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How Do Memory Champions Train Their Minds?
Nelson Dellis • 2024-05-07
Dylan Carnahan:Welcome to the Simple Questions Podcast. This is your host, Dylan Carnahan. You will learn in this episode, the competitions memory champions participate in, strategies memory competitors use, and ways you can improve your memory. Our guest is a highly sought after memory consultant who works with people from all across the world. The current world record holder for memorizing a little over nine decks of cards within 30 minutes. Memorizing 907 digits within 30 minutes and memorizing 235 names in just 15 minutes. The founder of the nonprofit organization Climb for Memory, which raises awareness and funds for Alzheimer's research through climbing expeditions and is a five time USA memory champion. I introduce to you Nelson Dellis. I am eight years old, sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner. When I hear someone exclaim, oh, this is disgusting, what is this? I look over, I see my grandma had taken someone else's glass of wine and taken a sip. Several minutes passed, and then I hear, oh my goodness, what is this? This is disgusting. And again, she had taken a sip of wine and had forgotten and exclaimed how this was gross. And the third time it happened, it was not very funny. So at eight years old, this is kind of my first exposure to one extreme of memory and lack thereof. It wouldn't be until a decade or more later till I read the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which introduced me to the world of memory competitions. The other extreme on this spectrum. So that was kind of my first experience to kind of the experiences of the world of memory. Nelson, can you talk about what was the catalyst for you to focus on memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, something quite similar actually. My grandmother had Alzheimer's, and I can remember very distinctly as well something like the story you told. I wasn't eight years old, I was quite a bit older, my early 20s, but we were visiting her. She lived in France. My parents are side of the family is French. And yeah, we were sitting down in her little apartment with my granddad in a small French village and having our dinner. And she's right next to me asking my grandfather where I was, even though I was right next to her, right? Among other things that kind of showed her memory lapsing, but that one kind of hit very hard. Like, I just was not fascinated. I mean, it wasn't exciting or happy or positive or anything, but I just couldn't fathom. Like I really was out of my body thinking, what is happening to this person's brain to say that? Right? So, anyways, that thought of like, what is going on in the brain made me read a bunch of memory books, and I discovered memory championships, and it kind of led the way.
Dylan Carnahan:So, you get this exposure, you start reading up on these things. Now, it's one thing to get intrigued by the concept of a memory competition. It's a whole other to be an active participant. And I'd say that you're even more so than an active participant. So can you explain a little bit more about what these memory competitions are, and what the contestants must do to perform in them?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah. So it's been around. A memory championship has been around for like 20, 25 years, 30 years ago was the first one. And there's a world championships, there's a UK championships, there's a US championship. And I think they all started from the same place. The US has kind of done its own thing, made it a little more TV friendly as Americans like to do. But it's essentially the same thing, which is, you know, you memorize for a certain amount of time, and then you have to recall as best as you can that information. And these memory championships are memorizing cards, memorizing numbers, memorizing names, memorizing poems, lists of words, things like that.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and can you give a little bit of an idea of kind of the constraints placed around that? You know, I know that you have certain time limits, as well as a lot of information that you must ingest during that time as well.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, so to give you an idea of some of the specifics here, memorizing a deck of cards, you get five minutes, which people can do it in 30 seconds. So if you stop, if you can do it before the five minutes, you can stop the timer. And that's 52 cards, you got to remember the order forwards and backwards. You have five minutes to memorize as much of a large number as you can. What else? So it's either like really quick, like cards like under a minute, or you have like a five minute memorization period for some other things like numbers, or you have longer ones like 15 minutes. That's what they time you for for names and poetry and usually it's a bigger set of data for those ones. But yeah, there's a time to memorize and then there's a time to recall. That's that's kind of typically how it works.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. And so if I'm not mistaken, you also have to qualify, right to kind of proceed and progress to get to kind of a championship, right? So there's also a competitive aspect as well.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, it's changed format over the years. But in recent years, there is an online qualifying event. And then the top performers there get to go to this finals. But it used to be when I was on the earlier part of my competitive career, the qualifiers was like in person the same day as the finals. So people in the afternoon who qualified would do the on the stage finals that same day.
