Dominic O'Brien is an eight times world memory champion and has brought the subject of memory to the forefront of the media.

Memorizing 54 packs of cards is the amazing feat Dominic accomplished to gain a place in the Guinness Book of records.

He also memorized a pack of cards in 38.29 seconds.

What is the relevance of this in terms of learning your times tables you may ask yourself?

To become world champion he had to memorize lots of numbers.

To enable Dominic to do this efficiently he had to find a method to aid him.

Dominic's way of looking at numbers is now used by a vast amount of people to help them successfully remember.

Dominic says that the problem with numbers is that they are cold and unfeeling. People find them awkward and difficult to remember.

This view held by adults if shared by children will make times tables difficult to learn.

With this view numbers can be more difficult to remember.

Numbers are not as easy to group together as words are, therefore making memorizing more difficult.

Dominic realized it would be much easier to memorize the numbers if an emotion, image or person became attached to them.

It therefore makes sense for people to remember numbers by turning the numbers into an image or a person.

Once Dominic had accomplished this he found the numbers came to life and were so much easier to memorize.

By doing this he memorized 360 random numbers in only 5 minutes.Many people assume Dominic and other memory champions are geniuses but the fact is they are not.

They themselves state that they use simple techniques that anyone can use and with practice achieve great feats of memory.

It is a known fact that children have always learnt their times tables by rote.Imagine if the memory champions had learnt using rote learning , very few outstanding records would have been met.

Any child using the techniques used by the memory champions and Dominic would have a massive advantage over other children memorizing the times tables.

Imagine the confidence your children would have if they could easily remember the times tables.This is an invaluable lesson learnt from the memory champions.