An incredibly impressive recall record has been broken in Miami, Florida, USA by Nelson Dellis (USA).
The American memory master achieved the record for the fastest time to arrange a deck of playing cards memorized underwater with a time of just 2 min 22.53 sec.
As the title suggests, this record requires the participant to memorize a deck of well-shuffled playing cards underwater, having not seen the deck previously.
Once that is done, they leave the water and sort a freshly-opened deck of cards into the order they memorized underwater.
The record time begins when they touch the fresh pack of cards.
So not only does this record require a fantastic memory, but also the ability to hold your breath while you’re memorizing!
Nelson trained every day for six weeks prior to the record attempt.
The training consisted of memorizing cards daily and also doing breath-holding exercises.
"The hardest part was training my breath hold" Nelson said, mostly because this was something he had never done before.
"I had to learn a lot and really push my limits to advance that."
On the day of the attempt, he felt quite nervous as there were a lot of people there watching him.
But thankfully, Nelson achieved the record and also smashed the target he had set for himself.
Previous record holder Sanchit Sharma (India) completed the challenge in 3 min 42.50 sec in 2019, and it was Nelson’s aim to "do it around 3 minutes flat".
Nelson Dellis is an Alzheimer’s awareness activist, having lost his grandmother to the disease in 2009.
He undertakes memory-based challenges in tribute to her and in an effort to keep his mind sharp.
In fact, the record breaker is one of the leading competitive memorizers in the world. He has claimed the title of USA Memory Champion (an annual competition for elite mental athletes) and set numerous US memory records, including the fastest time to memorize a deck of playing cards (40.65 seconds) and the most digit memorized in 5 minutes (33 digits).
Nelson appeared on the Netflix documentary Memory Games (2019) as well as many other TV shows to show off his skills, such as FOX's Superhumans, Brain Games and The Science Channel.
He is the author of four memory-based books too, including titles such as Where You Left Your Keys and Everything Else You Tend to Forget. He is also the author of a memory book for kids, named Memory Superpowers! An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget.
In addition to his memory skills, Nelson is a mountaineer. He pursues a lifestyle that combines mental and physical health, good nutrition and social engagement to try and stay as healthy and fit as possible.
Combining his two passions, Nelson is also the Founder and CEO of Climb For Memory, a non-profit charity that seeks to raise awareness and funds for Alzheimer's disease research through mountain climbs around the world. Nelson himself has climbed numerous peaks around the world for this cause, including Mount Everest three times.
He believes that all his career and training have prepared him to finally break a Guinness World Records title, which he considers a prestigious achievement.
Since Nelson loves to undertake both mental and physical challenges, he saw this record as the perfect opportunity to test both skills at the same time.
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