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 Julia Class and
Speaker 1: Julie I don't have the best memory in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe it's an average memory. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: I'm I have problems with my brain or anything, but
Speaker 1: I often forget that. I think everybody has this where
Speaker 1: the really boring stuff you need to remember sometimes uh,
Speaker 1: you don't remember. I can have a simple list to
Speaker 1: go to the grocery with, and if I don't have
Speaker 1: it written like in the notes section of my iPhone,
Speaker 1: then I'm not gonna remember everything. Even if it's something vital,
Speaker 1: like something the thing that I need to eat that night,
Speaker 1: an important component in the in then the meal, I
Speaker 1: still will forget to pick it up. I'm sorry, what
Speaker 1: were you just saying? Now, that's just uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I have a horrible memory. Actually, I've read something in
Speaker 1: 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. Were you 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, Um
Speaker 1: well we'll we'll definitely have to cover that in an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode in more detail. But yeah, every time you
Speaker 1: you bring up a memory, you're not just removing it
Speaker 1: pristine from the vault and then returning it pristine to
Speaker 1: the vault, but you're updating at each time because your
Speaker 1: brain needs updated information because we live in a world us,
Speaker 1: as we discussed in our Math podcast, we live in
Speaker 1: a world and don't have to navigate a world of
Speaker 1: multiple movable objects and symbols. So we have to be
Speaker 1: able to fly with that yep. And then hence the
Speaker 1: horsemen who are sometimes right right. So people have had
Speaker 1: horrible memories for as long as we've had to remember
Speaker 1: things because uh, just as math, as we discussed in
Speaker 1: the Math podcast, we develop mathematics to do the things
Speaker 1: that we're not naturally inclined to be able to do
Speaker 1: with our normal mental faculties. We have to develop systems.
Speaker 1: But what to do if you're in the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: for for instance, just hanging out and you don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have a ton of books around you or your your
Speaker 1: iPhone there? Yeah, well, in this case you turn to
Speaker 1: something called the memory palace, also known as the method
Speaker 1: of Loki. Right, that's right, and the the origins of
Speaker 1: this go back to a particular back to the fifth
Speaker 1: century BC and a Greek poet by the name of
Speaker 1: Somonodes of CEOs. And uh, he was attending a party,
Speaker 1: you know, in the dining hall, having fun around a
Speaker 1: table with a bunch of a bunch of buddies, and
Speaker 1: he uh walked out for a few minutes, and the
Speaker 1: whole entire place collapsed behind him. Oh, he walked out.
Speaker 1: I wondered how he survived. Okay, yeah, maybe he went
Speaker 1: up for smoke or something else. But but he went outside, uh,
Speaker 1: and everything collapsed. He survives everybody else that's just crushed
Speaker 1: to just mush, just a smucker's jam. There's no identifying
Speaker 1: these people. But he was, yeah, with a name like Smuckers. Um,
Speaker 1: so he goes back in you know, he doesn't go
Speaker 1: back in, but they dig everything up again. Smucker's jam everywhere,
Speaker 1: and they're like, all right, who were each of these people?
Speaker 1: And he says, well, let me think about it. And
Speaker 1: he's able to identify each puddle uh as as he's
Speaker 1: able to that was, and he's able to identify them
Speaker 1: based on their seating position at the table. He's able
Speaker 1: to remember where they were spatially and and therefore remember
Speaker 1: who they were identified these remains. And this was a
Speaker 1: big moment for him, right yeah, because then he realized, hey,
Speaker 1: I could apply this to other things in my life.
Speaker 1: If I have a list I need to remember, if
Speaker 1: there's a long list of facts I need to get down,
Speaker 1: this is how I could do it. And uh and
Speaker 1: and so this survived for ages. Uh you know, well,
Speaker 1: you know, for centuries and centuries and on up through today. Um.
