Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe
Speaker 1: and I recently had the chance to talk with Nelson Dellis.
Speaker 1: He is a memory champion, a memory athlete, as some
Speaker 1: might say. Yes, someone even say a mental athlete. Um
Speaker 1: though when I when we chatted with him, he did
Speaker 1: mention that he doesn't like to use that terminology because
Speaker 1: if he goes out to the UK, that makes him
Speaker 1: sound like he's got a problem. But but no, this
Speaker 1: this guy is one of the leading memory athletes in
Speaker 1: the world. He is. Uh. He uses the method of
Speaker 1: loci the memory Palace, which is a fabulous device that
Speaker 1: allows you to use spatial memory to catalog at times
Speaker 1: just obscure facts or even just useless data. It's really
Speaker 1: one of the great mental technologies that I've ever encountered.
Speaker 1: I haven't used it much, but I think it's very
Speaker 1: interesting and I'd like to give it an exploration sometime soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating stuff. So we recently chatted with Nelson and uh,
Speaker 1: we're gonna air that interview, but first we thought it
Speaker 1: would be helpful to go ahead and re air some
Speaker 1: previous stuff to blow your mind content about the memory palace,
Speaker 1: about the method of loci, how it works, where it
Speaker 1: comes from, and then we'll talk to the expert himself
Speaker 1: to give some inside information. So, without any further ado,
Speaker 1: here is Robert and Julie's excellent old discussion of the
Speaker 1: memory palace. Really, I don't have the best memory in
Speaker 1: the world. Um, I mean, maybe it's an average memory.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I'm I have problems with my brain
Speaker 1: or anything, but I often forget that. I think everybody
Speaker 1: has this where the really boring stuff you need to
Speaker 1: remember sometimes, uh you don't remember. I can have a
Speaker 1: simple list to go to the grocery with, and if
Speaker 1: I don't have it written like in the notes section
Speaker 1: of my iPhone, then I'm not going to remember everything.
Speaker 1: Even if it's something vital, like something the thing that
Speaker 1: I need to eat that night, an important component in
Speaker 1: the in the the meal, I still will forget to
Speaker 1: pick it up. I'm sorry, what were you just saying that? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I have a horrible memory. Actually I read
Speaker 1: something when our research that compared memory to a Wikipedia entry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were saying, it's like it's your memory is
Speaker 1: constantly being altered and augmented and then sometimes pared away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the stuff that it's being updated with is
Speaker 1: completely uh not true. It's horse manure sometimes turns out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's not necessarily what we're gonna talk about today,
Speaker 1: but you could actually talk to me about that before,
Speaker 1: and I thought it was fascinating. We're just saying that
Speaker 1: when you have a memory, each time you bring it up,
Speaker 1: you're revising it in some way. Oh yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 1: we'll we'll definitely have to cover that in an upcoming
Speaker 1: episode in more detailed. But yeah, every time you bring
Speaker 1: up a memory, you're not just removing it pristine from
Speaker 1: the vault and then returning it pristine to the vault,
Speaker 1: but you're updating at each time because your brain needs
Speaker 1: updated information because we live in a world, as as
Speaker 1: we discussed in our math podcast, we live in a
Speaker 1: world and we have to navigate a world of multiple
Speaker 1: movable objects and symbols, so we have to be able
Speaker 1: to fly with that yep, and then hence the horsemen
Speaker 1: who are sometimes right right. So people have had horrible
Speaker 1: memories for as long as we've had to remember things
Speaker 1: because just as math, as we discussed in the Math Podcast,
Speaker 1: we develop mathematics to do the things that we're not
Speaker 1: naturally inclined to be able to do with our normal
Speaker 1: mental faculties. We have to develop systems. But what to
Speaker 1: do if you're in the Roman Empire, for for instance,
Speaker 1: just hanging out and you don't necessarily have a ton
Speaker 1: of books around you or your your iPhone there. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: in this case, you've turned to something called the memory palace,
Speaker 1: also known as the method of low key. Right. That's right,
Speaker 1: And the origins of this go back to a particular
Speaker 1: back to the fifth century BC and a Greek poet
Speaker 1: by the name of Somonodes of CEOs. And uh, he
Speaker 1: was attending a party, you know, in the dining hall,
Speaker 1: having fun around the table with a bunch of a
Speaker 1: bunch of buddies, and he h walked out for a
Speaker 1: few minutes, and the whole entire place collapsed behind him.
Speaker 1: Oh he walked out. I wondered how he survived. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: maybe he went out for smoke or something, but but
Speaker 1: he went outside, Uh, and everything collapsed. He survives. Everybody
Speaker 1: else's just crushed to just mush just a Smucker's jam.
