How to hack your memory and remember almost anything

By Nelson Dellis

Memory grandmaster Nelson Dellis explains how anyone can develop a super-memory

My foray into the world of memorisation began with a single memory — a startling, gut-wrenching memory, at that. I was in France, visiting my grandparents, sitting at the dinner table. My grandmother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years earlier. The last time I’d seen her, she’d had trouble remembering where she’d left her cane, or whether she’d left her tarts in the fridge or set them on the counter.

This time, as she sat across from me at the table, she turned to my grandfather and asked him how I was doing, and whether I was planning to visit anytime soon — completely unaware that I was right there with her. I was stunned by the depth of her lapse. It’s hard to forget being forgotten by someone you love.

After that moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about what was going on inside her mind, and inside mine. When I returned home, I started looking for little ways in which I could improve myself somehow, specifically how I could boost the way my mind worked. I thought of the life-encompassing possibilities of having a good memory — what it would mean to improve mine, as well as what it would mean to lose it like my grandmother. So I picked up a self-help book promising "unlimited mental capacity” and “laser-sharp concentration.”

When I first picked up that book, I didn’t even know that competitive memory events existed. Nor did I know that the top competitors all used essentially the same 2,500-year-old techniques. And contrary to my assumptions (and the assumptions of most people), the best competitors are not photographic-memory savants, but rather average-brained men and women who trained very hard and mastered these techniques. I had always believed that memory was inelastic; mine wasn’t great, and I didn’t expect it to get much better. But I put aside my skepticism and soon discovered that the memory techniques really worked.

Their premise was fairly simple: our brains are better equipped to remember certain types of information than others — anything that involves senses, especially sight and sense of direction, is stickier than abstract stuff like numbers and concepts — so to remember those harder things we simply have to use a little imagination to “translate” them into easier things. That means turning words and numbers into pictures in your mind’s eye, and imagining those pictures set against the backdrop of real-life familiar places, which I like to call journeys.

I decided to enter my first USA Memory Championship (USAMC) only a few months after I’d first learned it existed. I did know that anyone could win the championship with enough practice. Unfortunately, two weeks of rigorous training weren’t enough (I came in 16th overall), but the experience fuelled my drive to get better and better.

Then my grandmother passed away. The shock and grief cut right through me. Yet in the midst of that troubling moment, I searched for, and found, a purpose to my own life. Could I beat back this disease that had taken my grandmother’s mind and then the rest of her? Could I make my mind not only sharper but healthier? Could I master my memory and help others do the same?

So, I trained. For hours a day, I practiced for each event in the USAMC. I hit plateaus and had to find ways to break through. My goal was to be the very best, and I knew I had to put in hard work to get there. That year (2010), I came in third. The next year, I trained even harder, and I finally became the USA Memory Champion. In 2012, 2014, and 2015, I won as well. Along the way, I also broke a number of US memory records, achieved grandmaster status, and was, at one point, ranked among the top 25 memory athletes in the world.

So, what’s it like being able to remember things that you typically forget Here’s a taste:

I usually wake up around Garth Algar (Dana Carvey’s character from Wayne’s World), otherwise known as 07:27. I head down to my gym and check out the day’s workout. First up: Tony Blair is hanging from a ceiling lamp and giving it a powerful cleaning. Then along comes 50 Cent, floating and doing squats in midair. Finally, James Bond, with comically enormous pecs and biceps under his tuxedo, leaps upwards toward the former prime minister and the rapper. So that’s ten (as in 10 Downing Street, the prime minister’s address) hang power cleans, 50 air squats, and seven (or 007) muscle-ups.

After my workout, I head home and hit the shower. Like most people, that’s where I start going over my to-do list for the day. If it’s not a long list, I’ll store it in a journey I’ve set aside for today: my old apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the front door, I imagine emailing an embarrassing, inappropriate picture of my business partner Brian to all my contacts. Whoops!

In the kitchen, I look at my website on my laptop when along comes a construction crew and smashes a wrecking ball into the screen. Next, I head into the living room, where there’s a giant, floating brain with a full set of facial features, glaring at a deck of cards as it tries to memorise them. Finally, in my bedroom, I train with Oscar De La Hoya, who wears a number four on his jersey, trading jabs and uppercuts. Once I’m clean and dressed, I’ll sit down and send Brian an email, spend some time working on my website, do my memory training and then head out to train with a client at 16:00.

Just your typical day, right? While it may seem totally random and bizarre, thinking like that helps me remember numbers, appointments, names, and all the other things that fly my way, on a daily basis.

You must know the frustration of forgetting something you really needed to remember, so let me give you an example of how to apply my techniques to a specific situation we all have needed at one point or another in our lives: remembering a speech without notes!

If you’ve ever had to memorise a speech – or even the key points of a speech – by rote repetition, you know that it can be done that way eventually. Sometimes though, that process can takes hours, sometimes days. At a certain point you get it down pat. When the time comes to deliver it, you’ve got a pretty good shot at nailing it – that is, unless you get nervous, or you suddenly feel tired, or you just get distracted for a moment and in that moment you lose your place, you lose the whole thing, and you wonder if you’re losing your mind (or your job).

I feel your pain. I’ve had memory mistakes too, and they burn – especially in front of an audience. But on the big stage you have to consider whether you need your memory to be 100 per cent perfect – as in knowing a speech, a script, or a poem word for word – or whether your memory only has to be good enough to recite the key ideas in their proper order.

Let’s leave the word-for-word memorisation aside for another time and start with “good enough.” If you know your material well, and you already have the ideas for your talk developed and structured, you don’t need to use your conscious memory to elaborate on each idea off the cuff. That part should be somewhat natural. Really, all you need is a list of the ideas themselves, sorted in their proper order.

Let’s say you’re getting ready to give a big talk, entitled Things the Honey Badger Doesn’t Care About. You have four main points you’d like to address:

You don’t want to embarrass yourself in front of a roomful of people; you want to keep your talking points straight, and you want to go through them one by one, in order. What’s the best way to keep track of all those snakes and bees? Put them in a journey!

The journey method works like this:

Close your eyes and imagine yourself lying in your bed, looking around your bedroom. At the foot of your bed there’s a giant, gnarled tree with branches coming out in every direction. One of those branches is sticking out right above your head, and dangling from it is a bright-green king cobra with red eyes like lasers, razor-sharp fangs and a forked tongue. It’s staring right at you, but you don’t care. You get out of bed and leave the room.

You head over to the bathroom, take a look inside, and notice the sink, toilet, shower and everything else are gone—replaced by a red brick house with white shutters. The windows are open, and bees are streaming out of there and buzzing all around. They start to come after you so you dash to the living room.

You make it to the living room, but you can’t outrun the bees. They’re stinging you everywhere. There might even be a bee driving a Chevy Corvette Stingray through the wall, if you can imagine that. But like the honey badger, you don’t care.

You stroll over to the kitchen, and there’s that snake again. This time, though, the snake is cowering in fear, curled up in the corner. It’s stretching out its arms (this is some crazy snake!) as if to push you away, and it’s screaming, “Get away from me!”

Now, how could you ever forget those talking points?

In order to recall those talking points, all you have to do is mentally visualise yourself walking back through that journey, seeing all the crazy images you placed there, and translate them back to that actual pertinent information you were trying to remember.

In short, memory is all about paying attention, visualising (encoding the information into silly, memorable images), and finding a place to store it (it doesn’t have to be your house, any familiar journey will do). That’s it! If you can do that, and if you can put a little effort into using your memory, then you too can one day be a champion of your own memory./wired

* Nelson Dellis is author of Remember It!: The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget