June 25, 2015 • 35 mins
Stroll into the memory palace, an imagined location that just might expand your brain power. In this classic episode you'll learn all about the Method of Loci, a mnemonic device that allows mental athletes to perform astounding acts of recall. Plus, in this updated publication of the episode, learn the secrets firsthand from 4-time USA memory champion Nelson Dellis.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe
and I recently had the chance to talk with Nelson Dellis.
He is a memory champion, a memory athlete, as some
(00:23):
might say. Yes, someone even say a mental athlete. Um
though when I when we chatted with him, he did
mention that he doesn't like to use that terminology because
if he goes out to the UK, that makes him
sound like he's got a problem. But but no, this
this guy is one of the leading memory athletes in
the world. He is. Uh. He uses the method of
(00:45):
loci the memory Palace, which is a fabulous device that
allows you to use spatial memory to catalog at times
just obscure facts or even just useless data. It's really
one of the great mental technologies that I've ever encountered.
I haven't used it much, but I think it's very
interesting and I'd like to give it an exploration sometime soon. Yeah,
(01:08):
it's fascinating stuff. So we recently chatted with Nelson and uh,
we're gonna air that interview, but first we thought it
would be helpful to go ahead and re air some
previous stuff to blow your mind content about the memory palace,
about the method of loci, how it works, where it
comes from, and then we'll talk to the expert himself
to give some inside information. So, without any further ado,
(01:31):
here is Robert and Julie's excellent old discussion of the
memory palace. Really, I don't have the best memory in
the world. Um, I mean, maybe it's an average memory.
I'm not saying I'm I have problems with my brain
or anything, but I often forget that. I think everybody
has this where the really boring stuff you need to
(01:53):
remember sometimes, uh you don't remember. I can have a
simple list to go to the grocery with, and if
I don't have it written like in the notes section
of my iPhone, then I'm not going to remember everything.
Even if it's something vital, like something the thing that
I need to eat that night, an important component in
the in the the meal, I still will forget to
(02:13):
pick it up. I'm sorry, what were you just saying that? Uh,
you know, I have a horrible memory. Actually I read
something when our research that compared memory to a Wikipedia entry. Yeah,
and they were saying, it's like it's your memory is
constantly being altered and augmented and then sometimes pared away. Yeah,
(02:34):
and sometimes the stuff that it's being updated with is
completely uh not true. It's horse manure sometimes turns out. Yeah,
and that's not necessarily what we're gonna talk about today,
but you could actually talk to me about that before,
and I thought it was fascinating. We're just saying that
when you have a memory, each time you bring it up,
you're revising it in some way. Oh yeah, yeah, well
(02:55):
we'll we'll definitely have to cover that in an upcoming
episode in more detailed. But yeah, every time you bring
up a memory, you're not just removing it pristine from
the vault and then returning it pristine to the vault,
but you're updating at each time because your brain needs
updated information because we live in a world, as as
we discussed in our math podcast, we live in a
world and we have to navigate a world of multiple
(03:19):
movable objects and symbols, so we have to be able
to fly with that yep, and then hence the horsemen
who are sometimes right right. So people have had horrible
memories for as long as we've had to remember things
because just as math, as we discussed in the Math Podcast,
we develop mathematics to do the things that we're not
naturally inclined to be able to do with our normal
(03:39):
mental faculties. We have to develop systems. But what to
do if you're in the Roman Empire, for for instance,
just hanging out and you don't necessarily have a ton
of books around you or your your iPhone there. Yeah, well,
in this case, you've turned to something called the memory palace,
also known as the method of low key. Right. That's right,
(04:00):
And the origins of this go back to a particular
back to the fifth century BC and a Greek poet
by the name of Somonodes of CEOs. And uh, he
was attending a party, you know, in the dining hall,
having fun around the table with a bunch of a
bunch of buddies, and he h walked out for a
(04:21):
few minutes, and the whole entire place collapsed behind him.
Oh he walked out. I wondered how he survived. Okay, yeah,
maybe he went out for smoke or something, but but
he went outside, Uh, and everything collapsed. He survives. Everybody
else's just crushed to just mush just a Smucker's jam.
There's no identifying these people. But he was, yeah, with
(04:42):
a name like Smuckers. Um, so he goes back in,
you know, he doesn't go back in, but they dig
everything up again, Smucker's jam everywhere, and they're like, all right,
who were each of these people? And he he says, well,
let me think about it. And he's able to identify
each puddle as as he's able to that was, and
(05:04):
he's able to identify them based on their seating position
at the table. He's able to remember where they were
spatially and therefore remember who they were identified these remains,
and this was a big moment for him, right yeah,
because then he realized, hey, I could apply this to
other things in my life. If I have a list
I need to remember, if there's a long list of
(05:25):
facts I need to get down, this is how I
could do it. And uh and and so this survived
for ages, uh you know, well, you know, for centuries
and centuries and on up through today. Um. One big
proponent of this was Dominican monk UH Giordano Bruno, who
was actually he was burned at the stake in UH
(05:45):
sixteen hundred for heresy. But it wasn't the memory palace
method that they got him there though, I think some
people found it kind of creepy. But his whole thing
had to do with he believed that God was president
nature and the universe and life was infinite there where
that you know, there might be aliens or something and uh,
and so that got him into the hot water. Yeah.
The Roman Catholic Church wasn't big on that at the time,
(06:07):
but today they have a statue where he where he
was burned, and and he's more revered these days. No,
that's nice, you know, at least later on. Yeah, So
the basically the the idea here, uh, if you want
to look at like just sort of a simple version,
if you take these mundane facts and you position them
(06:27):
in a spatial framework and you make and you make
them interesting, all right, So that the idea of the
memory palace is to create a mental house in which
to house and organize symbolic images, which then could serve
as a queue for information retrieval, right right, Like for instance,
our good friend um um, the simonities here could easily
(06:51):
populate this this banquet table with um, you know, a
list of addresses he needs to remember if he can
come up with a unique way to remember each one
and then remember them in order based on where they
are at the table. Okay, and um, just a little
side fact to Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal. Actually, Hannibal Lecter
uses memory palaces for his patients records. Yeah he does.
(07:13):
I've forgotten about that. I read that. Yeah, he even
includes music too for the rooms that he's going into. Um. Well, hey,
it's good enough for Hannibal Lecter, you know, it's it's
good enough for me, which is why I actually tried
this out yesterday. And I'm going to repeat everything that
I imagined the way I built and populated my memory
(07:35):
palace so that I could remember a list of five
things to get from the grocery store in the way home. Okay,
he didn't write a thing down, No, did not write
a thing down. He didn't put anything in my in
my phone and uh and so these were the things.
Just it was a soy creamer, ingle Hoffer's mustard, ant traps,
frozen fruit, and toilet paper. So you know, just this
(07:57):
a standard run for me. Um, all right, what is
your mem smory palace look like? So I decided to
for the space. I decided to use the space that
I'm occupying right now, the house stuff works podcast room
slash podcast chamber. Okay, so this is why I pictured it.
All Right over here behind you is our sound booth,
and inside it I pictured a robot cow drinking coffee
(08:21):
for my soy milk, all right, and then seated where
you are. You're not here, but instead there's a large
German man in in a later hosen, big mustache going on,
and he's got big clumps of of of spicy hot
mustard in his mustache. And that's the inglehoppers mustache, because
it has a little German man on the loop. Then
(08:42):
in this seat between us, because the table that we
record at has a third chair that is never occupied
by an actual person um but in in my memory palace,
it is occupied by a large pile, like a human
sized pile of frozen fruit. And it's just gleaming in
the light, smelting a little bit, smelling wheat and uh.