Dylan Carnahan:Now I want to take a step back and kind of look at obviously to be a competitor and to be this involved, you have to have some understanding of memory to an extent. So could you give to a complete layman some just general information about how memory works?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, I mean, you actually don't need to know much about memory, other than how the techniques work, I could have a neuroscientist besides me and tell me what I'm actually doing with my neurons, and I would be like, oh, interesting, I didn't know that. But technically, we're taking advantage of things that our brains have been proven to do time and time again, be good at, which is to remember pictures. And pictures implies that it's something that is meaningful to you, associative to something meaningful to you, and that we remember spatial information really well. So think of your childhood home, you could probably recreate most of it in your mind without much effort or having to truly memorize it. It's kind of there probably. We just remember that kind of stuff very well. So those things together employed into one of the most powerful memory techniques can allow us to do these seemingly phenomenal feats of memory.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, I think that's an excellent point, right? If you had someone break down, here's all this scientific terminology and all these things, that's fine and all. But at the end of the day, you're doing whatever that is, even though that's kind of an added dimension of commentary, right, to an extent.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:So, in talking about kind of those strategies, what are some strategies that you employ regarding memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, so a lot of the information in these championships are list-based, meaning there is some order to it, you know, and it's the sequence-based, let's say. So memorizing a deck of cards, order matters. And the way you're recalling the deck is you've got to put it in order, you know, suit, value and everything. Same with the numbers. It's a number from start to finish, right? Same with the poem, same with the list of words. Names not so much. This is quite a variation of that because they shuffle the faces. So the order doesn't matter. It just matters if you can name the right name to the right face, right? But anyways, in general, a lot of the information that can be randomized to test people on their memory is in this format. And so the Memory Palace technique is the technique that most of us use at this high level. It's an ancient technique. It's been around for thousands of years. Many different types of documentation of past civilizations using this have been found. And it's just kind of the lost art these days because we don't need to memorize stuff anymore. There's books, there's printing press, there's iPhones, Wikipedia, you know, all that. That information is at a fingertip tap away. So yeah, and this memory palace technique is using what I just told you, which is coming up with pictures for the things that we're memorizing, really memorable visuals in our mind, and then anchoring them to these mental creations of familiar places, not palaces. We don't really have palaces anymore, I guess, unless you're a billionaire or royalty, but maybe your apartment or your house, a childhood home, the gym you go to, your high school, all of these places that you go through every single day and know the routes through it, you can use as a way to organize the order of a sequence of images.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and so once you kind of have this mental model, if you will, there, if I'm not mistaken, there is an element of kind of some work you've done to place things in there using like a POA method. So there's kind of an onboarding, if you will, to then additionally, I guess, use that, leverage that strategy for more information.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, so that really, what you're trying to do there, what you're talking about is that first part, which is coming up with a picture for the information. And finding the best way to kind of compress the data into as few images as possible. So let's take a sequence of numbers, for example. If you were to just look at each separate digit and try to turn each digit into its own picture, maybe the number looks like something like, you know, an eight looks like a snowman. So you picture a snowman, a one looks like a stick. So you picture a stick being whacked against the snowman or something. That's fine, that works, but then if you have like a 10-digit number, which isn't that big, you have 10 different images you got to remember the sequence of, right? So then memory athletes are always trying to find out ways to compress that data so that we don't need as many images. So the PAO, Person, Action, Object, is a way to turn numbers into one image for, there are variations of this, but six digits. And you can even grow it to seven or eight. Some people even do nine digits for one image. And then, you can think of multiple of nine, whatever digits divided by nine, and that's how many images you have, significantly cuts down on how many locations you have to use in your memory palace and how much further you can span with a few images.
