Congrats to Luis Angel, memory competitor, who won the FOX TV show, "Superhuman" last night after memorizing the entire audiences' names, hometowns, and physical features. He killed it. The competition on the show was great, ranging from another one of my friends, Yusnier Viera calculating numbers real quick, to another guy being able to locate one Rubik's Cube sticker in a sea of thousands. Impressive stuff!
Unfortunately, the show didn't really go into much detail on how each competitor was able to perform their feat. They just left it as each competitor being actually "Superhuman," but that's hardly the case - at least for the memorization and calculation stuff, which is often misunderstood as something that the superhuman memorizer is born with. I don't know enough about the other tasks to comment, but I would assume there are tricks to each of them. There was a doctor/scientist on the judge panel, commenting on everything, but judging from how he commented on the memory feats, he didn't really explain it correctly.
Anyways, the point is. We are all capable of Superhuman things. Everything Luis and Yusnier did on that show was learned through simple techniques and dedicated practice.