‘It’s cool to memorise so much but not such fun to watch’
Jonas von Essen, winner of the World Memory Championships, can memorise 24 decks of cards in an hour but arrived for this year’s contest wearing odd socks. He tells Valentine Low why
It would be terrible stereotyping to suggest that everyone who enters memory competitions is in any way odd, but it should be noted that Jonas von Essen, the 22-year-old Swede who won the annual-World Memory Championships recently, wears odd socks, once memorised 100 digits while holding his breath underwater and thinks that his other hobby of parachuting is pretty good, but not quite as exciting as committing long lists of numbers to memory.
With a dishevelled charm and several days’ growth on his Nordic chin, he also has something of a rock-star following.
“We were like, ‘Oh my gosh!’” says Ramyasree Varlagadda, 21, one of two sisters from Hyderabad, India, among the 112 competitors taking part in the three-day contest, which is now in its 22nd year, in Croydon, South London. “He’s crazy!” her sister Sri Vyshnavi, 17, says.
On the face of it, those gathered in the conference centre looked normal, at least for people who can memorise a deck of cards in less than a minute.
There were students in T-shirts, stern Scandinavians practising their card skills, teams of Chinese in red and white uniforms and Germans who did not look as if they had an ounce of geek in them.
However, one should not be fooled by appearances, said Ben Pridmore, the threetimes world champion who was trying to regain his title. Pridmore, 37, is an accountant from Nottingham, UK. He has a beard, is hopeless at remembering names and faces and is, by his own admission, strange.
“They look normal on the outside,” he says. “But I like to think they have some strangeness on the inside.”
Their feats are certainly extraordinary. Von Essen, a student from Gothenburg, memorised 24 decks of cards in an hour, and about 3,800 binary digits in 30 minutes (sorry, he said, he can’t remember the exact number).
Even Von Essen, who was wearing his lucky “Super Sparrow” T-shirt, which he designed himself (it’s a big black bird and makes him feel really powerful), admitted that it doesn’t always come across as the most exciting of competitions. That is why he wears odd socks.
“People think that memorising lists of ones and zeros does not sound a lot of fun,” he says. “I think that maybe with a bit of colour I can change that prejudice.”
It also explains why he set up a bathtub outside his home and got a friend to film him memorising 100 spoken digits underwater as part of a series of extreme memory stunts put on YouTube.
“It’s cool that it’s possible to memorise so much, but it’s not such fun to watch,” he says.
Von Essen’s memory, however, suffered an embarrassing meltdown live on BBC2’s
Newsnight when he was challenged to recite the names of the production team over the end credits. He spent several seconds trying to remember the name of Jeremy Paxman, the presenter sitting beside him, before stumbling
This year marked the first winner of theWorld Memory Championships from Scandinavia: for the past 21 years the winners have been from England, Germany or China
over the identities of many of the production crew. In a bid to rescue his floundering guest, Paxman helped him with the rest of the names.
To wrap up the programme on time, Paxman finally asked for the name of the programme’s editor, Ian Katz, which von Essen eventually recalled. Writing on Twitter, Katz said the champion’s memory “was a bit knackered” after “a long day”.
This year marked the first winner of theWorld Memory Championships from Scandinavia: for the past 21 years the winners have been from England, Germany or China.
A team from Mongolia on their first appearance took many observers aback, with 17-year-old Namuuntuul Bat-Erdene making it into the top 10.
So how come the Mongolians are so good? “Maybe because we are descended from Genghis Khan?” young Namuuntuul says.