Speaker 1: There's no identifying these people. But he was, yeah, with
Speaker 1: a name like Smuckers. Um, so he goes back in,
Speaker 1: you know, he doesn't go back in, but they dig
Speaker 1: everything up again, Smucker's jam everywhere, and they're like, all right,
Speaker 1: who were each of these people? And he he says, well,
Speaker 1: let me think about it. And he's able to identify
Speaker 1: each puddle as as he's able to that was, and
Speaker 1: he's able to identify them based on their seating position
Speaker 1: at the table. He's able to remember where they were
Speaker 1: spatially and therefore remember who they were identified these remains,
Speaker 1: and this was a big moment for him, right yeah,
Speaker 1: because then he realized, hey, I could apply this to
Speaker 1: other things in my life. If I have a list
Speaker 1: I need to remember, if there's a long list of
Speaker 1: facts I need to get down, this is how I
Speaker 1: could do it. And uh and and so this survived
Speaker 1: for ages, uh you know, well, you know, for centuries
Speaker 1: and centuries and on up through today. Um. One big
Speaker 1: proponent of this was Dominican monk UH Giordano Bruno, who
Speaker 1: was actually he was burned at the stake in UH
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred for heresy. But it wasn't the memory palace
Speaker 1: method that they got him there though, I think some
Speaker 1: people found it kind of creepy. But his whole thing
Speaker 1: had to do with he believed that God was president
Speaker 1: nature and the universe and life was infinite there where
Speaker 1: that you know, there might be aliens or something and uh,
Speaker 1: and so that got him into the hot water. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Roman Catholic Church wasn't big on that at the time,
Speaker 1: but today they have a statue where he where he
Speaker 1: was burned, and and he's more revered these days. No,
Speaker 1: that's nice, you know, at least later on. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: the basically the the idea here, uh, if you want
Speaker 1: to look at like just sort of a simple version,
Speaker 1: if you take these mundane facts and you position them
Speaker 1: in a spatial framework and you make and you make
Speaker 1: them interesting, all right, So that the idea of the
Speaker 1: memory palace is to create a mental house in which
Speaker 1: to house and organize symbolic images, which then could serve
Speaker 1: as a queue for information retrieval, right right, Like for instance,
Speaker 1: our good friend um um, the simonities here could easily
Speaker 1: populate this this banquet table with um, you know, a
Speaker 1: list of addresses he needs to remember if he can
Speaker 1: come up with a unique way to remember each one
Speaker 1: and then remember them in order based on where they
Speaker 1: are at the table. Okay, and um, just a little
Speaker 1: side fact to Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal. Actually, Hannibal Lecter
Speaker 1: uses memory palaces for his patients records. Yeah he does.
Speaker 1: I've forgotten about that. I read that. Yeah, he even
Speaker 1: includes music too for the rooms that he's going into. Um. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: it's good enough for Hannibal Lecter, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: good enough for me, which is why I actually tried
Speaker 1: this out yesterday. And I'm going to repeat everything that
Speaker 1: I imagined the way I built and populated my memory
Speaker 1: palace so that I could remember a list of five
Speaker 1: things to get from the grocery store in the way home. Okay,
Speaker 1: he didn't write a thing down, No, did not write
Speaker 1: a thing down. He didn't put anything in my in
Speaker 1: my phone and uh and so these were the things.
Speaker 1: Just it was a soy creamer, ingle Hoffer's mustard, ant traps,
Speaker 1: frozen fruit, and toilet paper. So you know, just this
Speaker 1: a standard run for me. Um, all right, what is
Speaker 1: your mem smory palace look like? So I decided to
Speaker 1: for the space. I decided to use the space that
Speaker 1: I'm occupying right now, the house stuff works podcast room
Speaker 1: slash podcast chamber. Okay, so this is why I pictured it.
Speaker 1: All Right over here behind you is our sound booth,
Speaker 1: and inside it I pictured a robot cow drinking coffee
Speaker 1: for my soy milk, all right, and then seated where
Speaker 1: you are. You're not here, but instead there's a large
Speaker 1: German man in in a later hosen, big mustache going on,
Speaker 1: and he's got big clumps of of of spicy hot
Speaker 1: mustard in his mustache. And that's the inglehoppers mustache, because
Speaker 1: it has a little German man on the loop. Then
Speaker 1: in this seat between us, because the table that we
Speaker 1: record at has a third chair that is never occupied
Speaker 1: by an actual person um but in in my memory palace,
Speaker 1: it is occupied by a large pile, like a human
Speaker 1: sized pile of frozen fruit. And it's just gleaming in
Speaker 1: the light, smelting a little bit, smelling wheat and uh.
Speaker 1: And you know I can see strawberry and mango and all.
Speaker 1: And because this is an important part of the memory,
Speaker 1: cost to add some details to it. You know, you're
Speaker 1: not just thinking the word Um, you know you're not
Speaker 1: just thinking the word frozen fruit, you're picturing it. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is existing in space and not just a concept,
Speaker 1: all right. And then if I were to poke my
Speaker 1: head out through these curtains where Jerry is setting, uh, producer,
Speaker 1: I would see a giant ant and that Aunt is
Speaker 1: dressed in Maria von Trapps dress from the Sound of Music,
Speaker 1: because I need to remember Aunt Traps. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: the fifth item. Standing at the green screen behind Jerry's seat,
Speaker 1: there is a toilet paper mummy going through a number
Speaker 1: of sexy poses for the camera. They're sexy poses. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so and so anyway it worked. I was able to
Speaker 1: remember I know only five things. That's kind of puny,
Speaker 1: but I was able to remember these five things. Now
Speaker 1: you can also say that while I was doing this
Speaker 1: for the podcast, I was applying thought to this than
Speaker 1: I would normally apply to the list that I things
Speaker 1: I need to pick up. And it's also worth noting
Speaker 1: that even though this is an abbreviated version, one can
Speaker 1: use use people use this for hundreds of items, right
Speaker 1: And in fact, in each room you could have I
Speaker 1: don't know five ten different items that are living there.
Speaker 1: It's just a matter of placing the object, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: well how about you. Do you have a memory palace,
Speaker 1: so you've constructed. I do, and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: actually share it, um because I don't think it's I'll
Speaker 1: share one on my on my list. And basically I
Speaker 1: need to mail my fs A reimbursement right flexible spending account.
Speaker 1: So at my front door, I just pictured angry chirups
Speaker 1: with wings made out of dollar bills greeting me at
Speaker 1: the front door with a pile of mail. Oh well
Speaker 1: that's good, right, like you, And they're angry because I'm like,
Speaker 1: you don't send this stuff in. My wings are going
Speaker 1: to fall off or whatever. I don't know, but I
Speaker 1: do have other rooms, but just for brevity's sake, I
Speaker 1: won't I won't tell. But what I love about this
Speaker 1: is that it quickly becomes very similar to the surrealism
Speaker 1: that I don't know about you, but for me, that
Speaker 1: I experienced in my dreams. Yeah yeah, right, Like all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, there's these incongruent things going on and
Speaker 1: they're they're wild and they're fantastic. And that's I think
Speaker 1: why we remember our dreams sometimes, right, because they're so
Speaker 1: extraordinary yeah, we were at least yeah exactly, I mean
Speaker 1: we were. We were talking about about this how we
Speaker 1: take something mundane and we turn it into something crazy
Speaker 1: and memorable in the same way that on this trip
Speaker 1: from New York we we both just came back from
Speaker 1: attending the World Science Festival in New York City. By
Speaker 1: the way, two eleven, it's gonna be back in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. Highly recommend anybody who's big into science and
Speaker 1: was in New York to give it a go. And and
Speaker 1: and that's actually where I attended a I was an
Speaker 1: audience for a panel on memory, and that's where I
Speaker 1: get really excited about the concept of the Memory Palace.
Speaker 1: But while I was waiting to go into one of
Speaker 1: these events, my wife and I were waiting out in
Speaker 1: this little courtyard area and we saw this man walk
Speaker 1: up with a box like cardboard box under his arm
Speaker 1: that said Trout on the side, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like a beer card, like a box like beer would
Speaker 1: come in or something, but he just said Trout. I
Speaker 1: don't know what the brand was, But anyway, he's standing
Speaker 1: in there, puts his box down on the ground and
Speaker 1: he gets a handful of of like bread or crackers out,
Speaker 1: and he starts feeding the pigeons, which I don't think
Speaker 1: it's technically illegal, but he's doing it anyway. So he's
Speaker 1: feeding the pigeons. Three of them land there, and they're
Speaker 1: just standing there eating, and then slowly he starts raising
Speaker 1: his hand up, moving his hand forward, and then he
Speaker 1: reaches down, snatches one of the pigeons, stuffs it into
Speaker 1: the cardboard box, and then walks off with the cardboard
Speaker 1: box full of a pigeon. And so you told me that,
Speaker 1: And I don't think I'll ever be able to look
Speaker 1: at a pigeon without thinking of that poor pigeons fate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or or or wondering again why the side of the
Speaker 1: the cooler said trout, Yeah, yeah, so that it's yeah.
Speaker 1: I have no idea what he was doing with it,
Speaker 1: what the purpose was, if he was an official pigeon catcher,
Speaker 1: if he was gonna eat it for dinner, uh, you
Speaker 1: know who knows. But it was memorable because it was
Speaker 1: so weird. And so the memory palace is is kind
Speaker 1: of like, let's make the mundane fact, Let's make the
Speaker 1: soy creamer that I will inevitably forget. Let's make that
Speaker 1: into something memorable so that I can't forget it at
Speaker 1: least for a short term. Um. And then you can
Speaker 1: you can use this this uh this memory palace and
Speaker 1: you can populate it with hundreds of items, so you
Speaker 1: can you can remember a list in order of hundreds
Speaker 1: of items. And that's what mental athletes do. They're called
Speaker 1: mental athletes, and we'll get to them in a bit.
