How North Koreans dominated World Memory Championships ‘like a battering ram’
- Despite fielding a team of just three contestants, North Korea collected seven gold medals, seven silvers and five bronze at last year’s competition
- Many memory competitors use a technique known as the Dominic System that replaces numbers with letters and represents them as images and actions
In silence, Pang Un-sim stares down at the jumbled-up playing cards for one minute, slowly shuffling through them.
Putting the pile aside, the 22-year-old takes a second pack and arranges them in order. One by one, the two sets are turned over. They match perfectly.
“I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but when you put in the time and make an effort, you can remember,” she says. “When you are having fun memorising, it is not as hard as people think.”
At the championships Pang came second overall, her feats including memorising 5,187 binary numbers in order and 1,772 cards in an hour, while her fastest time memorising a pack of playing cards was 17.67 seconds.
Her teammate Ri Song-mi – who came 7th overall – set a world record by recalling 302 words in 15 minutes. And in the hour numbers event, when competitors have 60 minutes to memorise as many digits as possible, all three North Koreans came in the top five. Two of them beat the previous world record, with Pang scoring 3,240.
Organisers had no idea until the last minute that a North Korean team was entering the contest in Hong Kong.