Ed Cooke is a Grand Master of Memory and co-founder and CEO of Memrise, the award-winning app that teaches cutting-edge memory techniques to optimise learning.
Key to Ed’s approach is demonstrating that, far from being boring and monotonous, training your memory is all about unleashing your imagination and cultivating positive emotions – it is, in fact, an incredibly powerful tool for enhancing our motivation, fuelling our creativity and enriching our world.
Ed first got hooked on memory techniques aged 18 during a three-month stint in hospital. With nothing to do but try and impress the nurses, he immersed himself in a book by World Memory Champion Dominic O’Brien and soon was able to memorise 200 foreign words in an hour and a shuffled pack of cards in a matter of minutes.
After completing a degree in Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford, and a Masters in Cognitive Science at Paris Descartes University, Ed went on to become a Grand Master of Memory aged just 23.
He subsequently met journalist Joshua Foer and coached him to become US Memory Champion in under a year. Foer featured Ed prominently in his book Moonwalking with Einstein (2011), which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 8 weeks. Most recently, Ed’s focus has been co-founding and growing Memrise, an app that employs cutting-edge technology and an intimate knowledge of brain science to help people learn faster. His aim is to make the Memrise user experience so powerful that learning a language will be as easy and natural as ordering shopping online.
He must be doing something right – Memrise currently has over 25 million users and has won an array of Android and Apple awards. Most recently it won Best App at the 2017 Google Play Awards.
Watch Ed’s TED Talk here
