🇵🇰 Emma Alam

A world title won from Karachi

The 29th World Memory Championships should have been held in person. COVID-19 made that impossible, so in December 2020 the World Memory Sports Council ran its first online edition: sealed paper tests opened only under supervision, local referees, video recording of every session, and an organizing base in Sanya, China. More than 300 competitors, aged 8 to 72, from 16 countries and regions took part — over 200 of them from China.

Emma Alam competed from Karachi over three days, December 18 to 20. When the ten disciplines were scored, she was first overall with 7,099 points, 837 ahead of China’s Zhang Xingrong. Raymond Keene, the council’s president, called her “one of the great sporting achievers for Pakistan” and “a unique heroine in Pandemic stricken 2020.” No Pakistani had won the title in the championship’s three decades.

Ten disciplines, one scorecard

A memory championship is a decathlon of recall. Emma’s official results show where the title was won. In names and faces she matched 218 names to photographs in 15 minutes and won the event. In random words she recalled 410 in order and won again. She was second in historic dates, with 195 — behind her own teammate Syeda Kisa Zehra — and second in speed numbers, with 550 digits in five minutes, four behind another teammate, Abeerah Ather. She added third places in spoken numbers and binary digits and fourth in abstract images.

The most remarkable line on the scorecard is her worst. In speed cards, the championship’s signature event — memorizing a shuffled deck as fast as possible — she recalled only two cards correctly in each attempt and finished 178th, earning four points. She won the world title anyway. The same event cost her the Grandmaster of Memory title: she met the standards for the one-hour cards and numbers events, but not the speed-cards standard.

Two Guinness World Records

In March 2021 Guinness World Records certified two of her December performances: the most names and faces memorized in 15 minutes (218) and the most random words memorized in 15 minutes (410). The previous marks had been held by competitors from Sweden and India, and Pakistan’s Geo News framed the news accordingly. Her teammate Kisa Zehra received a third record, for dates.

The names event is harder than it sounds. Competitors see color photographs of faces paired with random first and last names, deliberately assigned so that ethnicity gives no clue to the name. “It’s an honour to be recognised by the Guinness World Records,” Emma said. “I can now say, ‘I am officially amazing!’”

From first competition to world champion in under two years

Guinness gives her birth year as 2002 and says she began competing in memory contests at the start of 2019. That year she competed for Pakistan at the Asia Pacific Memory Championship in Malaysia and at the 28th World Memory Championships in Wuhan, China; her own site lists junior medals from both events and a junior world title in mind mapping. She was home-schooled while she trained, Geo reported at the time.

Her coach was Sania Alam, who directed her training at the Institute of Human Memory Development and later became president of Futuristic Learning; no source says whether the two are related. Emma credited the method, not magic: “I had aimed to give my best in WMC 2020, backed by a lot of daily practice for the past two years with my coach and the institute,” she told The Express Tribune. “It still astonishes me how powerful the mechanism of human memory is and the brain’s infinite information storage system.”

How memory athletes train

Most elite competitors use some version of the method of loci, or memory palace: they attach vivid images to places along an imagined route and walk it again to recall. The technique is traditionally traced to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. No published source describes Emma’s personal system; she has spoken only of daily practice.

The sport has two governing bodies. The World Memory Championships were founded in 1991 by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keene and are run by the World Memory Sports Council. In 2016 a group of competitors and organizers split off to form the International Association of Memory, which runs its own world championship. Emma’s title is the council’s. The council held the only world championship of 2020.

A second world title: speed reading

In March 2022 she won the 13th World Speed Reading Championship — the 2021 edition, delayed by the pandemic — reading a 15,823-word book in 20 minutes and 4 seconds: 789 words a minute, at 97 percent comprehension. The Express Tribune put the average reading speed worldwide at about 200 words a minute. At the same event she placed third in the 12th World Mind Mapping Championship. “I feel great bringing home another World Title,” she said. “I achieve, to inspire!”

Where is Emma Alam now?

No world-final result for her has been published since 2020; the 2021 edition, decided in March 2022, was won by Mongolia’s Munkhshur Narmandakh. In December 2023 the council reclassified records set in its 2020–2022 online events as “Online World Records,” separate from those set in person. Both Guinness records still list her as holder.

Today she is listed as a director of Futuristic Learning, teaches courses in memory, mind mapping and speed reading, and co-wrote a 384-page book, Mastering Memory, with Sania Alam in 2024. Her own sites list national honors and awards that have not been independently reported. Born in 2002, she is 23 or 24 in 2026.