Bell will be asked 100 questions about the positions of cards

World Memory Champion Andi Bell hopes to complete the challenge in five hours, after which he will be tested on the positions of individual cards.

The event is on at the British Museum in London, to coincide with its 250th anniversary and an exhibition on memory.

Mr Bell told the BBC the techniques he uses can be mastered by anybody - even people who often have trouble remembering their own phone number.

Confident

To make sure there is no cheating involved in Mr Bell's challenge, the cards were randomly shuffled by professional croupiers in front of witnesses.

You have got to think of the things you want to remember against a mental backdrop of places that you know. Andi Bell

Mr Bell said he was confident that he would be successful.

He said: "As far as I know, no one else has ever memorised 100 decks of cards in five hours.

"I will be asked 100 questions - one about each deck of cards - and I'm sure there will be very few I can't answer. Hopefully I will get all 100 right."

Animals and objects

Describing the key to his extraordinary memory, Mr Bell said: "You have got to think of the things you want to remember against a mental backdrop of places that you know."

He imagines the cards as animals and colourful objects and remembers them as being in different locations.

"To recall I just think back to those places, hopefully seeing the images still there, and turn them back into the cards."

It is a technique which he has previously used to successfully memorise 23 decks of cards in one hour.

God given?

Mr Bell has also performed the feat of memorising a 333 digit number spoken at a rate of a digit every two seconds.

But he denied that his talent was "God given" and said anybody could benefit from his techniques.

Mr Bell suggested that somebody wanting to learn history could imagine a different room in a house for every century and store events accordingly.