[music]
V.O.: Balance. Balance. Balance. Balance. Balance.
[music]
V.O.: Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three.
Two. One.
Yay!
C.H.: Let me pull out my mic real quick.
Wow, that was awesome. OK. So, we don't know
that much about memory, but what we do know
is that if I were to start reading off
a list of random words, you would only be
able to memorize about four of those things. And
then, if we wait twenty to thirty seconds, and
talk about anything else, you're only gonna remember about
two, or one, or none.
We kind of know that, right. Almost every person
I've met has told me, I have a really
bad memory. So that's understood. But at the same
time, if I walk up to anybody in this
room and I ask how to get to the
restroom, you could probably tell me. And you could
probably tell me with, like, really good detail.
Like, walk out of that door. There's gonna be
the thing with the coffee and the tea on
it. Just passed that is the registration desk. Take
a right. We're gonna pass the escalators. And we're
gonna have two sets of elevators. The one on
the left that only goes up to the seventeenth
floor, right. The one on the right starts at
the eighteenth floor. Keep going. We're gonna see the
women's restroom first and then the men's restroom.
We could all do that. So, on one hand,
we have a memory that completely sucks, but at
the same time we're able to, like, magically memorize
the blueprint of this building. And we don't even
try to do it. So has does that work?
What memory athletes do when they memorize gigantic lists
of words is, instead of using that short term
memory that we call it, or present memory, they
use their spatial memory. The same memory that we
use to memorize location. Which is what I tried
to do today. So we'll see how we did
with ten random words, which is more than double
the amount of words that we're supposed to be
able to memorize.
So the first word was me staring at my
watch, right. Anticipation. Does anyone remember what happened next?
Clown. Perfect. And then what? Yes. Clown and opera.
And we did a little trick there where we
combined the two, right. I was wearing the clown
thing and I was singing. Does anyone remember what
happened next when I came over to this side
of - yeah, I don't even need to remind
you. Perfect. Car.
And then what happened over here? Discovered an orange.
That's awesome. You guys are doing really well. After
that, what happened next? Sprint. Great. So I balanced
on my hands, and then we sprint back over
to the other side of the stage, and there
was a countdown playing on the speakers, right. And
then we ended up applause. That's excellent. That's the
entire method. That's what everybody uses to memorize thousands
and thousands and thousands of digits, or hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of random words. Is just by
visualizing it and using that spatial memory.
So now we're gonna see how to apply that
to a few different things. The first thing is
gonna be names, cause everybody has a hard time
with names. How many people do you think you've
met this conference? I think I've met maybe like
two hundred people. All right. I think there's fifteen
hundred people. I remember about half of those names,
and I was actually trying to remember them. So
it's probably a lot worse for some of you
who weren't trying.
When you first meet somebody, what you want to
do is actually listen to them tell you their
name. Cause a lot of the times when we're
meeting somebody, right, we're five seconds into the conversation
and we completely forgot their name. Well, our memories
actually aren't that bad. We just weren't paying attention
when we were introduced to them. So remember their
name.
The second thing you want to do is kick
in that spatial memory. So to do that, this
is Ryan. Everybody say hi Ryan. All right. So
you've got the first thing down. You've listened to
the name. Now you want to look at Ryan
and find something that stands out to you.
Now Ryan's got, obviously he's got his own look
going on, so he, he's given us a lot
of things to look at but first thing I
notice for him is his tattoo on his neck.
So if I want to remember Ryan, I'm gonna
look at that tattoo, and I'm gonna think of
a word that rhymes with the word Ryan. Something
that I can easily visualize, and then attach it
to that tattoo.
So Ryan, for me, makes me think of lion.
So I'm gonna imagine, coming up on Ryan's right-hand
size, a big lion running. He's got like a
bright-orange main, he's breathing hard. He jumps up in
the air and he bites Ryan in the neck
and just, like, rips off his tattoo, and he's
flailing it around. There's blood everywhere. The lion's like,
throwing the tattoo at you and you're super grossed
out. The most offensive you can make the image,
the better, because then it's gonna be more memorable.
So the next time we see Ryan, we'll immediately
notice his tattoo. We're gonna remember that crazy scene
of a lion ripping off his tattoo and throwing
it around the room, and then we'll be able
to connect that again with Ryan. Make sense? So
names are pretty easy. And I bet you all
can start doing that right now.
Let's move on to the next thing. And that
is memorizing a shuffled deck of playing cards. This
is, this is, the first thing that I started
getting interested in when I got into memory. It's
actually more, more useful than you think it is.
