Germany's New Super Brain

Most people can't remember where they put their car keys the night before, much less a list of 1,040 numbers. But 20-year-old Clemens Mayer, an aspiring law student, just rattled them off like a grocery list at Germany's memory Olympics, held over the weekend.

In a hotel conference room in the city of Darmstadt, near Frankfurt, the tension was thick as the participants in the 9th German Memory Championships got their brains prepared for the tasks ahead of them. They were asked to perform like human computers with a pretty good amount of RAM. The defending champion, Gunter Karsten, had donned mirror sunglasses and a baseball cap, evidently to shut out the outside world and leave him alone with his prodigious memory.

But his own super brain couldn't keep up with Germany's new brainiac, Mayer, who knocked Karsten off his cerebral throne with several astounding feats of mental gymnastics, setting two world records in the process. In 30 minutes, he regurgitated 1,040 numbers by memory, beating the previous record by 34. In the "Names and Faces" categories, he set another benchmark.

But Mayer, no pale, waif-like figure himself, doesn't just spend his days behind a computer screen memorizing random sequences of numbers for fun, he's a mid-distance runner looking to break a few records in that discipline as well.

"Physical fitness helps with memory sports," he said.