Memory Champion Answers Questions From Twitter

I'm Nelson Dellis, five-time USA Memory Champion

and memory coach.

And today, we're gonna be answering your questions

on Twitter.

This is Memory Support.

[upbeat drum music]

@GulaabZaamun asks, Does lack of sleep affect memory?

Yes, definitely.

If you don't get enough sleep,

you're not gonna be able to pay attention

or have tremendous focus the next day.

And focus is a huge cornerstone of having a good memory.

On the other side of things,

sleep is super important for consolidating memories.

During certain deeper states of sleep,

your hippocampus is actually transferring data

from short term to the long term.

And if that process doesn't happen,

you will potentially lose that information.

So it's a way to consolidate that day's information

for the long term.

@joguy358 asks, Does memory loss or weakening

always mean dementia or Alzheimer's?

Definitely not.

Although I will say, if you are worried,

I would consult a doctor.

Just because you're getting older doesn't mean

that your memory has to get worse.

My family has a history of Alzheimer's.

My grandmother had Alzheimer's,

and that's actually what spurred this journey

for me into the world of mnemonics.

I didn't have a good memory before I learned

about memory techniques and memory championships,

and it all started because

seeing my grandmother pass away made me question,

you know, is that my future?

The encouraging message here

is that we all can improve our memories.

So if you feel like you have a bad memory

or you're worried that your memory is aging,

you can turn it around.

@bobbymeow asks, How the [beep] can someone solve

a Rubik's cube blindfolded?

So what people will do is they'll assign each of the pieces

a letter of the alphabet.

So technically, each part of each piece has its own letter.

So the top here might be an A,

whereas the back here might be a Q.

And if you can remember the sequence

in which the pieces need to be solved,

you can create a sequence of letters

which could equate to a series of words.

@BarnabyFarn asks, How the actual [beep]

does memory work?

So it used to be thought that memories were stored entirely

in the hippocampus which is a part of the brain parallel

to your ear, about the size of your thumb.

Recently, they discovered that, actually, different kinds

of memories are stored in different parts of the brain.

@Orbital_Railgun asks, What the [beep] is it

about moving that totally wipes my memory?

I get up to do something,

and I instantly forget what that thing was.

So there's an interesting study that was done

by a psychologist at Notre Dame

where he talked about this phenomenon

that we forget things when we move through doorways,

when you open the fridge

and you forget what you opened it for,

or you walk into a room and you forget what you

were walking in there for.

We forget things where we cross an event boundary.

And so there wasn't really any solution to it

other than maybe when you're trying to memorize something,

stay where you are rather than crossing some kind

of barrier mid learning or mid memory.

@Casuallycruelme asks, How [beep] I can memorize

Taylor Swift lyrics but not physics formulas?

There are a few things at play here,

one is procedural memory.

That's basically muscle memory.

When you sing a song or listen to a song

over and over again,

you are building it into your long-term muscle memory.

Second at play here is the emotional response.

You're connecting to her music, her lyrics,

the way it makes you feel,

and that's a lot more interesting than say,

a physics formula.

And then the third thing at play is encoding.

The way that the song is structured,

the beat, the rhythm, the way things rhyme

lends itself to being easier to memorize.

@HashtaglifeGreg asks, Got any hacks

for how to remember a list of 11 items?

Let's say you wanna remember a list of grocery items.

All right, let's say that we have asparagus, bread,

bananas, sour cream, and coffee beans.

To memorize that list, we can use a technique

called the linking method which basically takes each

of the items on our list, turns them into some kind

of fun interactive image,

and connects it one by one to the next one on the list.

So maybe this is how we picture it, right?

We have asparagus, so maybe I take those asparagus spears

and stab the bread and break it down into pieces,

and it reveals that there was a banana inside.

I then peel that banana

and maybe some sour cream liquid just pours

out of it, right?

And then finally, maybe I scoop up that sour cream

and just dump it in my coffee

which is filled with coffee beans.

So that list would be asparagus, bread, bananas, sour cream,

and coffee beans.

And what we've done is each of those individual images

has a element of a story that connects it or links it

to the next thing in the list.

@jjpierce_ asks, How do you memorize lines overnight?

Asking for a friend.

Yeah. So there's this technique

I call the first letter method.

And basically, you take a passage

that you're trying to memorize

and you read it a few times, then write it down,

this is important, just the first letters

of each word as they show themselves in the actual text.

Then, you'll be surprised that you can actually read

from that first letter only script

and remember the full words for the whole thing.

You do that a few times, then take it away,

close your eyes and see if you can remember it.

And most times, like nine times outta 10,

you'll have the whole passage memorized.

@archanaHJ asks, Is there a correlation

between exercise and memory?

Yes, both indirectly and directly.

Indirectly, being fit and working out and exercising

makes you feel good.

It lowers anxiety, reduces stress, improves sleep.

All of those things improve your memory.

