Can’t remember the fourth item on your grocery list? Nelson Dellis, a professional “memory athlete,” can remember 100 things or more (though he still may forget the butter).
Hear how Dellis learned to memorize lists so long that he became a five-time USA Memory Champion, and how you can use some of his strategies to improve your own memory.
Dellis explains how he uses tricks like the “memory palace” and mnemonic devices to recall lengthy lists with perfect accuracy.
In an era when cell phones are making memory superfluous, you can regain some of those lost skills by using his techniques.
Plus… those rare folks who can never forget a day in their lives.
Dr. Phil Stieg: Have you ever been introduced to someone at a party by name? As soon as you walk away, you realize you have no idea what their name is. Do you have trouble remembering birthdays or phone numbers or even the one thing you were supposed to get at the grocery store on your way home?
Many of us cannot recall even those simple things in our daily lives, much less memorize an entire deck of cards in 40 seconds, or a list of 1,000 numbers like our guest today can.
Nelson Dellis is a competitive memory athlete and one of the leading memory experts in the world. He is the author of the fun, informative book, Remember It!: The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget.
Today, Nelson will discuss with us exactly what a memory athlete is and give us some great tips for improving our memories and our lives.
Nelson, thanks for being with us today.
Nelson Dellis: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Phil Stieg: Multiple things I liked about the book. Number one, your sense of humor and number two, the transparency about your life. This was not your chosen profession, and you gave a little bit of a story about your grandmother, about how you got into this. Can you relate that to us?
Nelson Dellis: Yeah. I was on track to be a physicist. That was my passion. It still is. It was my way to answer the questions I had about the universe and my life. I was very good at math, and I wanted to change the world, go to space, be an astrophysicist.
But along the way, my grandmother started struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. She lived in France. I never got to see her as much as I’d like. It was always a yearly trip for us. So when she started exhibiting signs of dementia, every time I’d see her, it would be compoundingly worse, just so jarringly worse.
I think that had a huge effect on me because it would be so real what was happening to her. I said to myself, I do not want that to happen to me. What can I do about it? And that led me down the rabbit hole of learning about memory techniques and memory competitions.
Phil Stieg: I had the same experience with my mother. It’s one of the most painful to watch. I didn’t go down the memory rabbit hole. I went down the rabbit hole of trying to remember everything I learned. And when I can’t remember something, I feel terrible. Like, oh, do I have Alzheimer’s?
So let’s get granular here. Like you said, you weren’t born with a great memory. Can you give us some examples, a specific example. In the book you talk about the first 10 presidents, or grocery lists, or a deck of cards. Each one of those is a little bit different about how you do it. Could you take us through that process?
Nelson Dellis: Depending on the information that you’re memorizing, you may want to approach it with a slightly different technique. But in general, it’s really always the same approach when you’re memorizing anything. And this is where “see-link-go,” which is the phrase I use to simplify the process to memorize anything.
It’s how can I visualize or see the information in my mind in the form of a very memorable picture? How can I link that information to stuff that’s already firmly planted in my brain? And that’s a crucial step because that’s how we can reliably recall things.
There’s so many times when you have things in your memory, it’s just you can’t get it out, or you get it out later at the wrong time, or it’s on the tip of your tongue. So that’s the “link” step.
Then the “go” step is really what you do with that after you’ve visualized it and stored it in your mind. It’s where you go with it. That depends on how long you want to keep the information.
Is it something that you just want for a few minutes until you can vomit it out on paper, or say it in the meeting, or whatever? Or do you want to keep this for life? Is it something you just want as your permanent database of knowledge? That all comes down to review.
Our brains are designed to forget things, unfortunately. Not everything, but most things. Because you can imagine if we remembered absolutely everything, how overwhelming that would be and how useless most of the stuff in there would be.
Phil Stieg: Your book has a lot of colorful terms in it – one that stood out to me is the “memory palace.” Can you explain what that is?
Nelson Dellis: This is the bread and butter of what memory athletes will use because for a lot of the information we have to memorize, order matters. It’s somewhat list-based. A memory palace has a pathway that you intuitively know. It’s like walking through your house from your door. What would make sense as you entered your house? You don’t have to memorize. You just know that. And you’re attaching the images to locations along that path. And so when you want to recall it, you just walk through it again and they’re there. The images are there.
