Emma Alam, a memory athlete from Karachi, holds a line in our Pakistan world rankings and records coverage that very few athletes in any sport can match: two Guinness World Records and two world championship titles. At the 29th World Memory Championships, held in Karachi from 18 to 20 December 2020, she memorised 410 random words in sequence in 15 minutes and 218 names and faces in 15 minutes, and she finished the championship with the highest accumulated points of more than 300 competitors from 16 countries. The following year she added the World Speed Reading Champion title.
- Born: 2002, Karachi; started competing in memory sport at the beginning of 2019
- Guinness record 1: most random words memorised in 15 minutes, 410 words (20 December 2020)
- Guinness record 2: most names and faces memorized in 15 minutes, 218 (19 December 2020)
- Titles: World Memory Champion 2020; World Speed Reading Champion 2021
- Coach: Sania Alam, of the Futuristic Learning institute, Karachi
Two Guinness Records in Two Days
The records fell on consecutive days of the same championship. On 19 December 2020, Guinness World Records records, Alam broke the record for most names and faces memorized in 15 minutes, correctly spelling and recalling 218 names matched to faces; the previous holder was from Sweden. One day later, on 20 December, she memorised 410 random words in sequence in 15 minutes, taking a record previously held by India. Guinness certified both records afterwards, and in the official announcement her reaction was quoted in full: “I am officially amazing,” she said, borrowing the Guinness slogan for record holders. Both record pages remain listed in her name on the Guinness World Records website today.
World Memory Champion 2020
The two records were part of a larger championship performance. The World Memory Championships test athletes across a battery of disciplines, from spoken numbers and binary digits to cards, words, names and faces, and historic and future dates. Alam ended the 29th edition, staged in her home city of Karachi, with the highest accumulated points of the field of more than 300 competitors from 16 countries, which made her the overall World Memory Champion 2020. Her gold medals at the championship included the names and faces and random words disciplines, and she took silver in historic and future dates among further medals. It was a remarkable rise for an athlete who, by her own biography, only started competing in memory contests at the beginning of 2019 and describes herself as having been an average student before structured memory training.
Photo: Futuristic Learning
World Speed Reading Champion 2021
A year later she proved the skill set ran wider than memorisation. Alam won the 13th World Speed Reading Championship in 2021, with reports of the finals saying she defeated more than 100 competitors from around the world. Speed reading at championship level is not skimming: readers are tested on how much of a previously unseen text they can absorb at extreme pace and then answer questions on, so the title pairs naturally with her memory records. Two different world championships, two different skills, one winner from Karachi.
Trained in Karachi: Emma Alam and Her Team
Alam was trained by her coach Sania Alam of Futuristic Learning, a Karachi institute for memory and accelerated learning, whose founder is one of a small number of senior licensed instructors in the sport worldwide. The Karachi championship was a breakthrough for the whole home squad, and accuracy matters here: her teammate Syeda Kisa Zehra broke a Guinness record of her own at the same event, memorising 241 fictional dates in five minutes, and squad medal totals sometimes quoted in coverage belong to the team as a whole. The two records described in this article are Alam’s alone, which is how Guinness lists them, and they are quite enough: two world records, set on consecutive days, by an 18-year-old competing at home. She has since written a book, Mastering Memory, and teaches the techniques she used. For other young Pakistanis collecting world-level honours, see the examination records of Mahnoor Cheema and the still-standing record of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel laureate.
Sources
- Guinness World Records: Most Random Words Memorised in 15 Minutes (410, Emma Alam)
- Guinness World Records: Most Names and Faces Memorized in 15 Minutes (218, Emma Alam)
- Official website: About and Honours
- Futuristic Learning: Profile and Championship Honours
- Featured image: The champion with her medals and her two framed Guinness World Records certificates. Photo: Emma Alam, via emmaalam.com
- In-body image: Emma Alam displaying her championship medals. Photo: Futuristic Learning
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.