And then directly, it improves blood flow to the brain,

it reduces inflammation in the brain,

and it encourages brain health.

Alex_Frandisco asks, What is a memory palace,

and how do you make one?

Inquiring minds want to know.

All right, so a memory palace,

it's a technique where you use a physical space

that you map out in your mind,

and you place images for the things you're memorizing

along that pathway.

Some of the best memory palaces are gonna be places

that you're super familiar with.

And then when you wanna recall the information,

all you gotta do is go back

to that same physical space in your mind

and walk through the place.

So let's say that you wanted to memorize

the five largest countries in the world in order.

Those happen to be Russia, Canada, USA, China, and Brazil.

Since we're doing this together,

maybe we could use this table.

Now, our pathway that we're gonna decide on

is gonna start at the brain and make its way to this side

of the table to the headphones.

One image per location.

Now, in terms of what are we putting on each location.

Well, with countries, you can maybe think

of an association that's natural to you.

For example, for Russia, I might think of a martini,

a vodka martini.

So I would imagine maybe on the brain,

is a balanced martini glass filled with vodka.

Then I go to the next location.

I'm on the laptop, and we have to memorize Canada.

When I think of Canada, I think of a hockey stick.

They play a lot of hockey, right?

So maybe a hockey stick is just slap shotting

the crap outta this thing and sending it flying

into the wall and exploding into bits.

Next one would be the third location, the deck of cards.

An association for USA, I might think of, like, a hamburger.

So maybe I would imagine instead of

an actual burger patty in my bun,

but it's a deck of cards stuck in there.

Next, we go to the fourth location

and that would be the fourth thing that I'm trying

to memorize which is China.

I think of chopsticks for Chinese food.

So I'd have to incorporate that image with this object.

So I'd imagine maybe picking this up with chopsticks

and having a hard time kind of rotating the cube,

trying to solve it.

And then finally, the last location here

would be our Brazil.

When I think of Brazil, I think of soccer ball.

They play soccer really well.

So I would maybe imagine putting these headphones

around a soccer ball so he can listen to some jams.

Now, we've just memorized the list.

Doesn't really feel like it,

but if we wanted to remember the list and recall it,

we just go back through our little memory palace

and pull up the images that we left there.

Martini, Russia.

Hockey stick, Canada,

Burger, USA.

Chopsticks, China.

Soccer ball, Brazil.

What's kind of beautiful about this technique

is that you can say that list now forwards

or you could say it backwards,

or you could jump to any location

and get any piece of information as you want it.

@abdoviper asks, How to memorize a deck of cards?

At the Memory Championships,

one of the events is to memorize a full 52-card deck

in sequence as fast as possible.

Now, the way I do that, I do a combination

of changing the cards into images

and then storing them in a memory palace.

How do I come up with the images?

There's a system called the PAO system,

person, action, object.

Every card, I've given a preset person, action,

and object to.

So whenever I see it, I don't see the card,

I see the person or the action associated with that

or the object.

And for every three cards,

I group them into this mini scene.

The first card's always the person, the second card's

always the action or the verb,

and the third is the object.

So to take an example, the first card that we had

was Eight of Clubs which to me, is Bear Grylls,

the action adventurer guy.

I probably can't even remember why it became that,

but there was a reason.

Whenever I see Eight of Clubs, it's Bear Grylls.

It feels like I'm looking at him.

It's so ingrained.

Then this next card is the second in a sequence

of three, so it's the action.

And my action for Four of Hearts is urinating.

So we have Bear Grylls urinating.

And then, the third card in this set, Ace of Clubs,

is a thong.

That's my image for it.

So I have Bear Grylls urinating on a thong,

weird but memorable.

And I place it in one of my memory palaces,

the first location of which is my high school bedroom.

I imagine that action, that little story happening

in a location at a memory palace.

Then we go into the next location.

Essentially, it's a person, action, and then an object.

And then do that for every subsequent set of three.

And I move through my memory palace

as I place down those different sets of images.

And then I continue that process for every subsequent set

of three until there's no more cards left.

Seven of Diamonds, King of Spades,

Two of Spades, Ace of Spades, Three of Spades.

You get the idea.

@TanviiAgarwal asks, How are bad memories so, so clear

and exact in our minds but happy memories fade away?

Back in the Medieval ages, they would throw kids

in the river after memorizing something,

and it was so that they could actually remember

the information better because their adrenaline spiked

right after learning.

And there are studies that show that in situations

of high stress or where your adrenaline is peaked,

you're actually gonna remember that information better.

@summerahrens asks, How does memory have fragrance?

Like, why can I summon the smell of fall 2019 into my brain?

Explain how I can smell my kindergarten classroom,

but I don't know what I did yesterday.

So smell is one of the earliest evolved senses in our brain,

and it actually bypasses this thing called the thalamus

which is responsible for kinda delegating information

between different parts of the brain.

So technically with smell memories,

they go directly to either the amygdala or the hippocampus

which are responsible for dealing with memories.