Phil Stieg: So let’s do it with the presidents. The first 10 Presidents. Describe what you did in the book.
Nelson Dellis: So the first thing you need to do is think of a memory palace you’d like to use. You probably want to maybe think of your own house. So the first President, we all know, is Washington. The first thing we want to do is go to our first location of our memory palace, starting at our front door. Imagine you’re at your front door. Now you need a picture. You need to see something for George Washington.
You try to come up with something that maybe it sounds like, or rhymes like. You can think of maybe a washing machine with a ton weight inside of it. Now, this is your image. It’s out there. It’s bizarre. But on your front door you’re going to imagine the image the image. Attach it to it.
So there’s a washing machine on your front door. It’s in the middle of a cycle, and you can hear this one ton weight inside of the washing machine just clanging about. Everything’s vibrating. Even just looking at that scenario, you may be just thinking, how bizarre would it be that my washing machine was attached to my front door with a weight in it like that? That’s the first item.
Now, in our memory palace, we walk through the door, we continue along this pathway, and maybe through the door is the entryway.
But our next president is Adams. We think of an image for Adams. In some cases, I think of a dam, an actual water dam, or you could even think of an apple. Like an Adam’s apple.
After the entryway, maybe there’s a couch to the left. The next president is Jefferson. I might think of a chef. Chef Jeff. It’s not the exact same, but it’s close enough. I’m going to picture a chef cooking something on my couch.
Then maybe next to the couch is a TV. That’s the next location in my palace. Madison. So Madison, I think of somebody, maybe a father mad at his son, yelling at him. That’s maybe I plant that on the TV. I picture on TV, that I’m watching a dad mad at his son.
Then finally, maybe we move to the kitchen, which is next to the couch-TV combo, and it’s Monroe. We think of maybe a man rowing a boat in the middle of your kitchen.
There’s a lot of association here. It really depends on your own first instinct. What does it remind you of? What does it sound like? But it’s all about creating a picture for the thing and amplifying it to make it very sensory rich and emotional and have some reaction to it, and then attaching it to the physical location in your mind.
Phil Stieg: In this day and age where everybody’s got a cell phone, nobody remembers numbers anymore. It’s amazing to me how many I’ve forgotten now. What’s the quick, easy way you use to memorize a phone number? What do you do?
Nelson Dellis: A phone number, in most cases, we’re talking about an American phone number here, which is 10 digits with a three-digit area code. Oftentimes, you don’t need to worry about the area code because it’s usually going to be the one you know, or one of the ones you know.
Oftentimes, we’re so used to seeing area codes from around the country, that what I typically do when I ask for a phone number is, I ask for the area code first and make a little conversation about it. If I know it, I’ll be like, Oh, 407, that’s Orlando. Cool. Or 305, that’s Miami. Where are you, Dr. Stieg?
Phil Stieg: 917
Nelson Dellis: 917. Okay, that’s New York, right? But maybe some people don’t know that.
Phil Stieg: The fact that you know where it is impressive!
Nelson Dellis: Thanks. But what you could do, if you don’t know it, then you make a conversation about it. I like to do that because it then gets three digits out of the way. Then we’re left with seven digits. Let’s just do-
Phil Stieg: I don’t want you giving your phone number out to the world (laughs).
Nelson Dellis: No. We can do 867-5309, which is the famous Jenny number from the ’80s song. But let’s say that we don’t know the song in our head because that wasn’t easy to want to remember. 8-6-7. So in my number system, that happens to be-it’s going to be very specific-but it’s the bass guitar player for Metallica. I picture him for 8-6-7 in my personal number system. There’s a reason why. Just bear with me there. So 8-6-7, it’s him.
Okay, 5-3-0-9, which translate for me in my system, he’s playing guitar with a spandex unitard. I could picture him on stage, headbanging, and 5-3 is an acoustic guitar, and he’s strumming it with this latex, spandex thing. That would be that number for me. I cannot forget that because it is absolutely bizarre.
You know I’ve learned these numbers so much so that when I see them, every two or three-digit combination, I feel like it’s the person. It’s not a number to me anymore.