Dylan Carnahan:So I think that was a really good way to put it. That's the compression, right? To kind of maximize the space that you can utilize within this memory palace.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah. Yeah, another example with cards, for example, there's 52 cards. So if you had one image per card, you would need a memory palace that had 52 places, one place you'd place one image. But then people got smart and they were like, well, if I have maybe two cards per image or per location, that's 26 places I need. Okay, I just halved it. And then three cards per location. Now you have 17 plus the leftover card. So that's easy, right? 17 places, like in walking through your house, it's not that hard to zip through. So yeah, it boils down to us always trying to find the best strategy to make something memorable and to keep it as compressed as possible.
Dylan Carnahan:So you bring up...
Nelson Dellis:And there's like a trade-off too, because you might think like, well, why don't I just like compress five or seven cards or something, you know? But the problem is trying to... There's like a sweet spot, because if I'm trying to compress this data and it's taking longer to figure that out, what that looks like, seven cards together, then I'm not really saving time and maybe even making it more complex. So usually it boils down to compressing two, three to four things into one, and no more than that really, because then you're just memorizing a sub-list within a list kind of thing.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and that's especially the competition, right? If you're taking so long to form these images and then subsequently taking long to decode them, that can be not beneficial.
Nelson Dellis:Exactly, yeah, yeah. And there's a fine line. For a while, I was like, oh, I've got to come up with a more robust number system. It took me months to learn, and it's one of these, it's very sizable in something that I have to actually ingrain into my procedural memory so that it's just like muscle memory. And I still have to upkeep it sometimes because it's so vast. Well, I could have probably done a simpler system and just trained that harder and would have been faster potentially. So yeah, these are the things that memory athletes are concerned with. I don't think it really matters for the day-to-day person, but at a highly competitive level, it matters.
Dylan Carnahan:Wait, something I'm curious about with these images, it seems like the more zanier the image is, the easier it is to recall.
Nelson Dellis:Yep, yep. And that's part of it too. So you want your images that you create to be novel, over-the-top, tapping into these kind of shocking senses, things that are outlandishly funny, overly sexual, grotesque even. Those are things that we just naturally are drawn to, like a moth to a flame.
Dylan Carnahan:And then you leverage that, right? And you leverage that within your system, and then you can turn that into a strength.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, exactly. So sometimes my images are pretty tasteless and potentially not PC for the times we live in, but it happens up here. Nobody needs to know about it, and it helps me remember. So I don't give it too much thought. I just do it and allow it in.
Dylan Carnahan:There you go. So you've talked a little bit. You've alluded to kind of some of the preparation that you'd have to do to compete or just some of the maintenance. Can you elaborate on that a little bit further?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, so it's a skill, you know? And yeah, the technique works. Like I could walk anybody through an example and they could do it and impress themselves, but it's also something that you can further master and get faster at, right? So you sit anybody down at a piano, and you could teach them simple song and how to move their fingers along the keys. But obviously, if you spend years training and training, learning how to sight read and practice your skills, like you could become a pretty good, if not virtuoso, in playing piano, right? And that's practice, right? Obviously, there's skill involved, like natural skill too. Some people just have it and it clicks better. But in general, we can all learn to be better at a skill if we practice it with the right technique and feedback. And memory is no different. So I really wanted to win this competition. I loved doing it. I was hooked on it and loved the idea of improving my memory through practice. So I spent many hours, not anymore, but back in the day, just training and training and training until it became automatic.