And you know I can see strawberry and mango and all.
(09:03):
And because this is an important part of the memory,
cost to add some details to it. You know, you're
not just thinking the word Um, you know you're not
just thinking the word frozen fruit, you're picturing it. Uh,
it is existing in space and not just a concept,
all right. And then if I were to poke my
head out through these curtains where Jerry is setting, uh, producer,
I would see a giant ant and that Aunt is
(09:27):
dressed in Maria von Trapps dress from the Sound of Music,
because I need to remember Aunt Traps. Yeah. And then
the fifth item. Standing at the green screen behind Jerry's seat,
there is a toilet paper mummy going through a number
of sexy poses for the camera. They're sexy poses. Yeah, yeah,
(09:48):
so and so anyway it worked. I was able to
remember I know only five things. That's kind of puny,
but I was able to remember these five things. Now
you can also say that while I was doing this
for the podcast, I was applying thought to this than
I would normally apply to the list that I things
I need to pick up. And it's also worth noting
that even though this is an abbreviated version, one can
(10:09):
use use people use this for hundreds of items, right
And in fact, in each room you could have I
don't know five ten different items that are living there.
It's just a matter of placing the object, right, Yeah,
well how about you. Do you have a memory palace,
so you've constructed. I do, and I'm not going to
actually share it, um because I don't think it's I'll
(10:30):
share one on my on my list. And basically I
need to mail my fs A reimbursement right flexible spending account.
So at my front door, I just pictured angry chirups
with wings made out of dollar bills greeting me at
the front door with a pile of mail. Oh well
that's good, right, like you, And they're angry because I'm like,
you don't send this stuff in. My wings are going
to fall off or whatever. I don't know, but I
(10:51):
do have other rooms, but just for brevity's sake, I
won't I won't tell. But what I love about this
is that it quickly becomes very similar to the surrealism
that I don't know about you, but for me, that
I experienced in my dreams. Yeah yeah, right, Like all
of a sudden, there's these incongruent things going on and
they're they're wild and they're fantastic. And that's I think
(11:12):
why we remember our dreams sometimes, right, because they're so
extraordinary yeah, we were at least yeah exactly, I mean
we were. We were talking about about this how we
take something mundane and we turn it into something crazy
and memorable in the same way that on this trip
from New York we we both just came back from
attending the World Science Festival in New York City. By
(11:33):
the way, two eleven, it's gonna be back in two
thousand twelve. Highly recommend anybody who's big into science and
was in New York to give it a go. And and
and that's actually where I attended a I was an
audience for a panel on memory, and that's where I
get really excited about the concept of the Memory Palace.
But while I was waiting to go into one of
these events, my wife and I were waiting out in
(11:54):
this little courtyard area and we saw this man walk
up with a box like cardboard box under his arm
that said Trout on the side, like I don't know,
like a beer card, like a box like beer would
come in or something, but he just said Trout. I
don't know what the brand was, But anyway, he's standing
in there, puts his box down on the ground and
he gets a handful of of like bread or crackers out,
(12:16):
and he starts feeding the pigeons, which I don't think
it's technically illegal, but he's doing it anyway. So he's
feeding the pigeons. Three of them land there, and they're
just standing there eating, and then slowly he starts raising
his hand up, moving his hand forward, and then he
reaches down, snatches one of the pigeons, stuffs it into
the cardboard box, and then walks off with the cardboard
box full of a pigeon. And so you told me that,
(12:37):
And I don't think I'll ever be able to look
at a pigeon without thinking of that poor pigeons fate. Yeah,
or or or wondering again why the side of the
the cooler said trout, Yeah, yeah, so that it's yeah.
I have no idea what he was doing with it,
what the purpose was, if he was an official pigeon catcher,
(12:57):
if he was gonna eat it for dinner, uh, you
know who knows. But it was memorable because it was
so weird. And so the memory palace is is kind
of like, let's make the mundane fact, Let's make the
soy creamer that I will inevitably forget. Let's make that
into something memorable so that I can't forget it at
least for a short term. Um. And then you can
you can use this this uh this memory palace and
(13:19):
you can populate it with hundreds of items, so you
can you can remember a list in order of hundreds
of items. And that's what mental athletes do. They're called
mental athletes, and we'll get to them in a bit.
Umah after this quick break and we're back. Do you
(13:45):
remember what we were talking about everyone memory palace robotic cow. Yeah, yeah,
well that that was part of it. That was how
we remember. Yeah, well, let's just walk is really quickly,
just like sort of four easy steps on how you
can create your own memory palace. Um. So we've already
talked about the first step, which is create a physical
location that you can clearly visualize right now. And that's
(14:07):
why I went with the podcast chamber for me because
I see it all the time. I'm very familiar with
the with the locations, and I can I can imagine
it instantly, right, and you can make up your own palace,
you know, just as long as you can um get
a clear beat on the detail of it. Might I
recommend like maybe the command deck from one of the
Star Trek shows. That would be good. There you go.
(14:27):
That's a good example. Um. And step two is to
establish a memory route through the location. Right, So if
you're gonna you say, your childhood home, then you want
to go through the front door, and you know, pick
a route that say you go left to the kitchen
and then down the hallway or so on and so forth. Um,
you want to keep that same route all the time?
Am I right about that? Yes? Okay? Yeah. Joshua four
(14:49):
who wrote a book about all this called Walking with Einstein,
he actually did a short video for the World Science
Festival and uh and it was shown during this memory
pan all that I attended, and uh and he he
was he actually did it in a garden like in
a like a gardener was more like a gardenery of
a park or something, and he was he actually, you know,
(15:10):
he's like, all right, here is going to be and
it was something crazy like you know, Einstein moon walking
that's the title. And then he walked through it and
he was able to do like a list of a
D ten things yea. And as he's walking through it,
he's placing the objects. So this is really important. So
once you're you establish your route. You want to put
your objects that you want to remember, your things, your
concepts they want to remember in that room. And the
(15:31):
reason why you want to do this is because it
becomes what's called a memory peg. Okay, so that's important
for step three is you need to now peg the
memory to the object. So that's when you start to
think about these really bizarre associations. Right, the more bizarre
the better. If you want to remember to pick up bananas,
then can visualize your front door as a banana Dakary
(15:52):
portal with Carmen Miranda greeting you or something along those lines.
It helps if you're kind of silly. I think silliness definitely,
yeah uh. And you can add a song or a
sent to the memory, especially if you're Hannibal elector right.
And then step forward is just to repeat the visualization
until you've cemented the objects to memories. You really pick
those memories, all right. So it's a fairly simple process.
(16:13):
So we've probably talked about the research part of this,
which is pretty cool, and actually talk about these mental athletes.
So there are many types of memory. We don't just
have memory in the human brain. We have just to
give you a brief idea. We have sensory memory, we
have short term, long term, explicit, implicit, procedural, declarative, episodic, semantic,
(16:35):
and uh, and we also have spatial memory. And the
spatial context is extremely important. Like it because again, at
a at a very basic level, we are navigating a world,
a physical world of movable, numerous objects and simples. That's right.
And no, I've talked about this before that when you
(16:57):
walk into a room, that what you're perceiving isn't necessarily
coming through your eyes. It's coming from the associations that
your brain is making spatially. So you're whether or not
you realize that you're you're judging the height of the
ceiling or the doors, and so on and so forth. Yeah,
I mean, and if you look back at our evolutionary history,
you know there's a time where you need to remember
the field where you you know, killed a monkey that
(17:18):
you're gonna eat or something of that nature. You know,
where does it lay in the field? Has it moved?
