Names

In the early 1990s Mark Channon was working at a London bar, when a friend taught him a technique to remember names. At the time, Channon, who was an aspiring actor, could remember lines for a performance, but had a terrible memory for names.

With the name-memorisation technique, however, he was soon remembering customers’ names and drink orders even during busy nights. Within a few years he designed a game show for the BBC called Monkhouse Memory Masters where he would teach contestants memory strategies and they would then compete in memory games. By 1995 he had come sixth in the World Memory Championships, becoming one of the first International Grand Masters of Memory.