Recently a graduate student - named Ogi - studying the cognitive neuroscience of memory decided to leverage his knowledge to gain an edge on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" Blogger Rashmi explains:

For his $16,000 question - "Which country first published the inflammatory cartoons of the prophet Mohammed?", Ogi used priming (to activate memories of a conversation he had with a friend about the issue) and successfully recalled that the country was Denmark.

For his $250,00 question - "The department store Sears got its start by selling what specific product in its first catalog?", he had an intuition that "watches" was the right answer. Memory research tells us that if you can trace where an intuition is coming from, then you can better decide whether to trust that intuition or not. In his case, he recalled that the "watches" choice brought up "railroads". He reasoned that there maybe he had read somewhere about Sears sending watches by railroad and went with the answer.

Here is a link to a fun article written by Ogi on his millionaire experience in Seed Magazine.

From Ogi after getting the $500K question correct..."My neurohormones whipped from black misery to shining ebullience, saturating my brain in a boiling cauldron of epinephrine and endorphins. I gaped at the azure screen in front of me as the ultimate question coalesced in hot white font."