Speaker 1: One big proponent of this was Dominican monk uh Giordano Bruno,
Speaker 1: who was actually he was burned at the stake in
Speaker 1: UH sixteen hundred for heresy, but it wasn't the memory
Speaker 1: palace method that they got him there though I think
Speaker 1: some people found it kind of creepy, but his whole
Speaker 1: thing had to do with he believed that God was
Speaker 1: president nature and the universe in life was infinite. Therefore
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: though today they have a statue where he where he
Speaker 1: was burned, and and he's more revered these days. It's
Speaker 1: nice at least later on. Yeah. So the basically the
Speaker 1: the idea here, Uh, if you want to look at
Speaker 1: just sort of a simple version, if you take these
Speaker 1: mundane facts and you position them in a spatial framework
Speaker 1: and you make and you make them interesting, all right,
Speaker 1: So that the idea of the memory palaces to create
Speaker 1: a mental house in which to house and organize symbolic images,
Speaker 1: which then could serve as a queue for information retrieval,
Speaker 1: right right, Like, for instance, our good friend um, um
Speaker 1: simonities here could easily populate this this banquet table with um,
Speaker 1: you know, a list of addresses he needs to remember
Speaker 1: if he can come up with a unique way to
Speaker 1: remember each one and then remember them in order based
Speaker 1: on where they are at the table. Okay, and um,
Speaker 1: just a little side fact to Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal. Actually,
Speaker 1: Hannibal Lecter uses memory palaces for his patients records. He does,
Speaker 1: I've forgotten about that. I've read that. Yeah, he even
Speaker 1: includes music too for the rooms that he's going into. Um. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: if it's good enough for Hannibal Lecter, you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's good enough for me, which is why I actually
Speaker 1: tried this out yesterday. Uh and and I'm going to
Speaker 1: repeat everything that I imagined the way I built and
Speaker 1: populated my memory palace so that I could remember a
Speaker 1: list of five things to get from the grocery store
Speaker 1: in the way home. Okay, you didn't write a thing down. No,
Speaker 1: did not write a thing down. It didn't put anything
Speaker 1: in my in my phone and uh and so these
Speaker 1: were the things. Just it was a soy creamer, ingle
Speaker 1: Hoffer's mustard, aunt traps, frozen fruit, and toilet paper. So, um,
Speaker 1: you know, just this is a standard run for me. Um, alright,
Speaker 1: what what does your memory palace look like? So I
Speaker 1: decided to for the space. I decided to use the
Speaker 1: space that I'm occupying right now, the house, stuff works,
Speaker 1: podcast room, slash podcast chamber. Okay, so this is the
Speaker 1: way I pictured it all right over here behind you
Speaker 1: is our sound booth, and inside it I pictured a
Speaker 1: robot cow drinking coffee for my soy milk, all right.
Speaker 1: And then seated where you are, you're not here, but
Speaker 1: instead there's a large German man uh in in a
Speaker 1: later hosen, big mustache going on, and he's got big
Speaker 1: clumps of of of spicy hot mustard in his mustache.
Speaker 1: And that's the the engle Hoffers mustache, because it has
Speaker 1: a little German man on the lap. Uh. Then in
Speaker 1: this seat between us, because the table that we record
Speaker 1: at has a third chair that is never occupied by
Speaker 1: 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 sweet 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
Speaker 1: our producer, I would see a giant ant and that
Speaker 1: Aunt is dressed in Maria von Trapps dress from the
Speaker 1: Sound of Music, because I need to remember Aunt Traps. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the fifth item, standing at the green screen
Speaker 1: behind Jerry's seat, there is a toilet paper mummy going
Speaker 1: through a number of sexy poses for the camera. They're
Speaker 1: sexy poses. Yeah, yeah, so and I So anyway, it worked.
Speaker 1: I was able to remember I know only five things.
Speaker 1: That's kind of puny, but I was able to remember
Speaker 1: these five things. Now you can also say that while
Speaker 1: I was doing this for the podcast, I was applying
Speaker 1: more thought to this than I would normally apply to
Speaker 1: the list that I of things I need to pick up.