So every we end up having this spatial scaffolding upon
which we make sense of our entire lives. Just think
of a calendar or think of a timeline like these
are These are spatial scaffolding systems that we use to
understand what's going on in the world around us. Yeah,
(17:41):
and I especially like the evolutionary example because if you
and why you would need the spatial memories because ye
again think about like trying to find food sources and
mapping that out in your brain, or trying to figure
out where that dent of lions are how best to
avoid them. Yeah, So it's really important distress here that
the memory palace is not a trick. It's not really
(18:04):
a trick. It's not something and when you have people
who can who can use it and use it to
impressive degrees, not just for five items at the grocery
store that uh, they're they're not doing anything out of
the ordinary. Like the spatial way, and the way that
we use spatial memory in the memory palace is just
how we think. It's how the brain works. Well. And also,
(18:25):
these mental athletes that compete, right, they actually have very
average memories. They've tested them. Yeah, these are not superpowered
brains here. These are normal brains. They're using just to
tie down what's happening in the brain. And there's a
lot going on in the brain with memory. But uh,
spatial memory is tied to the hippocampus, which is located
in the temporal lobe, and it kind of looks like
(18:46):
a long gummy worm kind of thing in your brain.
And it's also worth noting that at the head of
this worm you have the amigala, which is tied to
emotional memory, which again kind of look at the head
of the worm, and underneath that you have the pa
hippocampal which is tied into details, memory recoding, and memory retrieval.
But the hippocampus that's spatial, and that's the area that
(19:10):
really fires up when these mental athletes start using the
memory palace to exceptional degrees. That's right. In a study
of eight top ranking mental athletes that they were asked
to memorize three digit numbers and black and white photographs
of people's faces and magnified images of snowflakes, researchers found
that in comparison to the control group of non mental athletes,
(19:31):
the mental athletes were using a lot more of their
spatial memory in that hippocampus region that you talked about, um,
And again it's because they're using that spatial reasoning to
peg a blueprint of all the objects that they're memorizing.
So um, so we're talking about these mental athletes. Let's
talk specifically about one of the more famous ones. I
suppose by now, um Joshua four. Yeah, this is the
(19:53):
guy who wrote Moon's Moonwalking with Einstein that I mentioned earlier. Um. Yeah,
he became interested in these individ jules and he's just
a journalist, right, I want to find out more about this.
I mean, he became interested in the US Memory Championship
and he went there expecting to interview a bunch of
savants and uh and just you know, mental giants, and
(20:14):
and they kind of laughed at the notion when he
when he asked him the questions because they're like, no,
I'm just you know, a normal dude and this is
not that complicated. And so he kind of took it
on as a challenge to like, well, let me see
what I can do. Let me try out the memory palace,
let me let me see what I can do with
the method of Loki. Yeah, and he spent a whole
year this was just pretty incredible with memory champ ed
(20:35):
cook um literally just so he could improve his mental acuity,
right that that was his the first thing that he
wanted to try to do, but he became really obsessed
with becoming a mental athlete himself. And he went on
to compete in and win the US Memory Championship, and
each morning during this year, he would spend fifteen minutes
(20:56):
memorizing a new poem or memorizing the names in an
old yearbook for instance. Um, but that's not that's not
where it stopped him. He again, he was obsessed with us.
So on the subway he would start to memorize random numbers,
or he would keep a deck of playing cards with
him and memorize those. And he began to catalog everything
in his existence and constructing like basically like condominiums of
(21:19):
mental palaces, so to speak. Cook, the guy that he
he interviewed, he actually did a like a Ted talk
or Ted x talk or something. And I'll have to
embed that in the blog post that we do to
accompany this, uh, this particular episode, because he goes into
how he would he uses the memory pal system. He's
memorized things like Chinese characters, you know, basically learning bits
(21:41):
of another language via the memory palace. Yeah, and he
has some really good visual representations in that video. Yeah,
super silly Joshua four. Yeah, completely obsessed. He even bought
a pair of goggles and spray painted them black and
then he cut out eye holes in them. And this
is all in the efforts that he could better concentrate
(22:01):
on his memory scales. Yeah, so it looks like that.
Part of it sounds like, you know, Jedi master training,
where some sort of you know, far Eastern like thing.
But then in his mind he's thinking about goofy things
like you know, like Katherine Hepburn juggling frogs or something
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, And there's a great New
York Times article called Secrets of a Mind Gamer, and
(22:23):
in it, uh Cook says to the reporter there that
photographic memory because because the reporter brings up, well, isn't
this just photographic memory? And yeah, and he says, no,
photographic memory is a despicable myth, it doesn't exist. In fact,
my memory is quite average. All of us here have
quite average memories. Okay, So this is coming from the
guy who could recite most of Paradise Lost by Heart
(22:44):
as well as like two fifty two random digits he
could commit to memory in like five minutes. So I mean,
these really are incredible feats that these guys are doing. Yeah,
and indeed, and actually, um, you know, this is a
competition that they have among themselves. But Cook says that
it's also an attempt for them to rescue a long
lost tradition of memory training, because again, we don't necessarily
(23:07):
need it these days, right, except that we still have
these crazy, failing memories, right, um, just for the most
mundane things, Like I've mentioned to you that, um, I
think a lot for some reason about Quentin Tarantino movies,
but inevitably I always forget his name, and yet it's
something that you know, I reference a lot. How would
(23:29):
you use the memory palace to remember? Okay, the reason
why I can even say Quentin Tarantino now is because
now I think about going to San Quentin and going
to the Commissary, and in the Commissary, Mariotali is fixing
ten thousand plates of Tarantino pasta. We'll see that, well, see,
and that makes perfect sense within the architecture of your mind.
(23:49):
But I would have to use quent Quentin Tarantino to
remember that other stuff you were talking about. I mean,
Quentin San Quentin, I know, But who is the guy
Mario Batali, who's that? Oh man, he's a great Italian chef.
And and if you don't have to see the red
headed dude, yeah, yeah, he's pretty outrageous in another So
if you don't really have to do much to him,
like you know, you don't want to guild a literally there, Okay, yeah,
(24:11):
but yeah, anyway, I mean, this is this is stuff
that you can do. Um, but it's pretty amazing to
look at this, uh Joshua for Character and Ed Cook
and see them in action and um. In that video
that Ed Cook has um on the ted X, he
says that you should use your memory in a playful
(24:31):
and enjoyable way, and you should experience it as a
gift rather than a boring an annoying thing you'd rather
park away in your iPhone. Yeah, because that's the thing
they're enjoying, these memory games. And I have to say
learning that little list was kind of it was kind
of fun, so that the five and easily five things
I had to remember the grocery store. But I don't know,
maybe I should play a litt bit more and see
how it goes. And I certainly encourage anyone listening to
(24:54):
to give the memory palace a go to to. Try
using it, even if it's just like you know, the
time you need to do a grocery list of just
a few items, don't write it down, don't put it
in your cell phones. Try constructing a memory palace out
of it, and I think it'll be surprised at how
well it works. All Right, we're back and we're gonna
(25:16):
speak with Nelson Dellis here again, a three time us
A Memory champion. Uh. He's uh. He's currently ranked one
of the top fifty in the world memory rankings. And uh.
