The making of a memory champion, it turns out, is not so different from the making of any other great athlete. To triumph in sport, athletes sculpt muscle and sinew and lash them together with head and heart to deliver optimum performance. To perform extraordinary feats of memorization, memory champions strengthen distinct groups of structures scattered throughout the brain. And then, they groove the connections that lash those groups together until the whole system works like a well-oiled machine. In short, memory champions are not born that way.

Anyone can teach themselves to have a memory the size of a champion, a study shows. Scans found ordinary members of the public had brains as sharp as the world's greatest memorisers after a simple brain training course using'memory palaces'. It means the ability to perform astonishing feats - such as remembering lists of several dozen words - can be learned, say scientists. After 40 days of daily 30-minute training sessions individuals who had typical memory skills at the start and no previous practise more than doubled their capacity. In this study, the learning strategy scientists chose was loci training, also known as creating a'memory palace'.