Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking with Einstein", actually met Kim Peek and makes a lot of interesting observations about him. Regarding these competitions, w

Joshua Foer, author of "Moonwalking with Einstein", actually met Kim Peek and makes a lot of interesting observations about him. Regarding these competitions, what's incredibly interesting is that all the memory champs have always been trained... people with naturally strong memories have never been able to compete with them. The same holds true for the world mental calculation championships too.