Dylan Carnahan:Now, I'm curious, Nelson, when do you find yourself using strategies in your personal life? And then so what are they?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, you know, originally, I just wanted to compete. I wasn't like, oh, I have a terrible memory in my life. I need to improve that. I mean, I probably didn't have a great memory. It didn't really matter to me. I wanted to win this competition and have the best memory in the US according to this website that was promoting a championship. But very quickly, after training so hard, I realized that it, of course, permeates into my life, these abilities. And not so much that I memorize or remember everything. People often just assume that I'm now a tape recorder or something like that. It's not like that. I still have to make the effort to memorize something or remember something. But I have the tools to do it much easier. And I think by now, after all this training, I've kind of rewired how I process information. And I think that's the biggest difference is the way I hear information, see information, whatever my mind is perceiving, kind of goes through this different lens now, which can easily go down an avenue to be memorized. Do you think there's like this memorization factory in my mind, like in this conveyor belt of information going through, like it's in the right form, right, to be processed by that factory much easier than, say, the untrained person.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. Can you elaborate on kind of how you're processing things that enable you to better commit to memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah. I mean, it's as simple as my mind is automatically, instead of just seeing it as, or hearing it whatever way, what form it's in, it's beyond that. Things come in as kind of all the senses as one, if that makes sense. I don't know how else to describe it. It's kind of hard to put my finger on it. But let's say you're reading something on a page. They're just a collection of words, right? And some people might read something like that and have a hard time actually imagining what this is being said. They may not even take the time to do that. They're just reading it for the meaning, right? Whereas when I read it, almost by default now, like it comes in as this like enriched world where obviously it's not real. I'm not actually there touching it, having a psychedelic experience or anything like that. But it's in my head, it's very visual. It's probably as close as it could be without being real, real in my head, you know? I can taste it, I can touch it, I can feel it. I can sense it, like what it feels emotionally. And that's, I think, that's the key to memorizing anything is having information in that way. And yeah, whether it's a name, a number, an address, a set of instructions, like that is constantly happening for me. And it's just, it just makes my world for memorization a lot more colorful and enriched.
Dylan Carnahan:That was a really interesting way to articulate things. So what kind of what I heard there is that you've, when you hear things, you tie a lot more senses to them, and emotions, which then makes it easier to recall rather than someone idly studying, right? Where you're just looking at the page and just maybe you have an internal monologue going, right? So you've kind of tied a lot more to that bit of information than say a normal person just on first glance reading something.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, yeah. And you could even maybe go as far to say that like it's a creativity skill that I've really mastered here because when I'm looking at this dry esoteric textbook chapter of stuff that I'm studying that is boring me to tears, like it is my creativity is like bringing it alive, right? And it may not even be stuff that is like the actual text, right? It might just be stuff that it sounds like or reminds me of or in a sillier way, right? In a bizarre way, but it's memorable, right? Like I might read some, maybe I'm studying like biology terms or something and it's or medicine, and it's like a really complicated medical term. I mean, I don't know what it means, but maybe I read the word and it sounds like something, pornographic or like humorous, right? And that's what I'm envisioning in massive 4D in my mind. And then I read the meaning and then that has its own color to it too. And then they kind of like start to come together and overlap. And yeah, it just is naturally kind of doing that. And when I'm more conscious of that and applying a little bit more of the memory techniques, the other memory techniques, like that's when it can really catch fire and stick in the way that I want it to. But that little step is the conscious effort that I have to make.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, so the conscious effort is the ingestion of it and then employing the strategies on top of that.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, or the intent, right? For it to be memorized kind of thing, yeah.
Dylan Carnahan:No, that, yeah, that's very interesting. I appreciate you sharing that perspective because that is different. I think not everyone operates in that way, so I think sharing that can give people insight. So we talked a little bit about kind of the strategies and I guess some, like, frankly, the mindset, really, that comes with that. What habits did you find yourself adopting to kind of get an edge or improve your memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, at the time that I discovered this stuff, I'd started training on my own. I had always been interested in really kind of weird esoteric things, but I wouldn't really stick with it. I'd jump from the next exciting thing to the next. And this was one of those exciting things. But for whatever reason, maybe it was inspiration from watching my grandmother pass. But this one stuck. And yeah, it really taught me how to be dedicated to something and to put in a little bit of training every day, even if it wasn't like massive amounts of time, just being consistent, and then seeing the results, right? I was able to win these championships and break records. That was really reaffirming all the efforts that I've put myself through. And so that was a big learning lesson in my 20s. To my older self, I actually went through something and achieved it. And it helped me kind of be a little more dedicated to projects and work that I'm doing. So that was a big learning experience for my training.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, I think that's a big thing. When you get positive outcomes, it tends to incentivize you to continue to do that thing. So those early victories, the small wins aren't just throwing all the buzzwords out there. Those can have a good impact on the emotional aspect and drive you to continue to pursue something.
