Even Reigning Memory Champ Finds Herself Sweating the Small Stuff

Give Tatiana Cooley 15 minutes to memorize 100 faces and names, and she’ll remember 70 of them in a snap.

Give the reigning and only USA National Memory Champion strings of 4,000 numbers: “70093518555899 . . . “ or 500 words: “liquid, dairy, digit, district, garden, hair . . . “ and she’ll repeat them better than most. Same with a 54-line poem or a deck of cards.

So why does Tatiana Cooley need Post-its?

“I’m incredibly absent-minded,” said the tall 27-year-old with a Julia Roberts grin who recently defeated 16 challengers to keep the title she won in 1997. Her feats of recall also won her a second trip to London for a spot in a world contest of brains-not-brawn.

But asked how many brothers and sisters she has, she replied “six, er seven, er six.” When did she win the Los Angeles regional spelling bee? Grade school--but she doesn’t remember which grade. The year she graduated high school in New Orleans, seventh in her class? A pause. “1990.”

Fearful of forgetting, she keeps a daily “to-do” list. Her days hang on sticky little notes. “I live by Post-its,” Cooley said.

“I think the ability to memorize things is a different realm,” Cooley explained. “It’s not at the same level as remembering to call people.”

Modest as well as candid, she insists she’s not unique. “Anybody can train their mind to memorize,” she said.

Cooley said she has two techniques: visualization and association. The first entails looking at material and mentally photographing it. The other involves making up a story that links random numbers and words.

She came to be champ by chance.

It was 1997, the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Cooley and her boyfriend of a month, Dominick DeMilio, were looking for fun and found a competition called Memoriad ’97 at a Manhattan hotel.

Eight hours later, she was America’s National Memory Champion. She had defeated 17 other contestants in the first U.S. trials of a similar competition started in England in the early 1990s.

With the two runners-up, she went to London last August to compete in the first international Mind Sports Olympiad. There she took second place in the women’s division in the memory events, losing to Sue Whiting, an astrophysicist from Radlett, England.

This year’s U.S. Memoriad took place on the 19th floor of a Manhattan office building on a bitterly cold Saturday, watched by several dozen spectators and Cooley’s personal cheering squad, consisting of Dominick, her aunt and a sister.

The other contestants included nine high school students from New Jersey, a real estate broker from Pennsylvania and a computer programmer.

The competitive events proceeded in silence, interspersed with lectures by memory experts about the brain and using it.

Contestants, each seated at a small table, were handed a page bearing colored photographs and names, then pages of hundreds of words, then pages with thousands of numbers, then a poem that organizers said was written for the event by Britain’s late poet laureate, Ted Hughes. It began: “A Knight in armour falls pushed off his star/By the crow of a cock. A wedding ring/Bounced off a coffin by a finger caught it.”

Entrants were allowed to jot notes on a pad of paper. After a set time, the jottings and pages were taken away and contestants wrote down what they remembered. Each had a judge who used a complex scoring system that included bonus points for those who broke previous records.

For the final event, after trying to memorize a standard deck of 52 cards in precise order, the contestants handed the decks to their respective judges, turned away and called out the cards they remembered. Cooley did best, getting 17 in exact sequence.

When Cooley was proclaimed winner, she bounded onto the stage, braided ponytail swinging, to receive a glass trophy. She wore corduroys, a white T-shirt emblazoned with a dragonfly and combat boots. The whole time she had her mother on a cell phone from Texas. “She was just telling me how proud she was of me,” Cooley recalled, “and she was just screaming.”

Cooley first noticed her retentive edge while earning a college degree in communications in New Jersey.

Taking lecture notes was enough to prepare for tests. “It sort of didn’t occur to me that it was anything extraordinary. It was nice. It was just a means to get me more free time.”

She credits her mnemonic prowess to her Brazilian-born mother, a political science professor, and her father, a computer engineer. Though 2 years old when they broke up, she was raised by both in Los Angeles.

The only television they allowed was news and educational programs. They nurtured her memory with games. They encouraged her appetite for reading and language. She reads books in Portuguese, Spanish and French. “This is fun for me, this whole memorization,” she said.

“I’ve always loved to learn. I’ve been like a sponge my whole life.”

A self-described “free spirit,” she’s an aspiring writer with a memoir in the works and has a new job as executive assistant to the creative chief of an advertising agency.

In August Cooley returns to London for the Mind Sports Olympiad along with second-place winner Eric Chang, 16, of Fair Lawn, N.J., and third-placed Coral Parmar, 15, of Elmwood Park, N.J.

Cooley said an important part of her technique in competition is breathing deeply and reminding herself to take it easy. She sympathizes with people who feel their memory is slipping, and blames the pressures of modern life. “People are expected to be more concentrated, and think more and retain more,” she said.

Her advice: “Relax.”