If I see 65, that is my mom. And so when I see that number, it’s quite close to the emotional response I get when I see my mom in person. I want to hug that number, and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy and cared for, which is a weird thing to say about a six and a five next to each other.
But I love this aspect of the memory training because I have this rich world inside that I look around, I see numbers, I see words, and they come alive.
Phil Stieg: Are you just spontaneously linking all the time because it’s so much a part of your life?
Nelson Dellis: Kind of, yeah, because it’s a fun thing. I love trying to find these connections, and I like seeing these bizarre images come to life.
Interstitial theme music
Narrator: Most memory champions utilize a strenuous training program employing complex strategies to embed facts and detailed images into their memories. However, there is a small group of people who can effortlessly recall memories from any day in their past like it was just yesterday –- but that’s not necessarily a good thing.
Those rare people have an unusual neurological condition called Hyperthymesia, also known as “H-SAM” – for Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, which allows individuals to remember their lives intensely on a day-by-day basis.
It’s called Superior Autobiographical Memory because these indelible memories seem to be limited to personal experiences. Their unusual ability does not seem to extend to other well-known feats of memory–like reciting the digits of pi to a thousand places.
For example, mention a random date like January 12, 1993, and a person with H-SAM can instantly tell you that it was a Tuesday, and that they were late for algebra class that morning because their favorite jeans were still in the dryer, and while waiting for the clothes to dry they burned the toast for breakfast, and so on. Hundreds of details as if it had just happened yesterday.
It is still not known what actually causes Hyperthymesia, but MRI scans performed at University of California Irvine have found one part of the brain called the “caudate nucleus” to be up to seven times bigger than normal in people with H-SAM. It is an area of the brain often associated with ADHD and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
So far, only a few dozen people have been identified as having this extremely rare condition. Some consider life with H-SAM as bit of a burden.
New York musician Louise Owen described it this way: “Sometimes I feel like with all of these dates and all of these memories it’s almost like I’m in charge of about 9,000 rambunctious little children. Each one represents a different date, a different memory, and they’re all vying for my attention all the time.”
Actress Marilu Henner, probably the best known person with H-SAM,has this common experience:
“Every woman asks me if it’s terrible to have to always remember every bad relationship and bad break up–and men always say, “Oh my gosh, it must be impossible to be married to you…”Interstitial closing music.
Phil Stieg: I’m going to be transparent with you. I’ve worked with people for 10 years in the operating room. I know their face, and I still don’t remember their name every day. It’s terribly embarrassing. So I really want to work at this.
Nelson Dellis: Let me explain to the listener how to do this. So when you’re meeting someone, let’s imagine it’s a very simplified meeting situation where it’s nobody else, it’s perfectly silent, no distractions, and you’re about to shake this person’s hand, and you exchange names.
So, the first thing you’re going to do is, as you’re going in to exchange names, is choose a physical feature that you notice about their face. Whether they have beautiful blue eyes, or a radiant smile, or a ginger beard, whatever. Whatever you notice. Usually, the first thing that jumps out at you is the best because you’ll probably notice that in the future.
Once you’ve chosen that, they’re going to probably say their name at some point.
Give me a name, any name.
Phil Stieg: Tom.
Nelson Dellis: Tom. Perfect. Tom, What do you think of when you say the name Tom?
Phil Stieg: So immediately to my mind, a tom-tom, a drum popped up.
Nelson Dellis: Okay. Well, yeah, even that, right? First, my image for Toms is a thumb. Because I think of Tom Thumb. I don’t know. I don’t have any special connection to that story, but it just rolls off the tongue. I always think of thumb when I think of Tom.
Okay, so now I have an image. I have a thumb. Now the goal is to attach to two things, to anchor that weird image or the name to the feature that you have seen on their face.
This is very similar to the memory palace technique where you’re attaching images to a location, except now the location is them. They are the location on their face.
Let’s say Tom had, I don’t know, has a big nose or something like that. You’re going to go with a thumb for your picture. I’m going to picture a big thumb jammed up his nose, and that’s the reason why he has a big nose. Oftentimes, the linking part is maybe even just justifying why that weird image has anything to do with the feature. If you can somehow meld that together-the weirder, the better-it’s going to be an unforgettable connection.