Nelson Dellis:Obviously, the championship itself was a big win. It was an actual win. But I think that was always a nice potential goal to have before I won anything. I wanted that, but I must have been seeing daily wins for myself on a minute level in terms of me being hooked on this feeling that memory techniques gave me. It made me feel like a superhuman to myself daily, which was, I think, a win enough. Obviously, that doesn't necessarily happen with everything that you put in a little bit of effort to, but it did for this, and that was a learning experience.
Dylan Carnahan:I want to get to something that's a little bit different. I'm going to ask you something a little bit different here. So, there may be some people listening to have what's called aphantasia, which is a neurological condition where it is not easy or not possible to conjure images in the mind's eye. So, that's a unique kind of situation, and I'm curious. No, but I have people that I'm related to that have that. So, that's kind of where that came from. And so, for people, members of the aphantasia community, what strategies could they use that don't involve visualization for memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, so I know a few people with aphantasia. I've trained a few people with varying degrees. This is what I understand from my experience of working with people with aphantasia is that the statement, I can't create images is, I don't know if that's specific enough because this is what I'm going to tell you. So, when I teach memory techniques, I talk about this creating visuals and when I coach people, I do examples. Then I suggest, hey, for this, maybe picture and I go into all the details. Like, what are you feeling? What are the colors? And most people can do this. Let's say people who don't have that advantage at all. But even that, if I really stop to think about it, I don't really know what people are doing when they're doing that. If I say picture an ocean, my visual right now versus yours, if you did that, is not the same. I'm sure there's water involved in probably maybe a beach or a boat or something, but water for sure. But what are we picturing here? Are you staring at the water? Are you looking at the undulating waves? Is it far out? Is it zoomed in? Are you looking at droplets of water? Is the feeling of the waves in the ocean? It's really hard to describe that. Okay, what I found through training my memory, let's take cards, for example. All right, I couldn't do this at first. And then my first deck of cards took 20 minutes, which I thought was amazing at the time. And I took my time, each card I'd look at and like really try to imagine as much detail as I could in my image. And then as I try to chip down on the time, now I can do it in 30 seconds, okay. So you think like, what I obviously can't, two things that probably happened, I got faster at coming up with my pictures, but I also probably had to lose some of the detail, right? I can't sit there for each card and think, what does it smell like? What does it look like, right? At some point, you know, look, if I'm doing 30 seconds for a deck of cards, that's less than a second per card, right? So there's really not much time to formulate much of an image. And this is what the feeling happens when you get good at memorizing, is you almost feel like you're not really picturing anything at all. Okay, which is bizarre to say, because I'm teaching people to think of pictures, right? It really comes down to like a feeling, which is a bizarre thing to say, because some of the fastest times I've ever memorized stuff, I often walk away thinking like, I don't really know what I just did, you know? I just know the information, and the images are there, right? And that's wild to me. But I think it's a helpful thing to talk about, because for people with aphantasia, the end goal doesn't have to do with images in reality, right? It's really just a feeling about things. But to learn how to get there, unfortunately, it's taught through sitting with the visuals, right? But anyway, so what I'm trying to get to is, with the spectrum of people who have aphantasia abilities or disabilities, whatever you want to call it, I think we all can derive some context to the information, whether it's through some meaning that you know. If I said to someone with aphantasia, say, picture an orange, okay, they may not be able to come up with the thought of an orange round thing in their head, but they probably know that it is an orange round thing, right?
