While many students struggle to memorize facts for exams, Erin Luley (freshman-animal bioscience), a record holder at The USA National Memory Championship, memorizes as an extracurricular activity.

Called "mental athletes," participants at the USA National Memory Championship are tested on their ability to remember series of numbers, decks of cards and even poems.

"I got involved in this my senior year [of high school]; my gifted teacher found out about this competition," Luley said. "It's a competition to test various aspects of your memory."

Now, Luley is being featured in a full-length documentary, tentatively titled You Must Remember This, produced by Looking Glass Films, that the filmmaker hopes will hit theaters. "I read about the competition last year," filmmaker Richard Hankin said. "There was a brief article in The New York Times, kind of an 'isn't this odd' type thing."

Hankin believes the film will be fun for all ages.

"The idea is that its going to be a feature-length documentary that will go into theaters," he said.

The documentary, which explores the science behind memory, follows several people as they train and compete. Hankin believes many people will be interested and able to relate to the topic because of the growing concern with the aging population and diseases like Alzheimer's.

Last March, Luley and her high school team went to New York for the competition, where they came away the winners of the team competition. Luley earned the top prize and broke the previous record in both the "Names and Faces" and "Poetry" categories. A team wins by having the highest combined score, composed of their members' individual scores.

In a "Names and Faces" competition, competitors are given 99 photos and the names of those pictured. The contestants have 15 minutes to memorize as many as possible and then 20 minutes to give the photos, then in a different order, their proper names. Points are awarded based on correctly spelled names, first or last, and half points are awarded for names spelled phonetically correct.

Each activity has a period for memorization and another for "recall." In the poetry competition, the contestants are given a piece of unpublished poetry to read.

They then have 15 minutes to memorize it. During the 20-minute period afterward, the contestants must rewrite as much of the poem as they can remember and are then judged on spelling, grammar and the overall correctness of each line.

Luley's win in "Names and Faces" and "Poetry" in the pre-qualifying events advanced her to the finals, where she was eliminated.

When all but two of the competitors have been eliminated, the final event takes place to determine the overall winner. The final competition has the two contestants memorize the order of the cards in a double deck of cards.

"It's definitely getting more popular, and last year there was a ton of publicity at this event," Luley said.