Indian boy from Singapore wins gold at World Memory Championships

A student from Singapore named Dhruv Monoj Prabhakar, having it’s origin in India have won a couple of gold medals at the World Memory Championships held in Hong Kong in the month of December last year. Dhruv won in the names and faces and random words disciplines, beating 56 other contestants in the kids category.

The boy has mastered the Roman memory technique of creating memory palaces, which works by associating the ideas or objects to be memorised with scenes imagined at familiar locations, such as one’s house. He managed to memorise more than seven decks of shuffled cards in an hour; 1,155 binary numbers in half that time; and 87 names and faces in 15 minutes.

Dhruv said he would manage to take out two to three hours of practice every week before the vital Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE) after six years of the first level of schooling. “The toughest part was concentrating on what I have to do, because for most of my friends, PSLE just ended… For me, sitting down there and practising… it was hard, but I managed to pull through,”, said Dhruv to the Singapore tabloid ‘Today’.

Meanwhile his father a management consultant, urged to say that “I found that Dhruv enjoyed doing it and he’s doing pretty well, so I thought I should support him. He only began his intensive training in October, memorising binary numbers and cards for about four to six hours a day.”

The only Singaporean in the competition of over 260 contestants from China, Russia, India, Taiwan and Malaysia, Dhruv stood out in the competition with his stupendous memory. Training for Hong Kong competition was tougher for Dhruv, who was also a head prefect, a sprinter in the track and field team and a member of the computer club in his school.