He started competing in two thousand nine when he came
in sixteen in the USA Memory Championships that year and
the new year since he's won three times and finished
in the top three spots. Uh. He runs the Extreme
(25:39):
Memory Tournament to Extreme Memory Tournament dot com, it's where
you'll find it. And he also has a nonprofit titled
Climb for Memory, and you'll find that at Climb for
Memory dot org. That's a nonprofit charity aimed at raising
awareness and funds for Alzheimer's disease by climbing mountains around
the world. So welcome to the show, Nelson. I'm gonna
(26:00):
start off by just asking, Uh, what does competing in
the US Memory Championships consists of? Yeah, So it's actually, UM,
it's a one day event and basically there's a morning
in an afternoon part. In the morning part is based
off of four events. So we memorize faces. We have
(26:20):
UM a packet of a hundred and seventeen pictures, and
we have fifteen minutes to memorize as many of those
faces with their name pairs as possible. UM. And then
after that we have speed numbers, so we're given a
page filled with numbers and we have five minutes to
memorize as many as possible. Then we do a deck
of cards as fast as possible, and then finally a poem,
(26:43):
a previously unpublished poem that we try to memorize word
for word UM in fifteen minutes. The top eight from
that morning event set of events goes into the afternoon rounds,
which is like a playoff series of rounds. The first
is a random word list. We have to memorize in
sixteen minutes as many words as possible, and we go
(27:06):
on stage and are eliminated if you say any wrong UM.
And then when three are eliminated, we move on to
the next round, which is um a tea party, that's
what it's called. We get audience members to come up
and say things about themselves, like their name, where they're from,
phone number, hobbies and we have to memorize those and
then finally the final event is to memorize two decks
(27:29):
of cards in five minutes. And it's basically sat on
stage until somebody messes up and you're left with the champion.
So what's your method? Do you use the method of locai?
Right now? It's it's everyone that you'll find these competitions
will use some form of the memory palace technique or
the method of loca, and that's that's what separates us
(27:55):
all pretty much, in my opinion, is is basically practice.
How much time did you spend training? Uh? Because you
get faster at being able to use this method and
more efficient at it. And can you share anything on
your particular take on the method or is or is
that sort of a trade secret? No? I can. It's
(28:17):
funny in this world of pneumonics competitivenemonics and see everybody
is willing to share their techniques because there are no secrets.
It just comes down to how much do you train UM.
So in terms of what I do, it's nothing crazy.
I mean I use memory palaces from my childhood, my
(28:38):
homes that I've lived in, apartments, UM workplaces, things like that,
and what it comes down to, like I said, practice,
But also for some of the events it's UM. It's
big on strategy. So for example, numbers, I have a
specific system that I've come up with UM to help
me translate these numbers into things that I can place
(28:59):
in the memory top us UM. And that I guess
it's kind of where some people may have UM an
advantage over others. But that again, it takes time. If
you have, the more complicated your system, the more time
need to spend preparing it and practicing it. Do you
find yourself using the memory palace for things outside of competitions,
(29:21):
like when you're not in the game, And how much
of it do you use in the course of any
given day. You know, at the beginning, when I was
getting into this, I would try to memorize everything people
I meet, things I see, whatever. But the more I
got into memory sports and the more I would practice,
the more I just be exhausted by the time it
was in real life. So actually a lot of the
(29:46):
time I'm nowadays, I'm just kind of like, I don't
want to be on all the time, so I I
kind of shut it off, which is interesting in itself
because it shows that this thing is uh, it's it's
something I have to do with make an effort to
to do. It's not just a natural, um thing that happens,
you know. But that being said, I mean I do
(30:08):
use it obviously if I need to, but I'm at
a party or an important networking event, I use it
obviously to memorize names and facts about people. How is
the method of local change the way you look at
memory as a whole, particularly the degree to which show
we can trust it. Yeah, you know, learning these techniques
has definitely given me a lot more confidence in my
(30:30):
own memory. Um. It's allowed me to do things that
I never thought i'd be able to do. UM. And
it just shows me that the mind is really I
don't want to say a limitless because that's that's a
bit silly to say that. But there are a lot
of things that we can do with our minds that
we may not believe as possible, you know. UM, And
(30:52):
that's that to me, It's just The beauty of this
whole thing is that there's so much more than we know,
and uh, you know, we should give ourselves a lot
more credits. Sometimes we're too quick to say, oh, I
can't do that. Um, that's impossible, but you know, there
are a lot of things that are possible, and it's
just a matter of thought, you know. So who's harder
(31:14):
on you when you actually forget something of yourself? Or
other people? At this point? Probably people that I know,
you know, everybody expects me to remember everything. And while
I do remember a lot, like I said, I do
like to kind of take time off from being on
all the time, you know, so and you know, you
(31:35):
can imagine everybody who meets me expects me to remember
their name. And that's a lot of people. Of course,
they remember my name because I'm Nelson, the memory guy, right,
they come towards me. Um, so yeah, I guess now
it's more other people. Is there any sort of information
that's particularly difficult to incorporate into the memory palace in
(31:55):
your experience? Yeah, I guess names are are pretty tricky. Um,
because you're not really using a memory palace per se.
You kind of are, but it's in disguise, if that
makes any sense. Um. You know, you instead of attaching
a piece of information and image to a location in
a memory palace, you're attaching it to a person's face
(32:18):
or a person's body or something about them. Um. In
the Turkey part about that is you can't really review
in the same way that you can with a memory palace.
The memory palace, you know very well the person and
their attribute or their feature that you use as an anchor.
You know, it goes away with them when they're gone. Um.
(32:39):
So it's it's it's kind of scary in that sense
because you don't have control over that. Here's a question.
Does it affect your dreams? I don't know. I'm not
really I'm I'm a bad dreamer. I don't really remember
my dreams, which is kind of funny, I guess, um,
but I will say that leading up to competition, when
I'm memorizing a lot any a lot, I have had
(33:01):
dreams where I that I'm memorizing and when I wake up,
I remember, like the sequence of cards that I memorized
in the dream, which is bizarre. Now, I know what
a lot of people are wondering. Can anyone become a
memory athlete, or do you have to have a certain
type of cognitive architecture already in place? Um? No, anybody
(33:21):
can joint. There's no like qualifications or anything. Um. And
the techniques are pretty easy to to to learn, but
obviously if you want to compete at the high level,
a lot of prep needs to go into it. Can
you walk us through an example of the sort of
memory palace you might employ to remember, say something like
(33:42):
a series of playing cards? Um, yeah, you could. Uh.
Let's see, so I had I had to do a
speech today and some of that I can I can
maybe recite off some of the images I saw today. Okay, alright,
So the first three cards were Ata Clubs, Queen of
Hearts and five of Spades which is bear grills and the
the adventurer Guy um cooking a pair of scissors. And
(34:08):
then moving on to the next location was the tena
Hearts to Clubs and Tenna Clubs, which is a close
friend of mine being crucified on the floor. Um. And
then you have Jennifer Connolly um standing on top of
a television set while playing her game Boy. And then
(34:32):
I have Satan waving his wand and suddenly he's wearing gloves.
I have an ex girlfriend sniping with a golf club. Um.
Then there's a pirate Jack Sparrow, he's dunking slam dunking
a desk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was moonwalking on top of
a horse, um and so on. Alright, so do you
(35:02):
have it? Some insight from an expert utilizer of the
memory palace. Thank you Nelson for taking the time to
chat with us. If you want to follow Nelson on Twitter,
you can find him at Climb for Memory and again
be sure to visit his website Climb for Memory dot org.
That's the nonprofit charity aimed in raising awareness and funds
for Alzheimer's disease. As always, you can find uh this
(35:24):
and any number of other podcast episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
as well as blog post videos links out to our
various social media accounts. You name it, And if you
have thoughts about the memory Palace or you want to
tell us about a particularly bizarre memory palace you've ever constructed,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
(35:50):
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com,
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. Joe
and I recently had the chance to talk with Nelson Dellis.
