How the brains of quiz champions work

Afternoons

Every pub trivia night has one, that person who seems to be able to pull facts out of thin air. Dr Monica Thieu is a four-time contestant on the popular US trivia game show Jeopardy. She first competed in high school, won a college tournament and earlier this year reached the quarter finals in an invitational tournament for the best of the best. Talking to contestants backstage, she wondered if there was something special happening in the brains of people who can remember that the unicorn is the national animal of Scotland. So, she and her colleagues at Columbia University did a study to identify how memory works in the minds of trivia experts. Dr Thieu explains how trivia experts use two different types of memory and how we can all improve our memory.