In the age before books and tablets, orators stored texts in lees reliable devices: their minds. To boost his memory capacity, Roman philosopher Cicero used tricks called mnemonics to bind his words to vivid mental images, “as if ¹inscribing letters into wax.”

Such ancient techniques may no longer be needed, but this month they’ll take center stage when some 50 “mental athletes” go head-to-head in the 15^thUSA Memory Championship in New York City. Their minds aren’t photographic, even memory experts need a ²coding system to remember strings of words, numbers, names, or ³playing cards. The key is ⁴training – 12 hundreds of hours of it. And speed. ⁵Linking items to celebrities is common practice because they’re easy to visualize. However, “an emotional tie makes the image louder” says last year’s champ. Nelson DeIlis. When creating his mnemonic cede for cards, he passed on a popular heartthrob for the king of hearts. “Brad Pitt had to think about. But my dad – I can picture him in an instant”.

Oliver Uberti, National Geographic, March 2012  

The group of words from text which is made up of the words “INSCRIBING” (ref. 1) “CODING” (ref. 2), “PLAYING” (ref. 3), “TRAINING” (ref. 4) and “LINKING” (ref. 5) includes