Speaker 1: And it's also worth noting that even though this is
Speaker 1: an abbreviated version, one can use use people use this
Speaker 1: for hundreds of items, right and in fact, in each
Speaker 1: room you could have five ten different items that are
Speaker 1: living there. It's just a matter of placing the object, right. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: how about you, do you have a memory pale constructed?
Speaker 1: I do, and I'm not going to actually share it
Speaker 1: um because I don't think it's I'll share one on
Speaker 1: my on my list, And basically I need to mail
Speaker 1: my f S a reimbursement right flexible spending account. So
Speaker 1: at my front door, I just pictured angry chirups with
Speaker 1: wings made out of dollar bills greeting me at the
Speaker 1: front door with a pile of mail. That's good, right,
Speaker 1: like you, And they're angry because they're like, you don't
Speaker 1: send the stuff in my wings are going to fall
Speaker 1: off or whatever. I don't know, but I do have
Speaker 1: other rooms, but just for brevity's sake, I won't I
Speaker 1: won't tell. But what I love about this is that
Speaker 1: it quickly becomes very similar to the surrealism that I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, but for me, that I experienced
Speaker 1: in my dreams. Yeah, right, like all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: there's these incongruent things going on and they're they're wild
Speaker 1: and they're fantastic. And that's I think why we remember
Speaker 1: our dreams sometimes, right, because they're so extraordinary. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: were honest at least, Yeah exactly, I mean we were.
Speaker 1: We were talking about about this, how we make something
Speaker 1: mundane and we turn it into something crazy and memorable.
Speaker 1: In the same way that on this trip from New York.
Speaker 1: We we both just came back from attending the World
Speaker 1: Science Festival in New York City two thousand eleven. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be back in two thousand twelve. Highly recommend anybody's
Speaker 1: big into science and lives in New York to give
Speaker 1: it a go. And and that's actually where I attended
Speaker 1: uh A. I was an audience for a panel on
Speaker 1: memory and that's where I get really excited about the
Speaker 1: concept of the Memory Palace. But while I was waiting
Speaker 1: to go into one of these events, my wife and
Speaker 1: I we were waiting out in this little courtyard area
Speaker 1: and we saw this man walk up with a box,
Speaker 1: like cardboard box under his arm that said Trout on
Speaker 1: the side, like I don't know, like a beer cart,
Speaker 1: like a box that like beer would come in or something,
Speaker 1: but he just said Trout. I don't know what the
Speaker 1: brand was. But anyway, he he's standing there there, puts
Speaker 1: his box down on the ground and he gets a
Speaker 1: handful of of like bread or crackers out, and he
Speaker 1: starts feeding the pigeons, which I don't think it's technically illegal,
Speaker 1: but he's doing it anyway. So he's feeding the pigeons.
Speaker 1: Three of them end there and they're just standing there eating,
Speaker 1: and then slowly he starts raising his hand up, moving
Speaker 1: his hand forward, and then he reaches down, snatches one
Speaker 1: of the pigeons, stuffs it into the cardboard box, and
Speaker 1: then walks off with the cardboard box full of a pigeon.
Speaker 1: And so you told me that, And I don't think
Speaker 1: I'll ever be able to look at a pigeon without
Speaker 1: thinking of that poor pigeon's fate. Yeah, or or or
Speaker 1: wondering again why the side of the the the cooler
Speaker 1: said trout. Yeah, yeah, so that it's Yeah. I have
Speaker 1: no idea what he was doing with it, what the
Speaker 1: purpose was, if he was an official pigeon catcher, if
Speaker 1: he was gonna eat it for dinner, Uh, you know
Speaker 1: who knows. But it was memorable because it was so weird.
