"What's your name?" Dan Perl '08 asked me when I met him on the third floor of the Shapiro Campus Center "Rachel."

"Rachel what?"

"Pfeffer."

"You were here for a meeting at the beginning of last year!" he said after a short pause.

I knew I was talking to a high-ranking memory champion when he remembered me from a meeting I attended over a year ago, despite completely different haircut.

Perl started the Memory Training Club in hopes of training fellow memorizers by means of various memory enhancing games to bring them with him to the national competition in New York City.

Perl said realized he had a knack for memorizing during his senior year of high school, when Frank Felberbaum, author of The Business of Memory, came to talk at his school.

"I went with him, after being trained for a couple days, to Nationals," Perl said. "Somehow, I managed to pull off first place in poetry and eighth place overall."

Never having been able to commit to memory my own Social Security number, I thought I could benefit from the strategies Perl teaches. With a turnout of only five-and-a-half people, if you include Ben Kuss '07 popping in and out sporadically, we tried several exercises, similar to the ones that members mights face in competition.

For the first exercise, we were each given a sheet of paper with 12 black-and-white photographs of people's faces, with names underneath each. In competitions, there would be 99 faces with 15 minutes to memorize them, but here, we had five minutes to commit each name and face to memory.

Assuming it was impossible to remember each name and face, I decided to simply focus on half of the sheet. Six out of 12 isn't too shabby, right? Not too shabby, if I could actually do it.

My strategy consisted of furiously writing and rewriting each name in the same order they were laid out on the sheet, with complete disregard for their faces. Fairly confident of my memorization skills, I handed over the page cockily.

We were then given the almost-identical papers, only this time without the names, and, to my complete and utter dismay, in a scrambled order. Did Martha have the black scarf or the white scarf? Was it James Howard or Ron Howard? What kind of name is Zeiss anyway? I despondently scribbled in names, knowing for certain that most of them were wrong. I felt like a deflated balloon that couldn't remember its own color.

Afterward, we went over our strategies. I told the group how I lowered my standards to six.

"That's very wrong," Perl told me sorrowfully. "Never go into it having a negative attitude."

Alex Martynov '08, wrote our names and scores on the whiteboard. So far, I was last. Not a big surprise.

The next exercise involved papers with four columns of 10 random words. We had five minutes to memorize them, after which we would write them down in the same order. Perl told us he usually invents a story, with each word following one another. Mine consisted of a handsome yet mundane horse driving a wagon with a towel tied around a dog. Unfortunately, we received one point for every correct word, and lost five points for any incorrect or blank.

We then had to memorize a series of random numbers. The U.S. record holder in this category belongs to a man who remembered 120 numbers in the correct order in five minutes. My high score was seven.

One hour and a shattered sense of self-esteem later, we were given our final exercise. It was a poem written by the founder of the competition, titled "The Time, They Say, Shall Tell." I remember that, honestly. I didn't even write it down. I also remember the first stanza: "My old clock/had two hands on its face/Mum said it was rude, but they were always pointing, at things."

That's all I remember now, but I did much better at the time. I even impressed Perl, who last year placed second in the poetry memorization category and lost by a single word.

So while it may not have been as physically exhilarating as shooting guns or as awkward as learning to dance the cha-cha, Memory Training Club was definitely a mental journey. I can only hope it helps me to pick up tricks on how to memorize all those dates for my art history midterm or that phone number that just never quite stuck in my head.

As to why Martynov decided to join the club, he said:

"I forget.