Over time, the goal is not to always have to recall that connection. When you meet people, you don’t know if they’re going to be in your life for five minutes and maybe another time in 10 years, or you’re going to start seeing them every single day or work with them.
So you try this technique at first for everybody equally. Then over time, obviously, the more you see somebody, this crutch, let’s call it, falls away, and you’ll then know the name without thinking about it.
Phil Stieg: Really what we’re talking about is attention. Paying attention to the things that you do know you need to remember. For me, at the time I’m meeting people on the OR, my attention is completely focused on getting the operating room running smoothly. I’m not justifying it, but so many of us meet people, do things on the run. What you’re telling us is if you want to remember something, you want to memorize, you better stinking pay attention and focus, for a moment, at least.
Nelson Dellis: Yeah. I mean, all the things I’ve been saying are really elaborate ways of paying attention.
Phil Stieg: Again, it’s not spontaneous. It’s something you got to work at. This is what I think a lot of people don’t want to really do. They want the simple answer.
Nelson Dellis: I don’t think it’s hard. Being present-minded and wanting to do that actively can be difficult, or there’s a bit of friction. But the other thing is that if you do these memory techniques the way I’m describing, it can be super fun. That invites me in, and usually other people, it invites them in more to do this regularly.
Phil Stieg: You mentioned mnemonics. In medicine, we try to use that a lot. Do you use mnemonics much?
Nelson Dellis: In my lingo, a mnemonic is basically any tool to use to help you to remember something. A lot of the mnemonics that I’m familiar with will be some acrostic or acronym, where you create a phrase. It’s just a crutch to help you remember something.
Phil Stieg: Give me an example of a mnemonic that you use.
Nelson Dellis: You could think of-you want to learn the order of the planets. There’s Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and so on. But if you wanted to remember the order, maybe, and as a kid, I think one of them was Mr. Vister Eats My Jam, Says Uncle Nick. And that’s just the first letter of all those words which helps you remember the name of the planets.
Phil Stieg: For us, we have to write orders on every patient. So my mnemonic for that is Dach Van Dimmel. For 40 years, I’ve remembered Dach Van Dimmel. D stands for one thing, V, and I run down the list.
Nelson Dellis: That’s interesting. I don’t know all of those ones.
Phil Stieg: I always had a hard time. I felt I was cheating. Like no, I should just remember what I’m supposed to. Maybe that’s my own pathology.
Nelson Dellis: That would be nice, yeah. But remembering something is remembering something. Whether you have a feeling of it being automatic or some little trick. I think in the end, if it can come out of your brain, however it does that, it’s valid.
Phil Stieg: Exactly. At the end of the day, it’s about winning the game and figuring out the easiest way to get there.
Nelson Dellis: Right, exactly.
Phil Stieg: I’m sure that 90% of the people that are listening have never really met a memory athlete. You’ve been what? The memory champion in the United States five times. What’s the competition like? What happens? Are you sitting on a podium one at a time like a spelling bee, or is it a bunch of you up there?
Nelson Dellis: There’s a few different formats of the competition, but the U.S. Championship is a day long event. Mostly there’s a sea of competitors, and we’re all sitting at desks, and it looks like a bunch of people taking tests where we’re given packets of information, whether it’s a big number on paper, or a big packet of faces with names, and we have a certain amount of time to memorize it.
Then we give those papers back, and we get a blank sheet basically, and we have to fill in what we memorized.
That happens in the morning. Then the finals are on stage. There’s a few rounds, and the final 8 to 12, we’re on stage all together, and we have to memorize things live. It’s one by one. We each have to recite a portion or a piece of the data. If you make a mistake, in theory, you’re out.
Phil Stieg: You’re out?
Nelson Dellis: Yeah, exactly. Some of the events, you get multiple strikes, but some are brutal. If you make a mistake, you’re done. And they kind of whittle it down to the final three, and that’s the final event where we have to memorize two packs of cards. That one is single elimination, and you’re left with one person at the end.
Phil Stieg: Having never been to a memory athletic competition, is it a broad spectrum of people? Is it nerdlich, athletic, competitive? What’s the type?
