Synapsia

Rather than doing anything constructive today, I've been reading the collected editions of Synapsia magazine that all the competitors at the world memory championships this year were given free. It was the magazine of the Brain Club, which is Tony Buzan and his gang of mind-map enthusiasts, also discussing other brain-related things like chess and memory and the like. Like these things generally do, it started out with wild enthusiasm in 1988, was published regularly for a few years, then gradually dwindled away through lack of interest (whether from the writers or readers, I'm not sure) until it was coming out once a year before finally disappearing in 1997.

If I'd known about Synapsia back then, I would have been one of its biggest fans. I was a terribly nerdy teenager, and I can just see me and Noddy poring excitedly over every new issue. Who knows, maybe I would have got into the whole memory thing much earlier, and competed in the first world championships back in 1991? Probably not, though - it took actually talking to memory people at the MSO in 2000 before I believed the memory techniques described in Synapsia and such publications could really work.

The funniest bit is reading about the MSO in Synapsia. The first mention comes back in 1991, when Ray Keene confidently announces that not only will the first MSO happen in 1992, but that it's reasonable to expect at least five hundred competitors in each mind sport, that well over ten thousand people, plus their spouses and friends, will converge on the event from all over the world, and that TV and press coverage will be huge, turning mind sports into the most popular thing in the universe. And these estimates might have to be revised upwards closer to the time.

The MSO was quite big for the first few years (when it finally started up in 1997), but it never got more than 2000 or so competitors at its peak, and international participation was always pretty minimal. But it's not really nice to laugh at over-optimistic predictions, and I do like the MSO and Synapsia. Just not as much as I know I would have liked it when I was 14, that's all. I'm not sure whether that means I'm less nerdy now, or just nerdy in a different way.