The reason you want to memorize cards is because
it's the only thing that you can memorize that
will actually impress your friends, for number one, the
second reason is because it teaches you everything you
need to know to compete in the world memory
competition. All the techniques that are important for that.
So, looking at a card, here we have the
seven of diamonds and the seven of hearts. The
reason why this is so difficult to memorize is
because they're just hard to visualize. These two cards
almost look exactly the same. If I wanted to
just close my eyes and try to use this
visual technique we've been talking about and I visualize
the seven of diamonds and I visualize the seven
of hearts, I'm probably still gonna forget it. It's
difficult.
So what the pros do is, instead of memorizing
cards, they memorize people. So the seven of diamonds,
for me, is Isaac Newton. The seven of hearts
is Einstein. So these guys are much easier to
memorize. They're completely different. You can imagine them interacting
with each other, doing different things, right.
So the next step is to think of a
person for every single card in the deck. That's
fifty-two people. And when I first heard this, I
almost stopped. Because that sounds like, I mean, I
gotta use my memory to do that, right. But
there's a technique, a trick, it's called mnemonic. And
mnemonics just take information that's available to you, that's
already right in front of your face, and uses
that information to remind you of the thing it
is that you want to remember.
So, looking at a card, we have two bits
of information. We have the value of the card,
so for, for, four of hearts, it's a four,
and then we have the suit of the card.
Just looking at those two things can remind us
of the person it is that we associated with
that card. So we'll go through the values really
quickly here. You'll reference these later I'm sure. But
every ace and every two in the deck is
an athlete. Doesn't matter what the suit is. Ace
of clubs, ace of spades, ace of diamonds. These
are all athletes. Ace is a male athlete. Two
is a female athlete.
Every three and four is an actor. Three is
a male actor, four is a female actor. Every
five and six is a controversial or sketchy person,
somebody that's done something that not everyone agrees with.
And these are people that you can think of.
Five is a male, six is a female. So
you might see a pattern. Every single odd card
in the deck is a male. Every single even
card in the deck is a female.
Seven and eight. These are people of, like, any
kind of science field. Physics, math, any scientist. Remember
my seven of diamonds, seven of hearts, had Isaac
Newton and Einstein. Again, seven's a male, eight's a
female. Nine and ten, these are people of power.
That can mean political power or super human powers.
Any of that stuff. And queen and king, this
is a couple. This could be a famous couple.
A couple you know. This could be you. Whatever.
And finally jack. There are four of these in
the deck, too. And these are all religious figures.
K.
The second thing. Suit. There are four suits we
have. Each of these are a specific type of
person. So a diamond is a rich person, or
a fancy person, or a shiny person. Think diamonds,
right. Shiny, fancy. Hearts, these are people you love.
This can be family, friends. Clubs, these are, like,
bad people. You can think strong, Arno - I
have, I use Arnold Schwarzenegger for one of my
club cards. Sylvester Stallone, another good example. Or people
who are just, like, bad at what they do.
Spades. This means funny. These can be comedians, friends,
joksters, or other things that are funny to you.
So taking those two things combined, now, we can
try to memorize three cards. So we have ace
of diamonds, jack of spades, and four of hearts.
So first thing we want to do is look
at the suit, right. You may not remember, but
ace is a male athlete. And diamonds is super
fancy, or extravagant or rich. So this, for me,
is Michael Jordan. And for the rest of my
life, this will always be Michael Jordon.
The next card we have is jack of spades.
Remember jack is a religious person, spades means funny.
So a funny religious person. The Dali Llama. Next
card is four of hearts. Remember four is a
female actor. Hearts is somebody you love. So it's
a female actor that I love. Well, we may
have all different opinions on this, but I'm married.
So this is my wife. Remember, this is just,
you can use whatever pictures you want. This is
just a reminder. So four of hearts is my
wife. She's not an actor. And she's putting a
Santa hat on my dog Baxter.
So now we have three very different images that
we need to memorize. And we could, if we
wanted to, build a story, like we did with
the words. And we already know you guys can
do that, cause we just did it, right. So
you can imagine there's a basketball court. Michael Jordon's
dribbling down the basketball court. He jumps up, slam
dunks the basketball and for, for whatever reason, the
Dali Llama is like, he's down below the basketball
hoop praying, and so the ball just hits him
in the back of the head, and boom, his
head hits the ground. There's blood everywhere. My dog
comes running out of the locker room. He's running
around in the blood. He's leaving footsteps all over
the ground. Loise is screaming. It's crazy, right.