Speaker 1: And so the memory palace is is kind of like,
Speaker 1: let's make the mundane fact, let's make the soy creamer
Speaker 1: that I will inevitably forget. Let's make that into something
Speaker 1: memorable so that I can't forget it, at least for
Speaker 1: a short term. Um, and then you can you can
Speaker 1: use this this uh, this memory palace and you can
Speaker 1: populate it with hundreds of items, so you can we
Speaker 1: can remember a list in order of hundreds of items,
Speaker 1: and that's what mental athletes do. They're called mental athletes,
Speaker 1: and we'll get to them in a bit. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: after this quick break. Yeah, this presentation is brought to
Speaker 1: you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow and we're back. Do
Speaker 1: you remember what we were talking about everyone memory palace
Speaker 1: at Robotic Cows. Yeah, yeah, well that that was part
Speaker 1: of it. That was how we remember that. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: let's just walk this really quickly, just like sort of
Speaker 1: four easy steps on how you can create your own
Speaker 1: memory palace. Um. So we've already talked about the first step,
Speaker 1: which is create a physical location that you can clearly
Speaker 1: visualize right now. And that's why I went with the
Speaker 1: podcast chamber for me because I see it all the time.
Speaker 1: I'm very familiar with the with the locations, and I
Speaker 1: can can imagine it instantly, right And you can make
Speaker 1: up your own palace, you know, just as long as
Speaker 1: you can, um get a clear beat on on the
Speaker 1: detail of it. Might I recommend like maybe the command
Speaker 1: deck from one of the Star Trek shows. 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 use 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 The moon
Speaker 1: Walking with Einstein, he actually did a short video for
Speaker 1: the World Science Festival and uh, and it was shown
Speaker 1: during this memory panel that I attended, and uh and
Speaker 1: he he was he actually did it in a garden,
Speaker 1: like in a like an' really garden. It was more
Speaker 1: like a gardenery of a park or something. And he
Speaker 1: was he actually, you know, he's like, all right, here
Speaker 1: is going to be And it was something crazy like
Speaker 1: you know, Einstein moonwalking, that's the title. And then he
Speaker 1: walked through it and he was able to do like
Speaker 1: a list of a hundred and ten thing. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: as he's walking through it, he's placing the checks. So
Speaker 1: this is really important. So once you're you establish your route,
Speaker 1: you want to put your objects that you want to
Speaker 1: remember your things or your concepts they want to remember
Speaker 1: in that room. And the reason why you want to
Speaker 1: do this is because it becomes what's called a memory peg. Okay,
Speaker 1: so that's important for step three is you need to
Speaker 1: now peg the memory to the object. So that's when
Speaker 1: you start to think about these really bizarre associations. Right,
Speaker 1: the more bizarre the better. If you want to remember
Speaker 1: to pick up bananas, then can visualize your front door
Speaker 1: as a banana dacary portal with Carmen Miranda greeting you
Speaker 1: or something along those lines. It helps if you're kind
Speaker 1: of silly. I think silliness definitely. Yeah, And you can
Speaker 1: add a song or a set to the memory, especially
Speaker 1: if you're Hannibal elector right. And then step for is
Speaker 1: just to repeat the visualization until you've cemented the objects
Speaker 1: to memories. You really pick those memories, right. So it's
Speaker 1: a fairly simple process. So we should probably talked about
Speaker 1: the research part of this, which is pretty cool, and
Speaker 1: and actually talk about these mental athletes. So there are
Speaker 1: many types of memory. We don't just have memory in
Speaker 1: the human brain. We have just to give you a
Speaker 1: brief idea, we have sensory memory. We have short term,
Speaker 1: long term, explicit, implicit, procedural, declarative, episodic, semantic, and uh.
Speaker 1: And we also have spatial memory. And the spatial context
Speaker 1: is extremely important. Like it because again at a at
Speaker 1: a very basic level, we are navigating a world, a
Speaker 1: physical world of movable, numerous objects and simples. That's right.
Speaker 1: And now 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, is 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 the monkey that
Speaker 1: you're gonna eat or something of that nature. You know,
Speaker 1: where does it laying? The field? Has it moved? So
Speaker 1: every we end up having this spatial scaffolding upon which
Speaker 1: we make sense of our entire lives. Just think of
Speaker 1: a calendar or think of a timeline like these are
Speaker 1: these are spatial scaffolding systems. That we use to understand
Speaker 1: what's going on in the world around us. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I especially like the evolutionary example because if you and
Speaker 1: why you would need the spatial memories because again, think
Speaker 1: about like trying to find food sources and mapping that
Speaker 1: out in your brain, or trying to figure out where
Speaker 1: that dentif lions are, how past to avoid them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's really important to stress here that the memory
Speaker 1: palace is not a trick. It's not really a trick.
Speaker 1: It's not something and when you have people who can
Speaker 1: who can use it and use it to impressive degrees,
Speaker 1: not just for five items at the grocery store that uh,
Speaker 1: they're they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. Like
Speaker 1: the spatial way in the way that we use spatial
Speaker 1: memory in the memory palace is just how we think.
Speaker 1: It's how the brain works well. And also these mental
Speaker 1: athletes that compete, right, they actually have very average memories.
Speaker 1: They've tested them. Yeah, these are not superpowered brains here,
Speaker 1: these are normal brains. They're using um just to tie
Speaker 1: down what's happening in the brain. And there's a lot
Speaker 1: going on in the brain with memory. But uh, spatial
Speaker 1: memory is tied in the hippocampus, which is located in
Speaker 1: the temporal lobe, and it kind of looks like a long,
Speaker 1: gummy worm kind of thing in your brain. And it's
Speaker 1: also worth noting that at the head of this worm
Speaker 1: you have the amigala, which is tied to emotional memory,
Speaker 1: which again kind of look at the head of the worm,
Speaker 1: and underneath that you have the pair hippocamp bulk, which
Speaker 1: is tied into details, memory recoding, and memory retrieval. But
Speaker 1: the hippocampus that's spatial, and that's the area that really
Speaker 1: fires up when these mental athletes start using the memory
Speaker 1: palates to exceptional degrees. That's right. In a study of
Speaker 1: eight top ranking mental athletes, they are asked to memorize
Speaker 1: three numbers and black and white photographs of people's faces
Speaker 1: and magnified images of snowflakes. Researchers found that in comparison
Speaker 1: to the control group of non mental athletes, the mental
Speaker 1: athletes were using a lot more of their spatial memory
Speaker 1: in that himple campus 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 then I mentioned earlier. Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he became interested in these individuals, um, and and he's
Speaker 1: just a journalist, right, I want to find out more
Speaker 1: about this. I mean, he became interested in the US
Speaker 1: Memory Championship and he went there expecting to interview a
Speaker 1: bunch of savants and uh and just you know, mental giants.
Speaker 1: And and they they kind of laughed at the notion
Speaker 1: when he when he asked them 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 at it. And so he kind of
Speaker 1: took it on as a challenge to like, well, let
Speaker 1: me see what I can do. Let me try out
Speaker 1: the memory palace, let me let me see what I
Speaker 1: can do with the method of Loki. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: spent a whole year, this was just pretty incredible with
Speaker 1: memory champ ed Cook um literally just so he could
Speaker 1: improve his mental acuity, right that that was his the
Speaker 1: first thing that he wanted to try to do. But
Speaker 1: he became really obsessed with becoming a mental athlete himself,
Speaker 1: and he went on to compete in and win the
Speaker 1: US Memory Championship, and each morning during this year, he
Speaker 1: would spend fifteen minutes memorizing a new poem or memorizing
Speaker 1: the names in an old yearbook for instance. Um, but
Speaker 1: that's not that's not where it stopped. And he again
Speaker 1: he was obsessed with us. So on the subway he
Speaker 1: would start to memorize random numbers, or he would keep
Speaker 1: a deck of playing cards with him and memorize those.
