The USA Memory Championship (USAMC) is an annual tournament of memory challenges, founded in 1997 by Tony Dottino and Marshall Tarley. Their vision was to demonstrate that people can be trained to improve their memory, more than ever thought possible.

This year, fourteen Mental Athletes (MAs) have advanced to the finals which will be held live on July 14th at the Kresge Auditorium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. This year’s finalists were selected from a pool of 75 MAs who competed in a variety of qualifying events including memorization of hundreds of faces and names.

The USAMC Championship Round at MIT is open to the public and will consist of five memory events: Words to Remember, Long Term Recall, Musical Chairs, Tea Party, and Double Deck O’Bust. The event is free but registration is required.

About the USAMC

In early 1997, a number of leadership consultants in New York realized the value of memory in the corporate and leadership communities and so the USA Memory Championship was born. National and international records, set by the emerging “Memory Masters,” have reached almost superhuman levels, catching the attention of educational and medical research centers around the world.  The most interesting aspect of the competition is that these records have been set by competitors who began as “ordinary people” with ordinary scores!

For the first half of its existence, USAMC participants had typically received little formal training on memory skills. A watershed moment for the field came in 2006 after a journalist for Slate Magazine covered the event in 2005 and decided to compete the following year. USAMC’s 2006 Champion Josh Foer published the book on his training for the event (Moonwalking with Einstein). Many US MAs compete in international events. The performance of elite US MAs is comparable to the best in the world and a number of retired former champions now have lucrative careers as public speakers.

Mr. Dottino set out to spread the message to the world and educate various communities both personally and professionally that, “Your brain does not stop learning. Your brain is like a muscle.  Exercise it!  When given the proper training, the brain strengthens, regardless of age!”