Speaker 1: Umah after this quick break and we're back. Do you
Speaker 1: remember what we were talking about everyone memory palace robotic cow. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well that that was part of it. That was how
Speaker 1: we remember. Yeah, well, let's just walk is really quickly,
Speaker 1: just like sort of four easy steps on how you
Speaker 1: can create your own memory palace. Um. So we've already
Speaker 1: talked about the first step, which is create a physical
Speaker 1: location that you can clearly visualize right now. And that's
Speaker 1: why I went with the podcast chamber for me because
Speaker 1: I see it all the time. I'm very familiar with
Speaker 1: the with the locations, and I can I can imagine
Speaker 1: it instantly, right, and you can make up your own palace,
Speaker 1: you know, just as long as you can um get
Speaker 1: a clear beat on the detail of it. Might I
Speaker 1: recommend like maybe the command deck from one of the
Speaker 1: Star Trek shows. That would be good. There you go.
Speaker 1: That's a good example. Um. And step two is to
Speaker 1: establish a memory route through the location. Right, So if
Speaker 1: you're gonna you say, your childhood home, then you want
Speaker 1: to go through the front door, and you know, pick
Speaker 1: a route that say you go left to the kitchen
Speaker 1: and then down the hallway or so on and so forth. Um,
Speaker 1: you want to keep that same route all the time?
Speaker 1: Am I right about that? Yes? Okay? Yeah. Joshua four
Speaker 1: who wrote a book about all this called Walking with Einstein,
Speaker 1: he actually did a short video for the World Science
Speaker 1: Festival and uh and it was shown during this memory
Speaker 1: pan all that I attended, and uh and he he
Speaker 1: was he actually did it in a garden like in
Speaker 1: a like a gardener was more like a gardenery of
Speaker 1: a park or something, and he was he actually, you know,
Speaker 1: he's like, all right, here is going to be and
Speaker 1: it was something crazy like you know, Einstein moon walking
Speaker 1: that's the title. And then he walked through it and
Speaker 1: he was able to do like a list of a
Speaker 1: D ten things yea. And as he's walking through it,
Speaker 1: he's placing the objects. So this is really important. So
Speaker 1: once you're you establish your route. You want to put
Speaker 1: your objects that you want to remember, your things, your
Speaker 1: concepts they want to remember in that room. And the
Speaker 1: reason why you want to do this is because it
Speaker 1: becomes what's called a memory peg. Okay, so that's important
Speaker 1: for step three is you need to now peg the
Speaker 1: memory to the object. So that's when you start to
Speaker 1: think about these really bizarre associations. Right, the more bizarre
Speaker 1: the better. If you want to remember to pick up bananas,
Speaker 1: then can visualize your front door as a banana Dakary
Speaker 1: portal with Carmen Miranda greeting you or something along those lines.
Speaker 1: It helps if you're kind of silly. I think silliness definitely,
Speaker 1: yeah uh. And you can add a song or a
Speaker 1: sent to the memory, especially if you're Hannibal elector right.
Speaker 1: And then step forward is just to repeat the visualization
Speaker 1: until you've cemented the objects to memories. You really pick
Speaker 1: those memories, all right. So it's a fairly simple process.
Speaker 1: So we've probably talked about the research part of this,
Speaker 1: which is pretty cool, and actually talk about these mental athletes.
Speaker 1: So there are many types of memory. We don't just
Speaker 1: have memory in the human brain. We have just to
Speaker 1: give you a brief idea. We have sensory memory, we
Speaker 1: have short term, long term, explicit, implicit, procedural, declarative, episodic, semantic,
Speaker 1: and uh, and we also have spatial memory. And the
Speaker 1: spatial context is extremely important. Like it because again, at
Speaker 1: a at a very basic level, we are navigating a world,
Speaker 1: a physical world of movable, numerous objects and simples. That's right.
Speaker 1: And no, I've talked about this before that when you
Speaker 1: walk into a room, that what you're perceiving isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: coming through your eyes. It's coming from the associations that
Speaker 1: your brain is making spatially. So you're whether or not
Speaker 1: you realize that you're you're judging the height of the
Speaker 1: ceiling or the doors, and so on and so forth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and if you look back at our evolutionary history,
Speaker 1: you know there's a time where you need to remember
Speaker 1: the field where you you know, killed a monkey that
Speaker 1: you're gonna eat or something of that nature. You know,
Speaker 1: where does it lay in the field? Has it moved?
