It might be safe to presume that George Clooney has played many roles in the fantasy lives of many women.
In the case of Sue Jin Yang, the image of Clooney slapping himself in the face with a pancake helped her win a bronze medal at the USA National Memory Championship in New York City.
In a field of 52 participants from across the country, the 27-year-old registered nurse memorized a randomly shuffled deck of playing cards in 2 minutes and 36 seconds.
Yang said she doesn't have a particularly great memory. She wasn't a super-standout student as a child and she still forgets where she puts her car keys.
But about 18 months ago, she started helping a friend in California prepare for memory competitions and began playing with some techniques to boost recall.
She was hooked — enough that she's now willing to spend hours testing herself and has tattoos on her forearms of forget-me-not blossoms, along with spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs.
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She competed for the first time at the national competition last year but didn't place.
Practicing in quiet solitude didn't prepare her for the fishbowl of a competition that draws media attention as participants take on a series of challenges, from trying to memorize 99 names and faces in 15 minutes to spitting back a series of computer-generated random numbers to memorizing an unpublished poem in 15 minutes and reproducing it verbatim, including punctuation and bold letters.
Competing in the world competition that took place in Bahrain in October helped her continue working on her focus — and her time and scores have climbed.
Victory doesn't come with rote memorization. The techniques are largely a matter of visualization and creative — often intentionally graphic — storytelling to help wedge an image in the mind.
Yang has an image for numbers 00 through 99. The number 02, for example, is a bottle of Sunny Delight orange drink. She also has an image for each card. The jack of diamonds, for example, is Elizabeth Taylor showing off her diamonds.
And that's where Clooney comes in, too. He's the eight of spades. And he was hitting himself with the flapjack because the two of diamonds was next to his card in the deck.
Other images are closer to home, Yang said.
"I might think of an old ex-boyfriend chopping …" she said, pausing. "Some things are better left unsaid. Perhaps we should say 'Doing silly things.' "
The techniques can be applied to everything from schoolwork to grocery lists, she said.
Shopping for cheese, milk, eggs and fish?
She suggests linking the items to areas of the body. She might envision stinky cheese between her toes, egg yolks sliding down her legs, a fish swimming out of her side and milk, well, we're back to graphic. Then, when you get to the store, just do a quick physical inventory — the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone — and ta-da, no list.
Basking in her first medal, she's now pushing herself to greater memory heights, developing images for 000 through 999. Her someday-goal is to get to a recall of 1,000 digits and rebuild 10 decks of cards.
In a twist of irony that is not lost on her, Yang works in the neurology unit at Tucson Medical Center, where patients often don't remember her from day to day, let alone recall their own names.
In a time when we don't even have to remember phone numbers anymore, Yang said: "Anything that promotes thinking and imagination is something we should all be learning more about. You just have to have a good imagination, trust your instincts, and have fun with it."
And Clooney will never know.
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