That's why usually smell memories are so intense

and so instant.

@EverydayInnovtr asks, Anyone ever competed

in the United States Memory Championship?

Yes. [chuckles]

Many times.

I'm the five-time USA Memory Champion winner.

This is actually the trophy that I got

from my most recent win last year.

It's in the shape of a seahorse

which is what the hippocampus looks like.

The competition is pretty interesting in itself.

It's a day-long event where we

basically memorize useless stuff.

Decks of playing cards, huge phone numbers,

lists of words, names and faces, poetry, and more.

And basically, whoever can memorize the most,

the fastest and the most accurately,

becomes the USA Memory Champion.

@yours_nottruly asks, How do you remember passwords?

Are you mind mapping like Holmes?

First of all, a password has to be memorable,

but it also needs to be secure.

One of the best ways to do it is to choose a sentence

that is funny, or weird, or bizarre to you.

Nelson

Charles, that's my middle name,

Dellis

rocks

my socks off.

Take that sentence and just break it down

into the first letters.

Capital N, capital C, capital D,

lowercase R, M, S, O,

exclamation.

Keep things that were capital,

keep things that were lowercase.

And there you have a pretty complex password.

It's not my actual password by the way.

@abovoadmala asks, How are mnemonics helpful?

It's just a second thing to memorize.

When you use mnemonics and the proper technique,

you're taking advantage of things

that our brains are really good at,

namely, thinking in pictures.

We remember pictures way better than anything else,

pictures that have meaning to yourself.

And then secondly, spatial orientation or organization.

How do you structure the images

or things that you're memorizing?

If you have a way to do that,

you're making your life much easier.

@charlieweather_ asks, How do you remember people's names?

Really tired of feeling like I'm disrespecting everyone

I meet all the time.

This is probably one of the most common questions I get.

It's only normal that when we're meeting people,

we're probably thinking about the smart thing we wanna say

or looking cool, but we're not paying attention

to the person in front of us

who's about to tell us their name.

But there is a technique,

and I actually am pretty good at this.

This is one of the records that I still hold.

So let's do an example.

I've been given 25 different faces here,

all hiding a name behind the photo,

and I'm gonna take a minute or two to look this over

and memorize them.

First, you turn the name into a picture.

I would look at the person's face,

find something quick about them that I notice.

Usually the first thing that comes to mind

whether it's pretty eyes, a distinctive mole,

a big red beard.

So for this guy Oliver, I think of Oliver Twist.

So I thought of me twisting his beard pretty forcefully.

He doesn't look too pleased about it

in his expression there.

So it kind of makes the image a little more funny.

Then I just repeated that process through all 25 names,

and I did a quick review just to make sure

that I had it solidified.

Okay, so that took me about a minute or two,

and let's see if I can get them all right.

So this guy is Max.

This girl is Georgia.

Sandy.

Virginia.

Stan.

Tara.

Lucas.

Todd.

William.

Sean.

Alma.

Akash.

Camila.

Sophia.

Emma.

Sara.

Elijah.

Carmela.

Eric.

Carla.

Keith.

Noah.

Mara.

Cindy.

And Oliver.

There we go.

@BradleyLeese asks, What is your favorite resource

for training your memory for tests and quizzes?

There really are three ways to get something

into your long-term memory, one is spaced repetition.

So spacing out over time the things,

the study sessions basically,

what you're trying to memorize, give it some room.

So cramming's not a good idea.

The second thing is interweaving.

So in between sessions you actually study

something totally different

and then come back to the information

you were trying to remember.

That's also very effective.

Third would be active recall.

So actually trying, actively, to remember the things

that you're trying to remember.

That sounds pretty obvious,

but you'd be surprised how many people just look

at the thing they're memorizing

and think that they'll have it in their memory

just by going through it over and over again.

When you put that thing away, and you just close your eyes,

and you really try to get it, even if it's not perfect,

that process is so effective.

@aphrodiddy asks, Anyone know foods

that improve your memory?

Yeah, there's a few.

Avocado, blueberries, broccoli, turmeric, dark chocolate,

and walnuts.

I think the main one that I would encourage people

to investigate is omega-3, DHA specifically.

It's a fatty acid found in the brain.

We don't get a lot of it in our diet,

but we need it to help improve our brain health.

So you can get that from fish oil pills.

There are certain foods that have it

like fatty fish like salmon.

@BipolarBearDick says, Prevagen says it'll help your memory

because it contains jellyfish.

Do jellyfish have good memories?

I don't know specifically about Prevagen,

but there's a lot of kind of snake oil type

brain supplements out there.

Often they're referred to as nootropics.

Some don't really have any proof

or the research is very weak or not proven.

The best pill you can take to improve your memory

is not a pill at all.

It's just better diet, better sleep, more exercise,

and using your memory.

So those are all the questions for today.

I hope I inspired you a little bit to start your journey

into the world of memory.

Thanks for watching Memory Support.