He is a memory champion, a memory athlete, as some
(00:23):
might say. Yes, someone even say a mental athlete. Um
though when I when we chatted with him, he did
mention that he doesn't like to use that terminology because
if he goes out to the UK, that makes him
sound like he's got a problem. But but no, this
this guy is one of the leading memory athletes in
the world. He is. Uh. He uses the method of
(00:45):
loci the memory Palace, which is a fabulous device that
allows you to use spatial memory to catalog at times
just obscure facts or even just useless data. It's really
one of the great mental technologies that I've ever encountered.
I haven't used it much, but I think it's very
interesting and I'd like to give it an exploration sometime soon. Yeah,
(01:08):
it's fascinating stuff. So we recently chatted with Nelson and uh,
we're gonna air that interview, but first we thought it
would be helpful to go ahead and re air some
previous stuff to blow your mind content about the memory palace,
about the method of loci, how it works, where it
comes from, and then we'll talk to the expert himself
to give some inside information. So, without any further ado,
(01:31):
here is Robert and Julie's excellent old discussion of the
memory palace. Really, I don't have the best memory in
the world. Um, I mean, maybe it's an average memory.
I'm not saying I'm I have problems with my brain
or anything, but I often forget that. I think everybody
has this where the really boring stuff you need to
(01:53):
remember sometimes, uh you don't remember. I can have a
simple list to go to the grocery with, and if
I don't have it written like in the notes section
of my iPhone, then I'm not going to remember everything.
Even if it's something vital, like something the thing that
I need to eat that night, an important component in
the in the the meal, I still will forget to
(02:13):
pick it up. I'm sorry, what were you just saying that? Uh,
you know, I have a horrible memory. Actually I read
something when our research that compared memory to a Wikipedia entry. Yeah,
and they were saying, it's like it's your memory is
constantly being altered and augmented and then sometimes pared away. Yeah,
(02:34):
and sometimes the stuff that it's being updated with is
completely uh not true. It's horse manure sometimes turns out. Yeah,
and that's not necessarily what we're gonna talk about today,
but you could actually talk to me about that before,
and I thought it was fascinating. We're just saying that
when you have a memory, each time you bring it up,
you're revising it in some way. Oh yeah, yeah, well
(02:55):
we'll we'll definitely have to cover that in an upcoming
episode in more detailed. But yeah, every time you bring
up a memory, you're not just removing it pristine from
the vault and then returning it pristine to the vault,
but you're updating at each time because your brain needs
updated information because we live in a world, as as
we discussed in our math podcast, we live in a
world and we have to navigate a world of multiple
(03:19):
movable objects and symbols, so we have to be able
to fly with that yep, and then hence the horsemen
who are sometimes right right. So people have had horrible
memories for as long as we've had to remember things
because just as math, as we discussed in the Math Podcast,
we develop mathematics to do the things that we're not
naturally inclined to be able to do with our normal
(03:39):
mental faculties. We have to develop systems. But what to
do if you're in the Roman Empire, for for instance,
just hanging out and you don't necessarily have a ton
of books around you or your your iPhone there. Yeah, well,
in this case, you've turned to something called the memory palace,
also known as the method of low key. Right. That's right,
(04:00):
And the origins of this go back to a particular
back to the fifth century BC and a Greek poet
by the name of Somonodes of CEOs. And uh, he
was attending a party, you know, in the dining hall,
having fun around the table with a bunch of a
bunch of buddies, and he h walked out for a
(04:21):
few minutes, and the whole entire place collapsed behind him.
Oh he walked out. I wondered how he survived. Okay, yeah,
maybe he went out for smoke or something, but but
he went outside, Uh, and everything collapsed. He survives. Everybody
else's just crushed to just mush just a Smucker's jam.
There's no identifying these people. But he was, yeah, with
(04:42):
a name like Smuckers. Um, so he goes back in,
you know, he doesn't go back in, but they dig
everything up again, Smucker's jam everywhere, and they're like, all right,
who were each of these people? And he he says, well,
let me think about it. And he's able to identify
each puddle as as he's able to that was, and
(05:04):
he's able to identify them based on their seating position
at the table. He's able to remember where they were
spatially and therefore remember who they were identified these remains,
and this was a big moment for him, right yeah,
because then he realized, hey, I could apply this to
other things in my life. If I have a list
I need to remember, if there's a long list of
(05:25):
facts I need to get down, this is how I
could do it. And uh and and so this survived
for ages, uh you know, well, you know, for centuries
and centuries and on up through today. Um. One big
proponent of this was Dominican monk UH Giordano Bruno, who
was actually he was burned at the stake in UH
(05:45):
sixteen hundred for heresy. But it wasn't the memory palace
method that they got him there though, I think some
people found it kind of creepy. But his whole thing
had to do with he believed that God was president
nature and the universe and life was infinite there where
that you know, there might be aliens or something and uh,
and so that got him into the hot water. Yeah.
The Roman Catholic Church wasn't big on that at the time,
(06:07):
but today they have a statue where he where he
was burned, and and he's more revered these days. No,
that's nice, you know, at least later on. Yeah, So
the basically the the idea here, uh, if you want
to look at like just sort of a simple version,
if you take these mundane facts and you position them
(06:27):
in a spatial framework and you make and you make
them interesting, all right, So that the idea of the
memory palace is to create a mental house in which
to house and organize symbolic images, which then could serve
as a queue for information retrieval, right right, Like for instance,
our good friend um um, the simonities here could easily
(06:51):
populate this this banquet table with um, you know, a
list of addresses he needs to remember if he can
come up with a unique way to remember each one
and then remember them in order based on where they
are at the table. Okay, and um, just a little
side fact to Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal. Actually, Hannibal Lecter
uses memory palaces for his patients records. Yeah he does.
(07:13):
I've forgotten about that. I read that. Yeah, he even
includes music too for the rooms that he's going into. Um. Well, hey,
it's good enough for Hannibal Lecter, you know, it's it's
good enough for me, which is why I actually tried
this out yesterday. And I'm going to repeat everything that
I imagined the way I built and populated my memory
(07:35):
palace so that I could remember a list of five
things to get from the grocery store in the way home. Okay,
he didn't write a thing down, No, did not write
a thing down. He didn't put anything in my in
my phone and uh and so these were the things.
Just it was a soy creamer, ingle Hoffer's mustard, ant traps,
frozen fruit, and toilet paper. So you know, just this
(07:57):
a standard run for me. Um, all right, what is
your mem smory palace look like? So I decided to
for the space. I decided to use the space that
I'm occupying right now, the house stuff works podcast room
slash podcast chamber. Okay, so this is why I pictured it.
All Right over here behind you is our sound booth,
and inside it I pictured a robot cow drinking coffee
(08:21):
for my soy milk, all right, and then seated where
you are. You're not here, but instead there's a large
German man in in a later hosen, big mustache going on,
and he's got big clumps of of of spicy hot
mustard in his mustache. And that's the inglehoppers mustache, because
it has a little German man on the loop. Then
(08:42):
in this seat between us, because the table that we
record at has a third chair that is never occupied
by an actual person um but in in my memory palace,
it is occupied by a large pile, like a human
sized pile of frozen fruit. And it's just gleaming in
the light, smelting a little bit, smelling wheat and uh.
And you know I can see strawberry and mango and all.