So you won't forget that. And that's how you
would memorize three cards.
But there's actually a more popular technique of memorizing
when you have lots of things to memorize. So
we have to memorize fifty-two cards. So we're probably
gonna wanna use this. This is called the method
of Loki. Also known as the journey method or
the memory palace. Most people have heard of this.
The way this works is you take a location
that you're really, really familiar with. You're probably gonna
start with your house cause you're probably really familiar
with your house. And you imagine yourself walking from
room to room to room. So you would walk
through your front door into your bedroom, and here
you would place the first thing you want to
remember. So if it's Michael Jordon, you might see
him jumping off your bed and slam dunking into
your laundry basket. The important thing is to look
at everything in your room and imagine your memory
interacting with those things so it's firmly planted.
And then you go to the next room, say
the bathroom. You do the same thing here with
your second memory. So here we'd have Dali Llama.
Maybe he's in the shower and the Buddha's in
the sink. I don't know. You then leave the
bathroom. You walk into the living room. And here's
where you place your third memory. You look at
the TV, you look at the carpet, you look
at the couch, you imagine your memory interacting with
all of those things. And then you retrace your
steps from the beginning of the journey, and everything
will be right where you left it. So if
you're like me and you're from, I'm in Portland
now so I have a little bit more room,
but if you're coming from San Fransisco or even
here in Chicago, you're memory palace might look something
like this.
So I would actually recommend, and this is a
better method, is to go outside to make your
journey. Cause you have a lot more room this
way. So this is a run that I do
a couple times a week, and I've ran it
so many times that I could close my eyes
and run it and I have thirty-four locations that
I could place memories. And then I just start
my run over again and I go back through,
and they'll all be sitting there waiting for me.
And thirty-four doesn't seem like, like a ton, but
that's actually enough to memorize two shuffled decks of
playing cards. And I'm gonna explain how that works
right now.
Professional memory athletes need to memorize a lot of
stuff. And they don't want to be building journeys
that are like thousands and thousands and thousands of
locations long. So they're actually able to compress their
memories to take up less space. So if we,
instead of just coming up with a person for
each of our cards, we also come up with
an action and an action - for example, the
first card is Michael Jordon slam dunking a basketball,
the second card is the Dali Llama praying in
front of the Buddha. The third card is my
wife Loiussa putting a Santa hat on my dog
Baxter. We can then compress those three cards into
a single image, a single memory by taking the
person from the first card, Michael Jordon. The action
from the second card, praying. And the object from
the third card, which is, in this case, my
dog, and then we combine those into a single
image.
So we have Michael Jordon praying to my dog
Baxter. And the really, really, really great thing about
this technique, is not only have we compressed our
memories to take one third of the space that
they used to before, but we automatically get these
images that are extremely memorable, and we don't even
need to think about it. You know, I'm not
gonna forget Michael Jordon, like, on a, on a
mat in my bedroom praying to my dog who's
on my dog, like ripping up pillows, like. It's
very memorable and it's easy to retrace.
So that's good. If you want to get started,
the gift shop here, I checked actually has Chicago
themed gift cards, playing cards. So you can go
check those out. If you start getting quicker and
want to just have shuffled decks to practice on,
you can go to this url. It's just spitting
out shuffled decks of cards, and it'll time you.
This is also a GitHub repo that shows the,
the people that I use for these associations.
That may be a good starting point but it's,
it's pretty good to come up with your own
pictures so you actually remember them.
All right. So that was kind of intense. So
we're gonna take a quick thirty second break and
practice our memories. So, find a person to your
left or to your right, to front, to your
back, that you haven't met, and memorize their name.
And I'm gonna give you a quick reminder. Quick
reminder. Hold on. Hold on. Quick reminder. OK. Find
something on their face. Attach their name to that
something on their face and don't actually tell them
the image you create. That's important. Go.
OK. Time's up. Sit down. Time's up. Time's up.
Everybody back. Get it down. All right. Good job.
So does anybody remember this guy's name? Yes. Good.
I was hoping no one would get it and
I'd give you a prize but I don't have
enough prizes for everybody. OK.
Moving on. We're now going to memorize something that
is probably the hardest thing to memorize, but since
we've all learned how to memorize cards, it's not
as hard as it once was. We're going to
memorize numbers. This is definitely the hardest thing to
memorize, but the person who sets the world record
for this is able to memorize nine hundred and
thirty-seven random digits in fifteen minutes, which is four
credit cards a minute. Kind of amazing, right? Like
this guy can make bank at a restaurant.
So. