It’s the ultimate mental challenge: later this week in Bahrain 60 of the most lethally honed minds in the world will come together to test their powers of recall to superhuman extremes by competing in the memory world championships.

Over the course of three gruelling days they will take part in a 10-discipline “deca-mentathlon” in which they will be called upon to memorise entire decks of playing cards and hundreds of historical dates and random words as well as matching long lists of names with faces.

Impossible? Tell that to Clemens Mayer from Germany, the world champion. Last year he succeeded in blowing away the judges in an astonishing display of mental retention that included successfully recalling a string of 188 numbers that had just been recited to him.

This year he will be back to face down opponents including Wan Ky (it’s a real name, not a rude number-plate) from Hong Kong, Bhaskar Karmakar from India, the enigmatic-sounding Mahmoud from Egypt and the appropriately named James Ponder from Britain.

However, the real contest will be between two heavyweights who over the past 12 months have taken the memory world by storm by steadily annihilating the competition during national heats and other tournaments.

They are Gunther Karsten, a 46-year-old German social worker, who is currently ranked No 1 in the world despite coming only second in the championships last year (rather like tennis, you don’t have to win Wimbledon to be the top seed), and holds the world record over the 10 events of the deca-mentathlon.

The other main contender for the title, according to Tony Buzan, a British academic, memory expert and the event’s founder, is Ben Pridmore, a 30-year-old accountant from Derby and a former world champion. He is also the first man ever to remember a whole deck of cards in less than 30 seconds, which he achieved earlier this year at the British championships in Highley, Shropshire, where he notched his world record time of 26.28sec.

The extreme mental effort of the challenge, held amid the searing summer heat of the Gulf state where daytime temperatures exceed 40C, will see them temporarily lose between 4lb and 9lb of weight each day as their hippocampuses (the brain area associated with memory) go into overdrive. In the end, one winner will walk away with the first prize of £5,000.

The tournament, which began in 1991, is scored exactly like a decathlon in athletics. Participants receive a certain number of points for their performance in each event and the winner is the person with the highest tally at the end. At stake is not just the prize pot but also national pride.

Pridmore, a bespectacled, slightly plumper version of the actor Rick Moranis (the star of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), is a self-confessed lover of junk food and cartoons. Karsten’s approach is the direct opposite. A proponent of the theory of healthy mind in a healthy body, he is a fitness fanatic and yoga nut who abstains from alcohol in the weeks before the tournament.

So in a pattern we’ve seen many times before, it’s the plucky Brit versus the Teutonic öbermensch, and it’s as well this won’t be going to penalties because it means we might just stand a chance of coming home with gold.

Whoever wins, the audience at the event in the Crowne Plaza hotel will witness some spectacular feats, the mental equivalent of a sumo wrestling contest in which a person of average mental ability would quickly be crushed.

Many contestants have already earned the title of “grandmaster” of memory. Yes, there is such a thing — though not for those of us who struggle to remember the Pin code to our bank account. To join this elite club, you must recall a number that’s 1,400 digits long, memorise a deck of cards in less than two minutes and commit 10 decks of cards to memory in less than an hour.

Yet these are not the feats of mental supermen with photographic memories. According to Buzan: “People think it’s all computer pro-grammers and members of Mensa that apply but it’s not. Anyone can recall between two and five times as much through a bit of training.

“The prime age is any age and every age, and memory works the same whether you’re Chinese, German or Mexican. In recent years the Chinese have come roaring out of the blue. I think this is because the Chinese language is based on image and image is crucial to memory.”

Regardless of their nationality all the competitors use similar techniques, a memory method called “mind mapping”. Essentially this involves picturing yourself going on a journey through a place you know well, such as your own home, and associating objects you come across along the way with the thing you are trying to recall.

In order to memorise decks of playing cards at high speed, Pridmore remembers the cards in pairs. The accountant says there are 2,704 possible combinations of pairs and he has stored an image for each of them in his long-term memory: for instance, an ace of hearts and a two of clubs is represented by an electric fan.

However, there is a simplified method that Pridmore believes anyone can learn. This gives an image to every individual card rather than pairs of cards and means you only have to learn 52 images.

Here’s a rough breakdown of the technique. Give each suit the consonant sound of its initial: clubs is “C”, diamonds “D”, hearts “H” and spades “S”. Each number carries a different vowel sound. An ace would be “A”, for instance, while a five is “U”. These then combine to form the start of the word, and it’s your choice what that word would be: the five of spades could become “submarine”.

At every stop in your journey - in each room in your house perhaps - you should then place three images, representing three cards. To find out more see www.memoryconsulting. com/pridmore.htm.

“These sorts of methods are very useful for remembering playing cards or strings of random numbers,“ says Pridmore. “But they’re pointless for everyday things. For instance, I’m still terrible with names and faces.”

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Third of Muslim students back killings
• Curfew tames feral yobs of Cornwall
• £3,000-a-month drug free abroad