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, through word association, may not have a visual cue, but.
Nelson Dellis:Right, and what does that mean, right? So, and again, I don't want to speak for people who have severe aphantasia, I don't know how deep the rabbit hole goes, but I would bet that they can probably have a sensation of some time or something associated to a time made in orange, or where an orange is. You know, there's always some kind of angle, I think, that can be made to make a visual, whatever you want to call this thing, which isn't actually a visual, right? Using some picture in your mind. It's kind of a misnomer, but I think it's a fascinating thing. I don't want to claim that I have the solution, but I definitely think anybody who comes to me who says they have aphantasia, I think I can work with that and still teach them these techniques. So anybody out there who feels that way, and is maybe thinking, oh, memory techniques, I can't do it. I disagree. Reach out to me because I'm fascinated by it, and I want to work more in that field because I think there is work there that can be done.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, well said. I appreciate you saying that and extending that as well as I think, you know, again, that kind of highlights kind of that, I would use the term really like creation, but like the abstraction of this all and how, you know, like you said, there's maybe a different angle, right? You know, word association, you know, things like that, just something that you can kind of hold on to despite maybe not having that visual element.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, yeah. Listen, and this gets even further out there, like to extend beyond the feeling of like, of what I was explaining where I memorize something and I don't know how I did it, or really what I was thinking. I almost feel at this point in time that I don't even know if actual memory formation, like the like the qualia of those things that come to our mind is coming from our own brains, if that makes sense. Like this is way more philosophical than anything. But in terms of like consciousness, I feel like our brains, our memory is more like a read, write, kind of like head of like think of like a tape player, right? And the tape, the substrate of all the information that is out there, you're just reading it in and writing it in. So it's not necessarily a result of what is in here, but you're just pulling it in and receiving it from some thing out there. It sounds very woo-woo, it is, but that is a sensation I have when I perform in these kind of flow states with memory, which is bizarre.
Dylan Carnahan:And when you say flow state, you're referring to the fact that you could sit and ingest all this information, memorize it, and then walk away feeling like you don't really have, like you didn't do that in a way.
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't happen all the time. I don't want to say that I'm just like some, it's casually look at stuff and it's like, poof, there. No, most of the time, it's like a very concerted effort. But when I'm like really in it, it was like anybody playing basketball into their flow state, like they all can shoot threes, you know, like they've trained it. But some days it's just like, you touch the ball, if the basket hoop looks like an ocean, right? You just throw it in and it goes in. You just like can't describe why this is happening right now, but it happens, right? So same kind of thing.
Dylan Carnahan:How much training do you think you put in until you first kind of felt that? Can you kind of elaborate on when that happened and kind of what you've seen that's enabled you to kind of maybe enter that better?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, I mean, it's happened at different stages. You know, like when I was, I'll go back to the car, I was at first, you know, I was not able to go under five minutes, but eventually I was getting five, four, three minutes. Some of those times where I've like pushed myself beyond like a perceived barrier, you know, like breaking the three minute time to memorize cards. Like, I'm sure that first time I did it, I was like, oh man, I didn't, you know, time didn't feel like anything. And I just kind of like zoomed through it, you know? But then maybe that happened again. I can remember some of these instances where I was like, wow, that felt easier than it had ever before, like for one minute, and then getting down to 30 seconds. The only reason I explained the 30 second example is because it literally is very fast for the data. So something is being shortcutted there.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah. I wanna hit upon, you know, we had a little bit of a philosophical discussion, but I wanna kind of tap back into that conceptually here. You know, and we alluded to this earlier. You know, in a world where we have all of this externally stored information, what makes internal memory important?