Speaker 1: And he began to catalog everything in his existence and
Speaker 1: constructing like basically like condominiums of mental palaces. Cook the
Speaker 1: guy that he he interviewed, he actually did a like
Speaker 1: a Ted talk or Ted x talk or something, And
Speaker 1: I'll have to embed that in the blog post that
Speaker 1: we do to ac company this, uh, this particular episode,
Speaker 1: because he goes into how he would he uses the
Speaker 1: memory pal system. He's memorized things like Chinese characters, you know,
Speaker 1: basically learning bits of another language via the memory palace. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he has some really good visual representations in that video. Yeah,
Speaker 1: super silly Joshua for 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 an effort so that he could better
Speaker 1: concentrate on his memory skills. Yeah, so it looks like
Speaker 1: that part of it sounds like, you know, Jedi master training,
Speaker 1: some sort of you know, far Eastern like thing. But
Speaker 1: then in his mind he's thinking about goofy things like, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, like Katherine Hepburn juggling frogs or something I
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah. Yeah, And there's a great New York
Speaker 1: Times article called Secrets of a Mind Gamer, and in it,
Speaker 1: uh Cook says to the reporter there that photographic memory
Speaker 1: because because the reporter brings up, well, isn't this just
Speaker 1: photographic memory? And yeah, and he says, no, photographic memory
Speaker 1: is a despicable myth. It doesn't exist. In fact, my
Speaker 1: memory is quite average. All of us here have quite
Speaker 1: average memories. Okay, So this is coming from the guy
Speaker 1: who could recite most of Paradise Lost by Heart as
Speaker 1: well as like two fifty two random digits he could
Speaker 1: commit to memory in like five minutes. So I mean,
Speaker 1: these really are incredible feats that these guys are doing.
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. All right, Um, just for the
Speaker 1: most mundane things, like I've mentioned to you that, um,
Speaker 1: I think a lot for some reason about Quentin Tarantino movie,
Speaker 1: but inevitably always forget his name. And yet it's something
Speaker 1: that you know, I reference a lot. How would you
Speaker 1: use the memory palace to remember? Okay, The reason why
Speaker 1: I can even say Quentin Tarantino now is because now
Speaker 1: I think about going to San Quentin and going to
Speaker 1: the Commissary, and in the Commissary Mario b Tali is
Speaker 1: fixing 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 sat Sam Quentin. I know. But who's the guy
Speaker 1: Mario Batali? Who's that? Oh man, he's this great Italian chef.
Speaker 1: And and you don't have to see the red headed dude. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's pretty outrageous in and of up, so if you
Speaker 1: don't really have to do much to him, like you know,
Speaker 1: you don't want to gild the lily 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 acttion and um. In that video
Speaker 1: that Ed Cook has um from 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 the five measly five things I had
Speaker 1: to remember the grocery store. But I don't know, Maybe
Speaker 1: I should play with it more and and see how
Speaker 1: it goes. And I certainly encourage anyone listening to to
Speaker 1: give the Memory Palace a go to to try using it,
Speaker 1: even if It's just like, you know, the next time
Speaker 1: you need to do a grocery list of just a
Speaker 1: few items, don't write it down, don't put it in
Speaker 1: your cell phone. Try constructing a memory palace out of it,
Speaker 1: and I think you'll be surprised at how well it works. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I would love to hear too if if you
Speaker 1: have any other emnemonic devices that you use. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I think we've all, like I used like poems
Speaker 1: at one point, like when I was in junior high.
Speaker 1: In fact, I believe I Yeah, I got kicked out
Speaker 1: of ap history for writing a raunchy poem to memorize
Speaker 1: something about the the original thirteen Colonies. I love it.
Speaker 1: What a tawdry pass, I know it was. It was
Speaker 1: quite the scandal at the time. Uh. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: if you have any other weird methods or or you
Speaker 1: know that you employ to uh to sort of tweak
Speaker 1: your brain into uh doing things it wouldn't normally do,
Speaker 1: like remembering cinsul statu let us know. Indeed, well, hey,
Speaker 1: I have some listener mail here, let me you know,
Speaker 1: bag here and see what we have. Ah, here we go.
