The method was first developed in ancient Greece, but popularized in “The Art of Memory,” by Frances A. Yates, in 1966. Also called a “memory palace,” MoL involves placing items throughout a familiar place. In this case, your home. Mr. Foer in his book suggested walking through the front door and then letting your eyes gaze from left to right, top to bottom. In our example, we started with a map, placed a plush figure below it, and then a dog with a pair of socks in its mouth.

Seven digits, though, is child’s play. Gary Shang once used MoL to memorize pi to 65,536 digits.

How Mnemonics Work

In an evolutionary sense, our memory hasn’t quite become a powerhouse for nonvisual information. Early hominids had little need to remember dates or phone numbers. They did, however, require an acute sense of what times of the year were best to plant crops, what flora were edible, and when they might need to pack up and move to keep pace with nomadic food sources.

“From an evolutionary prioritization perspective, I think most of this comes down to gating mechanisms we have in place for denoting and ‘tagging’ incoming stimuli as important for the continuation of our existence,” Nicco Reggente, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said.

Even today, sensory representations drive memory in ways mere memorization can’t touch. Dr. Reggente explained that this is best seen in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that originally evolved to support movement. “In order for this movement to be purposeful, it must be guided via prediction,” he said. “It is the same region that is now, in our modern age, repurposed for non-spatial (non-movement based) memories as well.”

It’s why visual mnemonics, like MoL, are so effective; we’re piggybacking on a cognitive system that was fine-tuned over millions of years to work best with visual and spatial representation. “Visualization is typically beneficial due to its translation of the abstract form of the object (or concept) into a spatial medium,” Dr. Reggente said.

How to Remember Names

Names are actually best remembered by focusing on the text as it’s spoken and then using it immediately. “The most useful trick isn’t a trick at all,” Mr. Mullen, the memory champion, noted. “It’s focus.”

As mnemonics go, all the experts we spoke with suggested the same technique for remembering names. It involves singling out a particular trait of the person you’re speaking with. For Mr. Mullen, in a made-up example, that was hair color. The trait most noticeable about “Karen” was her orange hair, about the same shade as a carrot. He’d then imagine Karen with carrots for hair, perhaps munching on them as they spoke.