The Memory Palace Revisited (with Nelson Dellis)

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 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,

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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com,