Speaker 1: So every we end up having this spatial scaffolding upon
Speaker 1: which we make sense of our entire lives. Just think
Speaker 1: of a calendar or think of a timeline like these
Speaker 1: are These are spatial scaffolding systems that we use to
Speaker 1: understand what's going on in the world around us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I especially like the evolutionary example because if you
Speaker 1: and why you would need the spatial memories because ye
Speaker 1: again think about like trying to find food sources and
Speaker 1: mapping that out in your brain, or trying to figure
Speaker 1: out where that dent of lions are how best to
Speaker 1: avoid them. Yeah, So it's really important distress here that
Speaker 1: the memory palace is not a trick. It's not really
Speaker 1: a trick. It's not something and when you have people
Speaker 1: who can who can use it and use it to
Speaker 1: impressive degrees, not just for five items at the grocery
Speaker 1: store that uh, they're they're not doing anything out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary. Like the spatial way, and the way that
Speaker 1: we use spatial memory in the memory palace is just
Speaker 1: how we think. It's how the brain works. Well. And also,
Speaker 1: these mental athletes that compete, right, they actually have very
Speaker 1: average memories. They've tested them. Yeah, these are not superpowered
Speaker 1: brains here. These are normal brains. They're using just to
Speaker 1: tie down what's happening in the brain. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot going on in the brain with memory. But uh,
Speaker 1: spatial memory is tied to the hippocampus, which is located
Speaker 1: in the temporal lobe, and it kind of looks like
Speaker 1: a long gummy worm kind of thing in your brain.
Speaker 1: And it's also worth noting that at the head of
Speaker 1: this worm you have the amigala, which is tied to
Speaker 1: emotional memory, which again kind of look at the head
Speaker 1: of the worm, and underneath that you have the pa
Speaker 1: hippocampal which is tied into details, memory recoding, and memory retrieval.
Speaker 1: But the hippocampus that's spatial, and that's the area that
Speaker 1: really fires up when these mental athletes start using the
Speaker 1: memory palace to exceptional degrees. That's right. In a study
Speaker 1: of eight top ranking mental athletes that they were asked
Speaker 1: to memorize three digit numbers and black and white photographs
Speaker 1: of people's faces and magnified images of snowflakes, researchers found
Speaker 1: that in comparison to the control group of non mental athletes,
Speaker 1: the mental athletes were using a lot more of their
Speaker 1: spatial memory in that hippocampus region that you talked about, um,
Speaker 1: And again it's because they're using that spatial reasoning to
Speaker 1: peg a blueprint of all the objects that they're memorizing.
Speaker 1: So um, so we're talking about these mental athletes. Let's
Speaker 1: talk specifically about one of the more famous ones. I
Speaker 1: suppose by now, um Joshua four. Yeah, this is the
Speaker 1: guy who wrote Moon's Moonwalking with Einstein that I mentioned earlier. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he became interested in these individ jules and he's just
Speaker 1: a journalist, right, I want to find out more about this.
Speaker 1: I mean, he became interested in the US Memory Championship
Speaker 1: and he went there expecting to interview a bunch of
Speaker 1: savants and uh and just you know, mental giants, and
Speaker 1: and they kind of laughed at the notion when he
Speaker 1: when he asked him the questions because they're like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm just you know, a normal dude and this is
Speaker 1: not that complicated. And so he kind of took it
Speaker 1: on as a challenge to like, well, let me see
Speaker 1: what I can do. Let me try out the memory palace,
Speaker 1: let me let me see what I can do with
Speaker 1: the method of Loki. Yeah, and he spent a whole
Speaker 1: year this was just pretty incredible with memory champ ed
Speaker 1: cook um literally just so he could improve his mental acuity,
Speaker 1: right that that was his the first thing that he
Speaker 1: wanted to try to do, but he became really obsessed
Speaker 1: with becoming a mental athlete himself. And he went on
Speaker 1: to compete in and win the US Memory Championship, and
Speaker 1: each morning during this year, he would spend fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: memorizing a new poem or memorizing the names in an
Speaker 1: old yearbook for instance. Um, but that's not that's not
Speaker 1: where it stopped him. He again, he was obsessed with us.
Speaker 1: So on the subway he would start to memorize random numbers,
Speaker 1: or he would keep a deck of playing cards with
Speaker 1: him and memorize those. And he began to catalog everything
Speaker 1: in his existence and constructing like basically like condominiums of
Speaker 1: mental palaces, so to speak. Cook, the guy that he
Speaker 1: he interviewed, he actually did a like a Ted talk
Speaker 1: or Ted x talk or something. And I'll have to
Speaker 1: embed that in the blog post that we do to
Speaker 1: accompany this, uh, this particular episode, because he goes into
Speaker 1: how he would he uses the memory pal system. He's
Speaker 1: memorized things like Chinese characters, you know, basically learning bits
Speaker 1: of another language via the memory palace. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: has some really good visual representations in that video. Yeah,
Speaker 1: super silly Joshua four. Yeah, completely obsessed. He even bought
Speaker 1: a pair of goggles and spray painted them black and
Speaker 1: then he cut out eye holes in them. And this
Speaker 1: is all in the efforts that he could better concentrate
Speaker 1: on his memory scales. Yeah, so it looks like that.