(09:03):
And because this is an important part of the memory,
cost to add some details to it. You know, you're
not just thinking the word Um, you know you're not
just thinking the word frozen fruit, you're picturing it. Uh,
it is existing in space and not just a concept,
all right. And then if I were to poke my
head out through these curtains where Jerry is setting, uh, producer,
I would see a giant ant and that Aunt is
(09:27):
dressed in Maria von Trapps dress from the Sound of Music,
because I need to remember Aunt Traps. Yeah. And then
the fifth item. Standing at the green screen behind Jerry's seat,
there is a toilet paper mummy going through a number
of sexy poses for the camera. They're sexy poses. Yeah, yeah,
(09:48):
so and so anyway it worked. I was able to
remember I know only five things. That's kind of puny,
but I was able to remember these five things. Now
you can also say that while I was doing this
for the podcast, I was applying thought to this than
I would normally apply to the list that I things
I need to pick up. And it's also worth noting
that even though this is an abbreviated version, one can
(10:09):
use use people use this for hundreds of items, right
And in fact, in each room you could have I
don't know five ten different items that are living there.
It's just a matter of placing the object, right, Yeah,
well how about you. Do you have a memory palace,
so you've constructed. I do, and I'm not going to
actually share it, um because I don't think it's I'll
(10:30):
share one on my on my list. And basically I
need to mail my fs A reimbursement right flexible spending account.
So at my front door, I just pictured angry chirups
with wings made out of dollar bills greeting me at
the front door with a pile of mail. Oh well
that's good, right, like you, And they're angry because I'm like,
you don't send this stuff in. My wings are going
to fall off or whatever. I don't know, but I
(10:51):
do have other rooms, but just for brevity's sake, I
won't I won't tell. But what I love about this
is that it quickly becomes very similar to the surrealism
that I don't know about you, but for me, that
I experienced in my dreams. Yeah yeah, right, Like all
of a sudden, there's these incongruent things going on and
they're they're wild and they're fantastic. And that's I think
(11:12):
why we remember our dreams sometimes, right, because they're so
extraordinary yeah, we were at least yeah exactly, I mean
we were. We were talking about about this how we
take something mundane and we turn it into something crazy
and memorable in the same way that on this trip
from New York we we both just came back from
attending the World Science Festival in New York City. By
(11:33):
the way, two eleven, it's gonna be back in two
thousand twelve. Highly recommend anybody who's big into science and
was in New York to give it a go. And and
and that's actually where I attended a I was an
audience for a panel on memory, and that's where I
get really excited about the concept of the Memory Palace.
But while I was waiting to go into one of
these events, my wife and I were waiting out in
(11:54):
this little courtyard area and we saw this man walk
up with a box like cardboard box under his arm
that said Trout on the side, like I don't know,
like a beer card, like a box like beer would
come in or something, but he just said Trout. I
don't know what the brand was, But anyway, he's standing
in there, puts his box down on the ground and
he gets a handful of of like bread or crackers out,
(12:16):
and he starts feeding the pigeons, which I don't think
it's technically illegal, but he's doing it anyway. So he's
feeding the pigeons. Three of them land there, and they're
just standing there eating, and then slowly he starts raising
his hand up, moving his hand forward, and then he
reaches down, snatches one of the pigeons, stuffs it into
the cardboard box, and then walks off with the cardboard
box full of a pigeon. And so you told me that,
(12:37):
And I don't think I'll ever be able to look
at a pigeon without thinking of that poor pigeons fate. Yeah,
or or or wondering again why the side of the
the cooler said trout, Yeah, yeah, so that it's yeah.
I have no idea what he was doing with it,
what the purpose was, if he was an official pigeon catcher,
(12:57):
if he was gonna eat it for dinner, uh, you
know who knows. But it was memorable because it was
so weird. And so the memory palace is is kind
of like, let's make the mundane fact, Let's make the
soy creamer that I will inevitably forget. Let's make that
into something memorable so that I can't forget it at
least for a short term. Um. And then you can
you can use this this uh this memory palace and
(13:19):
you can populate it with hundreds of items, so you
can you can remember a list in order of hundreds
of items. And that's what mental athletes do. They're called
mental athletes, and we'll get to them in a bit.
Umah after this quick break and we're back. Do you
(13:45):
remember what we were talking about everyone memory palace robotic cow. Yeah, yeah,
well that that was part of it. That was how
we remember. Yeah, well, let's just walk is really quickly,
just like sort of four easy steps on how you
can create your own memory palace. Um. So we've already
talked about the first step, which is create a physical
location that you can clearly visualize right now. And that's
(14:07):
why I went with the podcast chamber for me because
I see it all the time. I'm very familiar with
the with the locations, and I can I can imagine
it instantly, right, and you can make up your own palace,
you know, just as long as you can um get
a clear beat on the detail of it. Might I
recommend like maybe the command deck from one of the
Star Trek shows. That would be good. There you go.
(14:27):
That's a good example. Um. And step two is to
establish a memory route through the location. Right, So if
you're gonna you say, your childhood home, then you want
to go through the front door, and you know, pick
a route that say you go left to the kitchen
and then down the hallway or so on and so forth. Um,
you want to keep that same route all the time?
Am I right about that? Yes? Okay? Yeah. Joshua four
(14:49):
who wrote a book about all this called Walking with Einstein,
he actually did a short video for the World Science
Festival and uh and it was shown during this memory
pan all that I attended, and uh and he he
was he actually did it in a garden like in
a like a gardener was more like a gardenery of
a park or something, and he was he actually, you know,
(15:10):
he's like, all right, here is going to be and
it was something crazy like you know, Einstein moon walking
that's the title. And then he walked through it and
he was able to do like a list of a
D ten things yea. And as he's walking through it,
he's placing the objects. So this is really important. So
once you're you establish your route. You want to put
your objects that you want to remember, your things, your
concepts they want to remember in that room. And the
(15:31):
reason why you want to do this is because it
becomes what's called a memory peg. Okay, so that's important
for step three is you need to now peg the
memory to the object. So that's when you start to
think about these really bizarre associations. Right, the more bizarre
the better. If you want to remember to pick up bananas,
then can visualize your front door as a banana Dakary
(15:52):
portal with Carmen Miranda greeting you or something along those lines.
It helps if you're kind of silly. I think silliness definitely,
yeah uh. And you can add a song or a
sent to the memory, especially if you're Hannibal elector right.
And then step forward is just to repeat the visualization
until you've cemented the objects to memories. You really pick
those memories, all right. So it's a fairly simple process.
(16:13):
So we've probably talked about the research part of this,
which is pretty cool, and actually talk about these mental athletes.
So there are many types of memory. We don't just
have memory in the human brain. We have just to
give you a brief idea. We have sensory memory, we
have short term, long term, explicit, implicit, procedural, declarative, episodic, semantic,
(16:35):
and uh, and we also have spatial memory. And the
spatial context is extremely important. Like it because again, at
a at a very basic level, we are navigating a world,
a physical world of movable, numerous objects and simples. That's right.
And no, I've talked about this before that when you
(16:57):
walk into a room, that what you're perceiving isn't necessarily
coming through your eyes. It's coming from the associations that
your brain is making spatially. So you're whether or not
you realize that you're you're judging the height of the
ceiling or the doors, and so on and so forth. Yeah,
I mean, and if you look back at our evolutionary history,
you know there's a time where you need to remember
the field where you you know, killed a monkey that
(17:18):
you're gonna eat or something of that nature. You know,
where does it lay in the field? Has it moved?
