He was astounded by the fact that the contestants were competing to remember huge lists of numbers, or the order of a pack of playing cards backwards, twice, or 40 line poems having only read them through for a couple of minutes. Having thought the people competing must just have special neurological make-up, Joshua Foer soon learned that these people with amazing memories were just ordinary people in the main, but ordinary people who had trained and developed their memories to a far higher degree than anyone would imagine possible.