Speaker 1: Part of it sounds like, you know, Jedi master training,
Speaker 1: where some sort of you know, far Eastern like thing.
Speaker 1: But then in his mind he's thinking about goofy things
Speaker 1: like you know, like Katherine Hepburn juggling frogs or something
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, And there's a great New
Speaker 1: York Times article called Secrets of a Mind Gamer, and
Speaker 1: in it, uh Cook says to the reporter there that
Speaker 1: photographic memory because because the reporter brings up, well, isn't
Speaker 1: this just photographic memory? And yeah, and he says, no,
Speaker 1: photographic memory is a despicable myth, it doesn't exist. In fact,
Speaker 1: my memory is quite average. All of us here have
Speaker 1: quite average memories. Okay, So this is coming from the
Speaker 1: guy who could recite most of Paradise Lost by Heart
Speaker 1: as well as like two fifty two random digits he
Speaker 1: could commit to memory in like five minutes. So I mean,
Speaker 1: these really are incredible feats that these guys are doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and indeed, and actually, um, you know, this is a
Speaker 1: competition that they have among themselves. But Cook says that
Speaker 1: it's also an attempt for them to rescue a long
Speaker 1: lost tradition of memory training, because again, we don't necessarily
Speaker 1: need it these days, right, except that we still have
Speaker 1: these crazy, failing memories, right, um, just for the most
Speaker 1: mundane things, Like I've mentioned to you that, um, I
Speaker 1: think a lot for some reason about Quentin Tarantino movies,
Speaker 1: but inevitably I always forget his name, and yet it's
Speaker 1: something that you know, I reference a lot. How would
Speaker 1: you use the memory palace to remember? Okay, the reason
Speaker 1: why I can even say Quentin Tarantino now is because
Speaker 1: now I think about going to San Quentin and going
Speaker 1: to the Commissary, and in the Commissary, Mariotali is fixing
Speaker 1: ten thousand plates of Tarantino pasta. We'll see that, well, see,
Speaker 1: and that makes perfect sense within the architecture of your mind.
Speaker 1: But I would have to use quent Quentin Tarantino to
Speaker 1: remember that other stuff you were talking about. I mean,
Speaker 1: Quentin San Quentin, I know, But who is the guy
Speaker 1: Mario Batali, who's that? Oh man, he's a great Italian chef.
Speaker 1: And and if you don't have to see the red
Speaker 1: headed dude, yeah, yeah, he's pretty outrageous in another So
Speaker 1: if you don't really have to do much to him,
Speaker 1: like you know, you don't want to guild a literally there, Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, anyway, I mean, this is this is stuff
Speaker 1: that you can do. Um, but it's pretty amazing to
Speaker 1: look at this, uh Joshua for Character and Ed Cook
Speaker 1: and see them in action and um. In that video
Speaker 1: that Ed Cook has um on the ted X, he
Speaker 1: says that you should use your memory in a playful
Speaker 1: and enjoyable way, and you should experience it as a
Speaker 1: gift rather than a boring an annoying thing you'd rather
Speaker 1: park away in your iPhone. Yeah, because that's the thing
Speaker 1: they're enjoying, these memory games. And I have to say
Speaker 1: learning that little list was kind of it was kind
Speaker 1: of fun, so that the five and easily five things
Speaker 1: I had to remember the grocery store. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe I should play a litt bit more and see
Speaker 1: how it goes. And I certainly encourage anyone listening to
Speaker 1: to give the memory palace a go to to. Try
Speaker 1: using it, even if it's just like you know, the
Speaker 1: time you need to do a grocery list of just
Speaker 1: a few items, don't write it down, don't put it
Speaker 1: in your cell phones. Try constructing a memory palace out
Speaker 1: of it, and I think it'll be surprised at how
Speaker 1: well it works. All Right, we're back and we're gonna
Speaker 1: speak with Nelson Dellis here again, a three time us
Speaker 1: A Memory champion. Uh. He's uh. He's currently ranked one
Speaker 1: of the top fifty in the world memory rankings. And uh.
