In fact, memory athletes train their brains to compete in memory championships In a new study that compared, the brains of these athletes with people who'd never practiced memory techniques found no structural differences between the brains, researchers say.

It's just about how well trained they are.

Nelson Dellis, a four time USA memory champion, has memorized more than 200 names in 15 minutes and nine decks of playing cards in 30 minutes.

Let's jog his memory about how 5037953450 When I tell people about what I do, I get such a big shock.

Oh, you must be some savant or something like that.

That's not the case.

It's just a technique that's kind of died out because the need is not there.

One thing that kind of pushing me along this path is my grandmother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and that's part of the reason why I was so concerned for myself, and why I got into all of this memory training is because I didn't want that to happen to me.

One of the events that train is spoken numbers.

So I'm closing my eyes.

I'm hearing these numbers come at me one digit at a second, and what I do is I'm turning those into pictures.

I receive a few digits at a time, and I turned that into a picture and then receive another to kind of make a little story and store that along a place.

When I'm writing it down.

All I'm doing is walking back through that place, picturing who was there and then translating that back to the numbers that those pictures represent.

I can't help it any more.

I look at these numbers and they are people to meet.

When I see 30 it's Conan O'Brien.

Same with my grandmother.

She's 175.

That's her number.

So when she pops up, it's awesome.

Any distraction could be detrimental to, you know, an event that you're trying to get a good squad, so we try to minimize those distractions, you know, go to a public place and train or, you know, trained high altitude in the mountains.

My first kind of big fundraising project was to climb on Everest and I thought would be a great way to kind of bring House members to the top of the world for the competition.

I actually trained about 4 to 5 hours a day because I'm trying actively hard to win these competitions.

I trained my brain in the same sense that, you know, you go to the gym or to make your body stronger.

I do that for my mind to try and develop that memory and make it stronger.

What's scary to me the most about potentially losing memories is not, you know, forgetting.

You know, all the stuff I learned in college or, you know, the fact that I was the memory champion.

Whatever it's, it's, it's more the small moments, you know, with the people you love and care about that makes us who we are.

And if you lose those memories and those feelings that came along with it, who are you and how can you enjoy life?