeks their asthma symptoms improved.
Blood markers of inflammation, including
C-reactive protein, also decreased, suggesting
that the fast was helping to moderate their
overactive immune system. Whether fasting
would benefit people with asthma who are in
the normal weight range or those with other
conditions associated with an overactive
immune response remains to be seen. There is
some evidence that alternate-day fasting can
lower their levels of blood fat. However,
Mattson suspects that when it comes to
diabetes and cardiovascular disease, fasting
may not be as beneficial for people of normal
weight as it is for people who are overweight,
simply because they are already likely to be in
pretty good shape, metabolically speaking.
Mattson has, however, identified another
effect of fasting that he believes can benefit
everyone it is good for the brain. If you look
at an animal that s gone without food for an
entire day, it becomes more active, he says.
Fasting is a mild stressor that motivates the
animal to increase activity in the brain. From
an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense
because if you are deprived of food, your brain
needs to begin working harder to help you
find something to eat. His studies show that
alternate-day fasting, with a single meal of
about 600 calories on the fast day, can boost
the production of a protein called brainderived
neurotrophic factor by 50 to 400 per
cent, depending on the brain region. This
protein is involved in the generation of new
brain cells, and plays a role in learning and
memory. It can also protect brain cells from
the changes associated with Alzheimer s and
Parkinson s. In mice engineered to develop
Alzheimer s-like symptoms, alternate-day
fasting begun in middle age delayed the
onset of memory problems by about six
months. This is a large effect, Mattson says,
perhaps equivalent to 20 years in people.
So, what about the common advice to
start the day with a good breakfast? Mattson
believes it is flawed, pointing out that the
studies were based on schoolchildren who
usually ate breakfast, meaning their poor
performance could simply be due to the ill
effects that occur when people begin fasting.
Mattson himself skips breakfast and lunch
five days a week, then has dinner and normal
weekend meals with his family. Varady has
tried alternate-day fasting, but she likes to
eat dinner with her young child and husband,
so now keeps her food intake to within an
eight-hour period. Harvie, however, sounds
a more cautious note for anyone thinking of
giving fasting a go. We still don t know
exactly who should be fasting, how often or
how many days a week, she says. Besides,
it may not be without risks. One study in mice,
for example, found that an alternate-day fast
for six months reduced the heart s ability to
pump blood.
There is also the fact that fasting is difficult.
Varady finds that between 10 and 20 per cent
of people who enrol in her studiesmember a list
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of random words, even the order of a pack
of cards in one viewing.
Some memory champions have talents
that most of us cannot emulate, however.
A century ago, Russian journalist Solomon
Shereshevsky was studied extensively for his
amazing ability to remember long lists of
numbers and words. This apparently required
very little effort: he could recite a list of 50
numbers, forwards and backwards, after just
3 minutes of study. It turned out that as well as
using mnemonics, Shereshevsky was aided by
his synaesthesia is the method
of loci, invented by the ancient Greeks at physical activity.
Though we all know that exercise is a good
thing, only recently has the extent of its
influence on health been established. In the
early 20th century, heart attacks were growing
steadily more common in the West, and they
were seen as a sinister new epidemic. It is now
thought there are several explanations for
this, ranging from a fall in infectious diseases
enabling heart attacks to overtake them as a
cause of death, to various changes in society
that made lifestyles less healthy.
A key insight into the importance of
physical activity came from a study of London
buses in the early 1950s. At the time, the buses
not only had a driver but also a conductor,
who sold tickets to passengers after they had
boarded. Most of the buses were doubledeckers,
so the conductors spent a lot of their
day dashing up and down the stairs.
The landmark study was published in the
medical journal The Lancet in 1953. It showed
that conductors suffered half as many heart
attacks as their driver colleagues. Jerry Morris,
the epidemiologist at the UK s Medical
Research Council who led the work, said
at the time: It was the first hint that this new
frightening epidemic could be linked to the
way we live.
Since Morris s study, hundreds of other
investigations have confirmed the benefits of
exercise on the heart and circulation, as well
as on almost every other system of the body.
Diseases that are prevented by exercise
include stroke, cancer, diabetes, liver and
kidney disease, osteoporosis and even brain
diseases such as dementia and depression.
So how should you go about getting fit and
staying fit? How do you disleast
2000 years ago. These days there are any
number of mnemonics, but while memory
champions may swear by them, how useful
are they in day-to-day life? Two psychologists,
James B. Worthen and R. Reed Hunt, attempt
to answer this question in their 2010 book
Mnemonology. We tried to cover everything
that s out there, says Worthen, of
Southeastern Louisiana