Speaker 1: He started competing in two thousand nine when he came
Speaker 1: in sixteen in the USA Memory Championships that year and
Speaker 1: the new year since he's won three times and finished
Speaker 1: in the top three spots. Uh. He runs the Extreme
Speaker 1: Memory Tournament to Extreme Memory Tournament dot com, it's where
Speaker 1: you'll find it. And he also has a nonprofit titled
Speaker 1: Climb for Memory, and you'll find that at Climb for
Speaker 1: Memory dot org. That's a nonprofit charity aimed at raising
Speaker 1: awareness and funds for Alzheimer's disease by climbing mountains around
Speaker 1: the world. So welcome to the show, Nelson. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: start off by just asking, Uh, what does competing in
Speaker 1: the US Memory Championships consists of? Yeah, So it's actually, UM,
Speaker 1: it's a one day event and basically there's a morning
Speaker 1: in an afternoon part. In the morning part is based
Speaker 1: off of four events. So we memorize faces. We have
Speaker 1: UM a packet of a hundred and seventeen pictures, and
Speaker 1: we have fifteen minutes to memorize as many of those
Speaker 1: faces with their name pairs as possible. UM. And then
Speaker 1: after that we have speed numbers, so we're given a
Speaker 1: page filled with numbers and we have five minutes to
Speaker 1: memorize as many as possible. Then we do a deck
Speaker 1: of cards as fast as possible, and then finally a poem,
Speaker 1: a previously unpublished poem that we try to memorize word
Speaker 1: for word UM in fifteen minutes. The top eight from
Speaker 1: that morning event set of events goes into the afternoon rounds,
Speaker 1: which is like a playoff series of rounds. The first
Speaker 1: is a random word list. We have to memorize in
Speaker 1: sixteen minutes as many words as possible, and we go
Speaker 1: on stage and are eliminated if you say any wrong UM.
Speaker 1: And then when three are eliminated, we move on to
Speaker 1: the next round, which is um a tea party, that's
Speaker 1: what it's called. We get audience members to come up
Speaker 1: and say things about themselves, like their name, where they're from,
Speaker 1: phone number, hobbies and we have to memorize those and
Speaker 1: then finally the final event is to memorize two decks
Speaker 1: of cards in five minutes. And it's basically sat on
Speaker 1: stage until somebody messes up and you're left with the champion.
Speaker 1: So what's your method? Do you use the method of locai?
Speaker 1: Right now? It's it's everyone that you'll find these competitions
Speaker 1: will use some form of the memory palace technique or
Speaker 1: the method of loca, and that's that's what separates us
Speaker 1: all pretty much, in my opinion, is is basically practice.
Speaker 1: How much time did you spend training? Uh? Because you
Speaker 1: get faster at being able to use this method and
Speaker 1: more efficient at it. And can you share anything on
Speaker 1: your particular take on the method or is or is
Speaker 1: that sort of a trade secret? No? I can. It's
Speaker 1: funny in this world of pneumonics competitivenemonics and see everybody
Speaker 1: is willing to share their techniques because there are no secrets.
Speaker 1: It just comes down to how much do you train UM.
Speaker 1: So in terms of what I do, it's nothing crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean I use memory palaces from my childhood, my
Speaker 1: homes that I've lived in, apartments, UM workplaces, things like that,
Speaker 1: and what it comes down to, like I said, practice,
Speaker 1: But also for some of the events it's UM. It's
Speaker 1: big on strategy. So for example, numbers, I have a
Speaker 1: specific system that I've come up with UM to help
Speaker 1: me translate these numbers into things that I can place
Speaker 1: in the memory top us UM. And that I guess
Speaker 1: it's kind of where some people may have UM an
Speaker 1: advantage over others. But that again, it takes time. If
Speaker 1: you have, the more complicated your system, the more time
Speaker 1: need to spend preparing it and practicing it. Do you
Speaker 1: find yourself using the memory palace for things outside of competitions,
Speaker 1: like when you're not in the game, And how much
Speaker 1: of it do you use in the course of any
Speaker 1: given day. You know, at the beginning, when I was
Speaker 1: getting into this, I would try to memorize everything people
Speaker 1: I meet, things I see, whatever. But the more I
Speaker 1: got into memory sports and the more I would practice,
Speaker 1: the more I just be exhausted by the time it
Speaker 1: was in real life. So actually a lot of the
Speaker 1: time I'm nowadays, I'm just kind of like, I don't
Speaker 1: want to be on all the time, so I I
Speaker 1: kind of shut it off, which is interesting in itself
Speaker 1: because it shows that this thing is uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: something I have to do with make an effort to
Speaker 1: to do. It's not just a natural, um thing that happens,
Speaker 1: you know. But that being said, I mean I do
Speaker 1: use it obviously if I need to, but I'm at
Speaker 1: a party or an important networking event, I use it
Speaker 1: obviously to memorize names and facts about people. How is
Speaker 1: the method of local change the way you look at
Speaker 1: memory as a whole, particularly the degree to which show
Speaker 1: we can trust it. Yeah, you know, learning these techniques
Speaker 1: has definitely given me a lot more confidence in my
Speaker 1: own memory. Um. It's allowed me to do things that
Speaker 1: I never thought i'd be able to do. UM. And
Speaker 1: it just shows me that the mind is really I
Speaker 1: don't want to say a limitless because that's that's a
Speaker 1: bit silly to say that. But there are a lot
Speaker 1: of things that we can do with our minds that
Speaker 1: we may not believe as possible, you know. UM, And
Speaker 1: that's that to me, It's just The beauty of this
Speaker 1: whole thing is that there's so much more than we know,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, we should give ourselves a lot
Speaker 1: more credits. Sometimes we're too quick to say, oh, I
Speaker 1: can't do that. Um, that's impossible, but you know, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of things that are possible, and it's
Speaker 1: just a matter of thought, you know. So who's harder
Speaker 1: on you when you actually forget something of yourself? Or
Speaker 1: other people? At this point? Probably people that I know,
Speaker 1: you know, everybody expects me to remember everything. And while
Speaker 1: I do remember a lot, like I said, I do
Speaker 1: like to kind of take time off from being on
Speaker 1: all the time, you know, so and you know, you
Speaker 1: can imagine everybody who meets me expects me to remember
Speaker 1: their name. And that's a lot of people. Of course,
Speaker 1: they remember my name because I'm Nelson, the memory guy, right,
Speaker 1: they come towards me. Um, so yeah, I guess now
Speaker 1: it's more other people. Is there any sort of information
Speaker 1: that's particularly difficult to incorporate into the memory palace in
Speaker 1: your experience? Yeah, I guess names are are pretty tricky. Um,
Speaker 1: because you're not really using a memory palace per se.