So every we end up having this spatial scaffolding upon
which we make sense of our entire lives. Just think
of a calendar or think of a timeline like these
are These are spatial scaffolding systems that we use to
understand what's going on in the world around us. Yeah,
(17:41):
and I especially like the evolutionary example because if you
and why you would need the spatial memories because ye
again think about like trying to find food sources and
mapping that out in your brain, or trying to figure
out where that dent of lions are how best to
avoid them. Yeah, So it's really important distress here that
the memory palace is not a trick. It's not really
(18:04):
a trick. It's not something and when you have people
who can who can use it and use it to
impressive degrees, not just for five items at the grocery
store that uh, they're they're not doing anything out of
the ordinary. Like the spatial way, and the way that
we use spatial memory in the memory palace is just
how we think. It's how the brain works. Well. And also,
(18:25):
these mental athletes that compete, right, they actually have very
average memories. They've tested them. Yeah, these are not superpowered
brains here. These are normal brains. They're using just to
tie down what's happening in the brain. And there's a
lot going on in the brain with memory. But uh,
spatial memory is tied to the hippocampus, which is located
in the temporal lobe, and it kind of looks like
(18:46):
a long gummy worm kind of thing in your brain.
And it's also worth noting that at the head of
this worm you have the amigala, which is tied to
emotional memory, which again kind of look at the head
of the worm, and underneath that you have the pa
hippocampal which is tied into details, memory recoding, and memory retrieval.
But the hippocampus that's spatial, and that's the area that
(19:10):
really fires up when these mental athletes start using the
memory palace to exceptional degrees. That's right. In a study
of eight top ranking mental athletes that they were asked
to memorize three digit numbers and black and white photographs
of people's faces and magnified images of snowflakes, researchers found
that in comparison to the control group of non mental athletes,
(19:31):
the mental athletes were using a lot more of their
spatial memory in that hippocampus region that you talked about, um,
And again it's because they're using that spatial reasoning to
peg a blueprint of all the objects that they're memorizing.
So um, so we're talking about these mental athletes. Let's
talk specifically about one of the more famous ones. I
suppose by now, um Joshua four. Yeah, this is the
(19:53):
guy who wrote Moon's Moonwalking with Einstein that I mentioned earlier. Um. Yeah,
he became interested in these individ jules and he's just
a journalist, right, I want to find out more about this.
I mean, he became interested in the US Memory Championship
and he went there expecting to interview a bunch of
savants and uh and just you know, mental giants, and
(20:14):
and they kind of laughed at the notion when he
when he asked him the questions because they're like, no,
I'm just you know, a normal dude and this is
not that complicated. And so he kind of took it
on as a challenge to like, well, let me see
what I can do. Let me try out the memory palace,
let me let me see what I can do with
the method of Loki. Yeah, and he spent a whole
year this was just pretty incredible with memory champ ed
(20:35):
cook um literally just so he could improve his mental acuity,
right that that was his the first thing that he
wanted to try to do, but he became really obsessed
with becoming a mental athlete himself. And he went on
to compete in and win the US Memory Championship, and
each morning during this year, he would spend fifteen minutes
(20:56):
memorizing a new poem or memorizing the names in an
old yearbook for instance. Um, but that's not that's not
where it stopped him. He again, he was obsessed with us.
So on the subway he would start to memorize random numbers,
or he would keep a deck of playing cards with
him and memorize those. And he began to catalog everything
in his existence and constructing like basically like condominiums of
(21:19):
mental palaces, so to speak. Cook, the guy that he
he interviewed, he actually did a like a Ted talk
or Ted x talk or something. And I'll have to
embed that in the blog post that we do to
accompany this, uh, this particular episode, because he goes into
how he would he uses the memory pal system. He's
memorized things like Chinese characters, you know, basically learning bits
(21:41):
of another language via the memory palace. Yeah, and he
has some really good visual representations in that video. Yeah,
super silly Joshua four. Yeah, completely obsessed. He even bought
a pair of goggles and spray painted them black and
then he cut out eye holes in them. And this
is all in the efforts that he could better concentrate
(22:01):
on his memory scales. Yeah, so it looks like that.
Part of it sounds like, you know, Jedi master training,
where some sort of you know, far Eastern like thing.
But then in his mind he's thinking about goofy things
like you know, like Katherine Hepburn juggling frogs or something
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, And there's a great New
York Times article called Secrets of a Mind Gamer, and
(22:23):
in it, uh Cook says to the reporter there that
photographic memory because because the reporter brings up, well, isn't
this just photographic memory? And yeah, and he says, no,
photographic memory is a despicable myth, it doesn't exist. In fact,
my memory is quite average. All of us here have
quite average memories. Okay, So this is coming from the
guy who could recite most of Paradise Lost by Heart
(22:44):
as well as like two fifty two random digits he
could commit to memory in like five minutes. So I mean,
these really are incredible feats that these guys are doing. Yeah,
and indeed, and actually, um, you know, this is a
competition that they have among themselves. But Cook says that
it's also an attempt for them to rescue a long
lost tradition of memory training, because again, we don't necessarily
(23:07):
need it these days, right, except that we still have
these crazy, failing memories, right, um, just for the most
mundane things, Like I've mentioned to you that, um, I
think a lot for some reason about Quentin Tarantino movies,
but inevitably I always forget his name, and yet it's
something that you know, I reference a lot. How would
(23:29):
you use the memory palace to remember? Okay, the reason
why I can even say Quentin Tarantino now is because
now I think about going to San Quentin and going
to the Commissary, and in the Commissary, Mariotali is fixing
ten thousand plates of Tarantino pasta. We'll see that, well, see,
and that makes perfect sense within the architecture of your mind.
(23:49):
But I would have to use quent Quentin Tarantino to
remember that other stuff you were talking about. I mean,
Quentin San Quentin, I know, But who is the guy
Mario Batali, who's that? Oh man, he's a great Italian chef.
And and if you don't have to see the red
headed dude, yeah, yeah, he's pretty outrageous in another So
if you don't really have to do much to him,
like you know, you don't want to guild a literally there, Okay, yeah,
(24:11):
but yeah, anyway, I mean, this is this is stuff
that you can do. Um, but it's pretty amazing to
look at this, uh Joshua for Character and Ed Cook
and see them in action and um. In that video
that Ed Cook has um on the ted X, he
says that you should use your memory in a playful
(24:31):
and enjoyable way, and you should experience it as a
gift rather than a boring an annoying thing you'd rather
park away in your iPhone. Yeah, because that's the thing
they're enjoying, these memory games. And I have to say
learning that little list was kind of it was kind
of fun, so that the five and easily five things
I had to remember the grocery store. But I don't know,
maybe I should play a litt bit more and see
how it goes. And I certainly encourage anyone listening to
(24:54):
to give the memory palace a go to to. Try
using it, even if it's just like you know, the
time you need to do a grocery list of just
a few items, don't write it down, don't put it
in your cell phones. Try constructing a memory palace out
of it, and I think it'll be surprised at how
well it works. All Right, we're back and we're gonna
(25:16):
speak with Nelson Dellis here again, a three time us
A Memory champion. Uh. He's uh. He's currently ranked one
of the top fifty in the world memory rankings. And uh.
