Reading Mastery
Test 2 · Parts 5–8

At first glance, Daniel Vance does not look like a champion of anything. Softly spoken and unfailingly modest, he has the slightly distracted air of someone perpetually lost in thought. Yet twice now he has been crowned national memory champion, capable of memorizing the order of a shuffled pack of cards in under thirty seconds, or hundreds of random digits in a matter of minutes. What is most surprising, he insists, is that anyone could learn to do the same.

Vance is at pains to dispel the myth that memory champions are born with extraordinary brains. “I had a perfectly ordinary memory growing up,” he says. “In fact, I was famous in my family for forgetting birthdays.” His talent, he maintains, is entirely the product of technique and practice — a claim supported by neuroscientists, who have found no anatomical difference between the brains of memory champions and those of everyone else. The difference lies not in the hardware, but in how it is used.

The methods Vance uses are, he admits, almost absurdly old-fashioned. The most powerful, known as the “memory palace”, dates back to the ancient Greeks. The idea is to associate each item one wishes to remember with a specific location along a familiar route — one’s childhood home, say. To recall the information, one simply takes an imaginary walk, collecting the items along the way. It sounds laborious, and at first it is. With practice, however, the process becomes almost instantaneous.

What draws people to such an unusual pursuit? For Vance, the appeal was never competition itself. He stumbled into the world of memory sport almost by accident, after reading a magazine article during a dull commute. What hooked him, he says, was the discovery that a skill he had always assumed to be fixed could in fact be transformed. “It changed how I thought about my own potential,” he reflects. “If I could rewire my memory, what else might I be capable of?”

He is careful, though, not to oversell the practical benefits. People often assume that a trained memory must make everyday life effortless, but Vance laughs at the suggestion. “I still lose my keys,” he admits. The techniques, he explains, require deliberate effort to apply; they do not run automatically in the background. A memory palace is a tool, not a superpower, and like any tool it is useless unless you actually pick it up.

If anything, Vance worries that the rise of digital technology is making memory training seem pointless. Why memorize anything, the argument goes, when a phone can store it all? He finds this attitude short-sighted. The value of a good memory, he argues, lies not in the facts themselves but in what having them readily available allows the mind to do. Knowledge stored in one’s head can be combined, compared, and built upon in a way that information locked in a device cannot. “You can’t have an original thought,” he says, “about something you have to look up.”

It is a characteristically thoughtful observation from a man who, despite his achievements, remains faintly puzzled by his own fame. As our conversation ends, he is already gathering his things to leave — and, with a wry smile, checking three times that he has remembered his umbrella.

We have all felt it: that shiver of wonder at a night sky thick with stars, or standing at the foot of a vast mountain. For most of human history, such moments of awe were treated as the province of poets and priests. Recently, however, they have become the subject of serious scientific study.

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What this research has revealed is that awe is far more than a pleasant feeling. Experiencing it appears to change us, at least temporarily, in measurable ways. People who have just felt awe behave more generously, think more clearly, and report a greater sense of connection to those around them.

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The explanation, researchers suggest, lies in awe’s curious effect on the sense of self. In the presence of something vast — whether a canyon, a cathedral, or a piece of music — the boundaries of the individual ego seem to soften. Our own concerns, so pressing a moment before, suddenly feel small.

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This “shrinking of the self” might sound unsettling, but most people experience it as a profound relief. Freed briefly from the endless chatter of self-interest, they feel part of something larger. It is no coincidence that awe is central to almost every religious tradition.

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If awe is so good for us, an obvious question follows: can we have more of it? Here the news is encouraging. Researchers have found that awe is far more available than we tend to assume, and that it does not require a journey to the Grand Canyon.

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Everyday life, it turns out, is full of potential triggers, for those willing to pay attention. A towering tree, a striking building, an act of unexpected kindness — all can produce the same effect, provided we slow down enough to notice them.

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Perhaps that is the most practical lesson of this research. In an age that prizes speed and self-promotion, awe offers a quiet corrective — a reminder that we are small, that the world is vast, and that this is nothing to be afraid of.