Speaker 1: You kind of are, but it's in disguise, if that
Speaker 1: makes any sense. Um. You know, you instead of attaching
Speaker 1: a piece of information and image to a location in
Speaker 1: a memory palace, you're attaching it to a person's face
Speaker 1: or a person's body or something about them. Um. In
Speaker 1: the Turkey part about that is you can't really review
Speaker 1: in the same way that you can with a memory palace.
Speaker 1: The memory palace, you know very well the person and
Speaker 1: their attribute or their feature that you use as an anchor.
Speaker 1: You know, it goes away with them when they're gone. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's it's it's kind of scary in that sense
Speaker 1: because you don't have control over that. Here's a question.
Speaker 1: Does it affect your dreams? I don't know. I'm not
Speaker 1: really I'm I'm a bad dreamer. I don't really remember
Speaker 1: my dreams, which is kind of funny, I guess, um,
Speaker 1: but I will say that leading up to competition, when
Speaker 1: I'm memorizing a lot any a lot, I have had
Speaker 1: dreams where I that I'm memorizing and when I wake up,
Speaker 1: I remember, like the sequence of cards that I memorized
Speaker 1: in the dream, which is bizarre. Now, I know what
Speaker 1: a lot of people are wondering. Can anyone become a
Speaker 1: memory athlete, or do you have to have a certain
Speaker 1: type of cognitive architecture already in place? Um? No, anybody
Speaker 1: can joint. There's no like qualifications or anything. Um. And
Speaker 1: the techniques are pretty easy to to to learn, but
Speaker 1: obviously if you want to compete at the high level,
Speaker 1: a lot of prep needs to go into it. Can
Speaker 1: you walk us through an example of the sort of
Speaker 1: memory palace you might employ to remember, say something like
Speaker 1: a series of playing cards? Um, yeah, you could. Uh.
Speaker 1: Let's see, so I had I had to do a
Speaker 1: speech today and some of that I can I can
Speaker 1: maybe recite off some of the images I saw today. Okay, alright,
Speaker 1: So the first three cards were Ata Clubs, Queen of
Speaker 1: Hearts and five of Spades which is bear grills and the
Speaker 1: the adventurer Guy um cooking a pair of scissors. And
Speaker 1: then moving on to the next location was the tena
Speaker 1: Hearts to Clubs and Tenna Clubs, which is a close
Speaker 1: friend of mine being crucified on the floor. Um. And
Speaker 1: then you have Jennifer Connolly um standing on top of
Speaker 1: a television set while playing her game Boy. And then
Speaker 1: I have Satan waving his wand and suddenly he's wearing gloves.
Speaker 1: I have an ex girlfriend sniping with a golf club. Um.
Speaker 1: Then there's a pirate Jack Sparrow, he's dunking slam dunking
Speaker 1: a desk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was moonwalking on top of
Speaker 1: a horse, um and so on. Alright, so do you
Speaker 1: have it? Some insight from an expert utilizer of the
Speaker 1: memory palace. Thank you Nelson for taking the time to
Speaker 1: chat with us. If you want to follow Nelson on Twitter,
Speaker 1: you can find him at Climb for Memory and again
Speaker 1: be sure to visit his website Climb for Memory dot org.
Speaker 1: That's the nonprofit charity aimed in raising awareness and funds
Speaker 1: for Alzheimer's disease. As always, you can find uh this
Speaker 1: and any number of other podcast episodes of Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
Speaker 1: as well as blog post videos links out to our
Speaker 1: various social media accounts. You name it, And if you
Speaker 1: have thoughts about the memory Palace or you want to
Speaker 1: tell us about a particularly bizarre memory palace you've ever constructed,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com,