Memory champion and Brain Awareness Week Ambassador Daniel Kilov / Pic: Jeremy Piper Source: The Daily Telegraph HE came second in last year's Australian Memory Championships - but Daniel Kilov insists he is nothing special. The 24-year-old says his skills - which include memorising a shuffled deck of cards in less than five minutes and holding the Australian record for correctly recalling 115 abstract images - can be learned by anyone: "It's crucial people don't think I have any special ability or talent in regards to memory. I've never met anyone who can't do what I do with just a small amount of training. After struggling through school due to his terrible memory, Mr Kilov stumbled upon a range of techniques known as the Art of Memory which rely on the use of colourful mental imagery to facilitate an eerily accurate ability to quickly memorise information. "When you tell people how you do it the reaction you often get is, 'Oh, is that it?'," Mr Kilov said. But although it's simple it's incredibly powerful. The Macquarie University graduate is encouraging Australians to become more conscious of maintaining the health of that most important of organs - the brain. He believes the incorporation of memory techniques into the school curriculum could help students. "Our schools cater and teach in a very limited methodology towards a specific school set so any students who don't have those specific skill sets are going to struggle, and memory is one of those pre-requisites that schools expect students to have," he said. Despite his capacity to almost instantly recall large volumes of data, Mr Kilov prefers to delegate some of the more mundane memory tasks - such as collating shopping lists and storing phone numbers - to a more traditional method. Not all things are worth committing to memory. To my mind, leave the trivial stuff to the iPhone and use the memory techniques to enliven and enrich your life. Who wouldn't want to learn a language if they knew they could pick it up in a couple of months instead of years? Daniel's Top 5 tips Practice mindfulness - remember to remember. Most failures of memory are actually just failures of attention. Think visually - construct mental movies of things you want to remember. Be creative - bring colour to your mental stories to transform the mundane into the memorable. Organise your memories - how we organise information (or fail to do so) dictates how easily we can recall it later. Use mnemonics and acronyms. Look after your body - regular exercise and sleep are vital for cognitive function, as is proper nutrition.