Nelson Dellis: Yeah, it really is all over the place, which always surprised me. I thought it would just be a collection of the nerdiest people you can imagine. But no, you have kids there. You have former pizza delivery guys, moms of three kids. Yeah, it’s all over.
Phil Stieg: So if somebody’s listening to this podcast, they go, jeez, that sounds like a fascinating life.
How does it become a career? It sounds like you do consulting work. What does consulting work in memory mean? What are you doing?
Nelson Dellis: Yeah, yeah.
Phil Stieg: Besides from competing.
Nelson Dellis: Right. When I first started this, I was interested in it for myself and to better myself. I’m a competitive person, so I like the competitive side of it. But I quickly realized that people would be fascinated with what I was doing, and they wanted to learn about it. I believe, and still believe, that everybody can do an impressive memory feat with these memory techniques.
I started doing little talks and seminars, at first for free, and then charging a little bit. Then I realized everybody has a memory. Everybody could do better in life if they had a better memory. I’ve never had anybody tell me that that wouldn’t help them.
There’s a demand for this, and I realized that it blossomed into a career where I want to help people. I think if we can all tap into this ability that we all have, I think, latent within us, that we’d be better at everything we do.
Phil Stieg: So I got to ask you then, the big question. You’re young. You look like you probably use a cell phone a lot, and you’re on digital media a lot. What has excessive cell phone use done to people that you meet and their memories?
Nelson Dellis: What you would imagine. It’s destroyed their memory. Because we’re atrophied, right? We don’t need to use our memories the same way we used to 10, 20, 30 years ago.
I think the best example is with relation to phone numbers. If you think about when most people listening were younger, if you’re pre-cell phone eras, you probably still can remember either on the rotary phone, or on the touchpad, how to dial, say, your home phone number or your best friend’s number. I still have mine.
Phil Stieg: I still remember my mom and dad’s. I remember it. Actually, the link that I used years ago for remembering somebody was their phone number. I put it together that way.
Nelson Dellis: Amazing. That was the thing. We had to because what was the alternative? You’re going to go to some directory to look it up? What a tedious chore. You just knew it, brute force. Now you don’t have to do that anymore. Nobody tries.
If you lost your phone and you had to do that again, you’d be surprised how good your memory would suddenly be. Technology has encouraged us to not use our memories anymore, so yeah, they suck.
Phil Stieg: In reading the last chapter in your book, you focus a little bit on brain health and how to pursue that. Is that another new passion that you’re going to develop? I hope you are, because I think that people trivialize the concept of brain health.
Nelson Dellis: I definitely talk about it all the time. I definitely think environmental factors play into a cognitive health and can improve your memory. But it’s more like a long game for that.
Obviously memory techniques can help instantly improve your memory right now. You’ll see the result. The other things may not always be so immediately obvious, but when you’re 70, 80, 90, you’ll probably be like, “oh, thank goodness. I took care of my mind.”
Phil Stieg: Thank God, I slept seven hours a night.
Phil Stieg: So you’re a normal human being. Tell me that you do forget things. You go to the grocery store, and you forget something, right?
Nelson Dellis: Yeah, I do.
Phil Stieg: So again, it gets back to, if you’re going to do it right, you’re going to go back and you say, okay, I’m going to create this “see-link-go” technique to make sure that I don’t disappoint my loved ones when I get home, and I forgot the ice cream.
Nelson Dellis: If you want to have a real conversation about that, you should have my wife on because she’s the first-hand experiencer of that.
I have this funny anecdote. I tell this all the time, but it’s true. There’s been times where she asked me to get two things from the grocery store, and I’m just like, I got it. I come home with one of them or none of them. I’m so embarrassed. I say, “listen, Leah, you’ve got to give me a list of 100 things, and I’ll remember every single one.” When you give me two or one, it’s just like, I don’t have this sense of mind to think about it.
Phil Stieg: Nelson, thank you so much for being with us today. Author of the book, Remember It. He did give us some great tips on improving our memories. Each one of us can develop images in our mind of things we’re trying to remember.
He’s made it fun, he’s made it practical, I hope that it helps all of us. Nelson, thank you so much for being with us.
Nelson Dellis: Nelson was happy to be on your show! (laugh)
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