Speaker 1: Here's a good one. Uh. This was from Katie and
Speaker 1: Katie's were responding to our cyber immortality podcast that we
Speaker 1: did uh about a month back. She says, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: love the podcast. Sorry this response is a little delayed
Speaker 1: to the podcast day um and by all means don't
Speaker 1: ever worry about that sending us mail we'd love to
Speaker 1: hear about. So you know, anything you have to say
Speaker 1: about past or currently, time is relative, she says. But
Speaker 1: I don't get them every weekend. I have to listen
Speaker 1: to them in blocks as you will. I was listening
Speaker 1: to the podcast on cyber immortality and heard the comments
Speaker 1: of the thirty year olds about the thirty year old
Speaker 1: self meeting another's thirty year old self, and the idea
Speaker 1: of living on by downloading your consciousness into a robot.
Speaker 1: I was just wondering if either of you guys had
Speaker 1: heard of a television series called Dollhouse that aired a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. It was on for two seasons
Speaker 1: and was a Jaw Sweden creation. If not, you can
Speaker 1: netflix it on in streaming. In that series, a group
Speaker 1: of people voluntarily signed their bodies away for five years
Speaker 1: for neurological experiments. The Dollhouse is a place where they
Speaker 1: download your consciousness onto a hard disk and stick it
Speaker 1: in the self in the self shelf. They then use
Speaker 1: that person's body as an empty shell called dolls, where
Speaker 1: they imprint or download personalities into these bodies and send
Speaker 1: them out on engagements missions that range from prostitution to
Speaker 1: bank robbery to surrogate mommies, et cetera. Then, as the
Speaker 1: series progresses, the powers that be in the corporation get
Speaker 1: greedy and decided to start giving away the bodies down
Speaker 1: loaded with a paying customer's consciousness to be to be
Speaker 1: the now dead customer's new body. Uh So it becomes
Speaker 1: a kind of immortality, and uh, of course all sorts
Speaker 1: of chadek things ensued on the civilized life, security, and
Speaker 1: personal liberties. I thought you guys might want to check
Speaker 1: it out since it follows that awful eyed chain of
Speaker 1: thought as to what could happen. All of these things
Speaker 1: start out as noble little steps for the betterment of man,
Speaker 1: but become monstrous terrors in and of themselves. Thanks for
Speaker 1: the podcast, m all right, I'm gonna check it out. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I've actually seen all the episodes that I should I
Speaker 1: should have mentioned in that in that episode, I guess
Speaker 1: because even though I'm I was. I think, like a
Speaker 1: lot of people, was less than satisfied with the show
Speaker 1: as it actually come together. It was they tried to
Speaker 1: do some interesting things that they really did tackle a
Speaker 1: lot of these ideas that arrived from cyber immortality. You know,
Speaker 1: what if you could what if you could store human
Speaker 1: human's mind, human's identity on a on a disk. What
Speaker 1: if you could switch them around? Um, you know, could
Speaker 1: we live forever? What would happen in personal freedoms? So
Speaker 1: it does explore a lot of those ideas and uh,
Speaker 1: and it does get your brain going. But but I
Speaker 1: wasn't completely pleased with But yeah, check it out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well Weed is great. I love Firefly. You just had
Speaker 1: high standards. That's all which you can do. Well, Hey,
Speaker 1: if you guys have any thing to share with us,
Speaker 1: If there is there any bits of science fiction or
Speaker 1: pop culture that tie into something we've talked about that
Speaker 1: we haven't mentioned or are not aware, I'll let us
Speaker 1: know because we'd love to hear about them. And you
Speaker 1: can find us on both Facebook and Twitter as Below
Speaker 1: the Mind, and those are great ways to interact with us,
Speaker 1: and you can also email us at blow the Mind
Speaker 1: at how Stuff works dot com. Be sure to check
Speaker 1: out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
Speaker 1: Houstaff Work Staff as we explore the most promising and
Speaker 1: perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. M