Nelson Dellis:I think, you know, it's in a world, yeah, where everything is just available. You don't need to keep it in your own brain. I think being able to remember something, that feeling of recalling something and knowing that you know something is such a human experience, right? It's like, it's self-validating. It feels like your truest self, you know? Something feels good about it, and it feels like you were made to do this, right? As a being. So I think in a world where like, I feel like more and more with technology, we'll be like disassociate from ourselves and what it means to be a human. I think having a good memory, like the argument for remembering things with this alone is super powerful and empowering itself. Obviously it takes work, and it's the lazier option to just be like, you know what, I don't need to remember this. But I think the argument to memorize something, you would feel, you gotta feel it again, to know what I'm talking about. And it's a very exhilarating feeling to be on top of information in your own head. On the other side of things, it potentially might stave off cognitive diseases as you get older, right? So there's an argument for brain health as well.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, no, I think those are two compelling arguments, right? There's an emotional satisfaction there. Also, like you said, that's a very human thing. You have some additional benefits there as well. And I think, too, something to point out is you can't always go to externally retrieve information. You don't always have that at your disposal, right? Albeit, that may sound crazy, but there are some circumstances where you can't do that. And I think you also have your own experiences, too, which may or may not be shown on a flashback on your photos or something like that on your iPhone.
Nelson Dellis:Right, yeah. Yeah, but it's like, you know, I've memorized poems for a competition. That's one of the events, but I never really memorized poems for myself. I love certain poems. I've read poems, and that's nice. That would be nice to know, to be able to recite, but I never do it. But I did last year, I did a poem that just, I was kind of bored and at the same time inspired to do it for one reason or another. And I came away from it, just being like, wow, like that experience of being able to recite it, like I felt one with the poem, and it meant so much more to me. It felt like it was mine, you know, that I put it up here and then I had it there. It was a really cool experience, and I don't know if many people go after that anymore, because they don't have to, but if they did, they might surprise themselves, you know, how exhilarating it might feel.
Dylan Carnahan:You've done a very good job articulating kind of that feeling as best you can. I think that's a very important part of this that I've heard from you quite a bit, is that, you know, albeit it's difficult to articulate, it's a little abstract, but you know, the emotion that you can put behind kind of this recollection, you know, it's a very human thing, and you can very validating, right? I'm curious, you know, you know, where you were at the beginning of your journey, as well as, you know, the people you've worked with, what are some of the biggest challenges that people face initially kind of wanting to get involved with improving their memory?
Nelson Dellis:Yeah, I think, especially with older people who have maybe never thought about memory improvement, and then I'm telling them to, you know, get rid of their boundaries, think about the wildest things ever, be creative. Like, that can be hard for some people who've thought a certain way their whole life. I don't think it's impossible. I think it's definitely possible to break through there, but that's usually a big hurdle for people. The other hurdle might be that they've just accepted that they have a bad memory their whole life. That's just who they are. And that's thought is so self-defeating, especially for memory. So getting over that could be a huge hurdle. But once you do, once you start to know and tell yourself that you have a good memory, it's a super powerful thing.
Dylan Carnahan:What's the best way for people to learn more about you and the work you do?
Nelson Dellis:Yep, there's a few resources. My website, if you just search Nelson Dellis, just go to nelsondellis.com. All my information is there. You can send me a question. You can hire me to give speeches, workshops. If you want my book, it's on Amazon. Just search my name. I have a kids book and an adults book. And then my YouTube channel. I have tons of videos that teach this stuff and do fun examples of it or silly demonstrations, but it's all out there to instruct and teach people and motivate people to maybe consider using their memories more.
Dylan Carnahan:Yeah, and we'll make sure that all of that is included in the show notes for this episode. Nelson, thank you for sharing your knowledge and time today.
Nelson Dellis:My pleasure, John.
Dylan Carnahan:That wraps up our conversation with Nelson. We talked about how memory techniques can be used by those who have aphantasia, the importance of internal memory, and that memory uses all your senses. Go to this episode show notes to see any resources Nelson mentioned during our episode. And lastly, subscribe to Simple Questions Podcast to get notified when our latest episodes are released. Thank you for listening, and remember to keep asking questions.