Kathy Lang is the name to remember.
The Altona woman smashed a 12-year record at the Australian Open Memory Championships held in Melbourne last weekend. She also took third place for Australia.
“I broke the 12-year national record for [remembering] 177 numbers in five minutes,” she said.
“You’ve got five minutes to remember as many numbers as you can, and they come in numbers like one, six, seven, four, three – and I remembered 177 numbers in order.”
Preparing for the competition, which attracted entrants from as far as China, Japan and the US, Ms Lang hired a memory coach.
“Because I’m in education and teaching and lecturing, I’m really interested in how to learn effectively,” she said.
“It’s not doing this to impress anybody – it’s to demonstrate that it can be done. The human potential’s there.
“The person that came first place would be studying around 12, 13 hours a day to get to that.
“These are elite athletes. These people are like the superheroes – they’ve got amazing brains.
“We’re looking at learning say, five or six decks of playing cards in five minutes.”
Ms Lang likened her memory training to the styles of tennis legends Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
“Nadal has the arm strength and he’ll be there on court all the time practising and practising, whereas Federer will be just learning strategically,” she said.
“I’m just hoping … to show that anybody can do it too, because I know there’s a lot of people out there – not just mums but business people, entrepreneurs – who want to remember names and things like that so they can learn all these techniques to their advantage.”