He started competing in two thousand nine when he came
in sixteen in the USA Memory Championships that year and
the new year since he's won three times and finished
in the top three spots. Uh. He runs the Extreme
(25:39):
Memory Tournament to Extreme Memory Tournament dot com, it's where
you'll find it. And he also has a nonprofit titled
Climb for Memory, and you'll find that at Climb for
Memory dot org. That's a nonprofit charity aimed at raising
awareness and funds for Alzheimer's disease by climbing mountains around
the world. So welcome to the show, Nelson. I'm gonna
(26:00):
start off by just asking, Uh, what does competing in
the US Memory Championships consists of? Yeah, So it's actually, UM,
it's a one day event and basically there's a morning
in an afternoon part. In the morning part is based
off of four events. So we memorize faces. We have
(26:20):
UM a packet of a hundred and seventeen pictures, and
we have fifteen minutes to memorize as many of those
faces with their name pairs as possible. UM. And then
after that we have speed numbers, so we're given a
page filled with numbers and we have five minutes to
memorize as many as possible. Then we do a deck
of cards as fast as possible, and then finally a poem,
(26:43):
a previously unpublished poem that we try to memorize word
for word UM in fifteen minutes. The top eight from
that morning event set of events goes into the afternoon rounds,
which is like a playoff series of rounds. The first
is a random word list. We have to memorize in
sixteen minutes as many words as possible, and we go
(27:06):
on stage and are eliminated if you say any wrong UM.
And then when three are eliminated, we move on to
the next round, which is um a tea party, that's
what it's called. We get audience members to come up
and say things about themselves, like their name, where they're from,
phone number, hobbies and we have to memorize those and
then finally the final event is to memorize two decks
(27:29):
of cards in five minutes. And it's basically sat on
stage until somebody messes up and you're left with the champion.
So what's your method? Do you use the method of locai?
Right now? It's it's everyone that you'll find these competitions
will use some form of the memory palace technique or
the method of loca, and that's that's what separates us
(27:55):
all pretty much, in my opinion, is is basically practice.
How much time did you spend training? Uh? Because you
get faster at being able to use this method and
more efficient at it. And can you share anything on
your particular take on the method or is or is
that sort of a trade secret? No? I can. It's
(28:17):
funny in this world of pneumonics competitivenemonics and see everybody
is willing to share their techniques because there are no secrets.
It just comes down to how much do you train UM.
So in terms of what I do, it's nothing crazy.
I mean I use memory palaces from my childhood, my
(28:38):
homes that I've lived in, apartments, UM workplaces, things like that,
and what it comes down to, like I said, practice,
But also for some of the events it's UM. It's
big on strategy. So for example, numbers, I have a
specific system that I've come up with UM to help
me translate these numbers into things that I can place
(28:59):
in the memory top us UM. And that I guess
it's kind of where some people may have UM an
advantage over others. But that again, it takes time. If
you have, the more complicated your system, the more time
need to spend preparing it and practicing it. Do you
find yourself using the memory palace for things outside of competitions,
(29:21):
like when you're not in the game, And how much
of it do you use in the course of any
given day. You know, at the beginning, when I was
getting into this, I would try to memorize everything people
I meet, things I see, whatever. But the more I
got into memory sports and the more I would practice,
the more I just be exhausted by the time it
was in real life. So actually a lot of the
(29:46):
time I'm nowadays, I'm just kind of like, I don't
want to be on all the time, so I I
kind of shut it off, which is interesting in itself
because it shows that this thing is uh, it's it's
something I have to do with make an effort to
to do. It's not just a natural, um thing that happens,
you know. But that being said, I mean I do
(30:08):
use it obviously if I need to, but I'm at
a party or an important networking event, I use it
obviously to memorize names and facts about people. How is
the method of local change the way you look at
memory as a whole, particularly the degree to which show
we can trust it. Yeah, you know, learning these techniques
has definitely given me a lot more confidence in my
(30:30):
own memory. Um. It's allowed me to do things that
I never thought i'd be able to do. UM. And
it just shows me that the mind is really I
don't want to say a limitless because that's that's a
bit silly to say that. But there are a lot
of things that we can do with our minds that
we may not believe as possible, you know. UM, And
(30:52):
that's that to me, It's just The beauty of this
whole thing is that there's so much more than we know,
and uh, you know, we should give ourselves a lot
more credits. Sometimes we're too quick to say, oh, I
can't do that. Um, that's impossible, but you know, there
are a lot of things that are possible, and it's
just a matter of thought, you know. So who's harder
(31:14):
on you when you actually forget something of yourself? Or
other people? At this point? Probably people that I know,
you know, everybody expects me to remember everything. And while
I do remember a lot, like I said, I do
like to kind of take time off from being on
all the time, you know, so and you know, you
(31:35):
can imagine everybody who meets me expects me to remember
their name. And that's a lot of people. Of course,
they remember my name because I'm Nelson, the memory guy, right,
they come towards me. Um, so yeah, I guess now
it's more other people. Is there any sort of information
that's particularly difficult to incorporate into the memory palace in
(31:55):
your experience? Yeah, I guess names are are pretty tricky. Um,
because you're not really using a memory palace per se.
You kind of are, but it's in disguise, if that
makes any sense. Um. You know, you instead of attaching
a piece of information and image to a location in
a memory palace, you're attaching it to a person's face
(32:18):
or a person's body or something about them. Um. In
the Turkey part about that is you can't really review
in the same way that you can with a memory palace.
The memory palace, you know very well the person and
their attribute or their feature that you use as an anchor.
You know, it goes away with them when they're gone. Um.
(32:39):
So it's it's it's kind of scary in that sense
because you don't have control over that. Here's a question.
Does it affect your dreams? I don't know. I'm not
really I'm I'm a bad dreamer. I don't really remember
my dreams, which is kind of funny, I guess, um,
but I will say that leading up to competition, when
I'm memorizing a lot any a lot, I have had
(33:01):
dreams where I that I'm memorizing and when I wake up,
I remember, like the sequence of cards that I memorized
in the dream, which is bizarre. Now, I know what
a lot of people are wondering. Can anyone become a
memory athlete, or do you have to have a certain
type of cognitive architecture already in place? Um? No, anybody
(33:21):
can joint. There's no like qualifications or anything. Um. And
the techniques are pretty easy to to to learn, but
obviously if you want to compete at the high level,
a lot of prep needs to go into it. Can
you walk us through an example of the sort of
memory palace you might employ to remember, say something like
(33:42):
a series of playing cards? Um, yeah, you could. Uh.
Let's see, so I had I had to do a
speech today and some of that I can I can
maybe recite off some of the images I saw today. Okay, alright,
So the first three cards were Ata Clubs, Queen of
Hearts and five of Spades which is bear grills and the
the adventurer Guy um cooking a pair of scissors. And
(34:08):
then moving on to the next location was the tena
Hearts to Clubs and Tenna Clubs, which is a close
friend of mine being crucified on the floor. Um. And
then you have Jennifer Connolly um standing on top of
a television set while playing her game Boy. And then
(34:32):
I have Satan waving his wand and suddenly he's wearing gloves.
I have an ex girlfriend sniping with a golf club. Um.
Then there's a pirate Jack Sparrow, he's dunking slam dunking
a desk, and Arnold Schwarzenegger was moonwalking on top of
a horse, um and so on. Alright, so do you
(35:02):
have it? Some insight from an expert utilizer of the
memory palace. Thank you Nelson for taking the time to
chat with us. If you want to follow Nelson on Twitter,
you can find him at Climb for Memory and again
be sure to visit his website Climb for Memory dot org.
That's the nonprofit charity aimed in raising awareness and funds
for Alzheimer's disease. As always, you can find uh this
(35:24):
and any number of other podcast episodes of Stuff to
Blow Your Mind at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
as well as blog post videos links out to our
various social media accounts. You name it, And if you
have thoughts about the memory Palace or you want to
tell us about a particularly bizarre memory palace you've ever constructed,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Stuff Works dot com for more on this and thousands
(35:50):
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com,
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