Meet memory king Ron White on ‘Stan Lee’s Superhumans’
12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, September 30, 2010
By DAVID MARTINDALE / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News
FORT WORTH – Ron White has been known to misplace his keys from time to time. He also occasionally forgets about monthly bills that aren’t set up for AutoPay.
But when White sets his mind to remembering, there is no one better.
“If I use a memory system, I’ll put my memory up against Rain Man,” the Fort Worth resident says. “I’ll compete with anybody in the world.”
White is the nation’s reigning memory king, with back-to-back titles at the USA Memory Championship. He holds national memory records. His recall skills are so remarkable, in fact, that the History channel has declared him superhuman.
He is profiled on Stan Lee’s Superhumans, a show that scours the globe looking for ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. It airs at 9 p.m. today.
Unlike many of Stan Lee’s famous Marvel Comics superheroes, the origin story behind White and his amazing memory does not involve anything as exotic as being bombarded with gamma rays, getting injected with a supersoldier serum or emerging as an evolutionary mutant.
White, 37, merely attended a memory seminar at age 18, discovered a knack for remembering massive amounts of information and then honed his skills with lots of practice, practice, practice.
“My memory is actually no better than anyone else’s,” he says. “We all have this ability. But most people, over 90 percent of the people, aren’t tapping into it, because they don’t know how.”
White is so tapped in that he has turned memory into a full-time job.
He speaks at conferences and seminars all over the county – last week: Dallas, San Diego and Washington, D.C.; this week: Seattle andSan Francisco – and he teaches others to implement his memory techniques for greater success in their professional and private lives.
His national records include being the fastest to memorize a deck of cards – he was timed at 87 seconds – Read the rest of the Article