How Jeopardy Mega Champion Ken Jennings Remembers Everything
A few insights into boosting your cognitive abilities.
My faulty memory was starting to tick me off.
I was forgetting promises, commitments, and names. It felt like I’d taken up a part-time job resetting all my passwords. More importantly, my memory was hurting my relationships and performance at work. I’d resolved to do something about it. So I called my dad. He’s an executive with tons of responsibilities — but he’s also one of the most forgetful people I know. I couldn't understand the disconnect and how he’d managed to survive and thrive.
I asked him, “Random question, how do you remember so many things?”
He said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “You're even more forgetful than me but you have so much on your plate. How do you remember when your meetings are? And what they’ll be about? Things like that.”
He paused and said, “I just have my secretary remind me.”
I realized I’d need to search elsewhere.
Insert Ken Jennings. For the uninformed, he has an encyclopedic knowledge of hundreds of subjects. This panned into a meteoric 6-month run on Jeopardy. He won a record 74 episodes and has the highest average correct answers per episode in history (35.9).
His total earnings are $4.5M dollars. He also won “Jeopardy! The Greatest of All Time Tournament.”
These are his strategies.
“Your brain isn’t broken.”
Few things annoy Ken more than people’s mass feelings of inadequacy. The most common thing people ask him: “How can I remember more stuff? My brain feels broken.”
He insists memory is far less about talent:
We all get into our little career niches and our little hobby niches. But the people you see on Jeopardy are trivia buffs, which means they think everything’s interesting.If you can convince yourself of that by having a wide-ranging curiosity, then really you become one of them. That’s all it takes.
Put another way, memory gets its fuel from curiosity. If you can sink your mental fangs into some small part of a subject that’s interesting, you’ll be able to hang on.
Jennings adds, “It isn’t that people can’t remember. It is that they don’t care.”
Study the test first
When a UFC fighter is assigned an opponent, they rarely go straight into the gym to train.
They immediately watch fight footage of their opponent. They study how they move. They find sparring partners of similar styles and physiques.
So when the fight comes, they know how to duck when their opponent pivots their hips a certain way, or step to the side when they see a left jab because they know it’s a fake for a right high kick. A fighter, more than most, knows the consequences of a lack of due diligence.
This is exactly how Jennings approached Jeopardy. He looked at the most popular topics in the show’s history. He tested his accuracy on daily doubles on multiple episodes.
He worked on his weakest subjects. He practiced while standing in his living room, knowing he wouldn’t be able to sit during the show. All of these things added up. He gave the information, and how it was presented, a sense of urgency.
Use this approach for work
People forget 50–80% of the information learned during corporate training courses. On average, a medium-sized organization loses 10,000 hours answering questions about things already covered. One of the most commonly cited traits in top corporate executives is their “photographic memory”.
Strategy: Envision the situation that necessitates this information. Think about what’ll happen if you forget (envision that figurative high kick hitting your chin). Connect it to the related concepts that matter and envision how they’ll play out in your setting.
Don’t be that person that constantly needs help. Treat information like fight footage before the fight.
Overlearn the subject
There are two ways. Many of you already did the first in piano lessons. You begrudgingly practiced a song several times at your parent’s command, even though you already had it down perfectly. Overlearning (reciting after 100% mastery) is proven to enhance retention.
The second is more novel: give it extra context. Let’s practice.
Fun fact: Hyperthymesia is a condition that’s very much the opposite of amnesia. People who have hyperthymesia remember, in excruciating detail, every day of their life. They remember the meals and conversations they had on specific days, down to the phrases and servings.
Let’s add 3 layers of context:
Experiential Context: Hyperthymesia is actually torture for most who have it. Every moment becomes a reflection of the past. Every mistake, every wrong is done to them, all becomes embedded in the present.
Linguistic Context: focus on the prefix ‘hyper’ as it associates with ‘a lot’ or ‘too much’. Also, note hyperthymesia has the same suffix ‘esia’ as amnesia.
Philosophical Context: too little is just as bad as too much. Hyperthymesia is a curse disguised as a blessing.
Adding context is like adding concrete: it’ll be more likely to stay.
Link it to something else
In one question, Ken was asked, “Who was elected president in 1824?”
Do you know? Give up? The answer was John Quincy Adams.
Jennings got this right. He knew this because he’d anchored this fact to a TV show called “Quincy”. The show was about a character who investigated crimes for 24-hour stints.
This is Ken’s magic sauce. He always links information, sometimes in a series of 3, 4, or 5 degrees of separation. Eventually, this forms a web of interconnected knowledge that never leaves.
It might seem above your head but it isn’t. Adding extra links to the chain will allow seemingly unrelated information to eventually connect and reinforce broader knowledge. Additionally, making something harder to memorize (extra links and steps), has the paradoxical effect of making it stick more.
Find a show, a memory, a character, a friend, or an inanimate object, and link it to information. It doesn’t matter how weird or how long the chain is.
Lastly, don’t rely solely on flashcards
Yes, flashcards are great for cramming. But that info tends to fade quickly too. Take it a step further. Your mind is much better at generating images to associate with words.
So when you get a new chunk of information, always, always, always, attach it to mental imagery, a story, a feeling, an impulse, a color. See it in your mind’s eye as you say the word or phrase.
With hyperthymesia, I envisioned a girlfriend who was tortured in her relationship. She saw every mistake her boyfriend had ever made being repeated. She was unable to give true forgiveness because the past haunted her and she blamed herself.
Takeaways to remember:
Develop a deep curiosity about the world around you. Enjoy information.
Study information like it’s an opponent. Visualize the consequences of losing.
Overlearn the info (1. practice beyond perfection 2. add layers of context)
Link it to something else (TV show, friend, color, habits, objects)
Create vivid mental imagery and attach it to information. Don’t rely on notecards.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential.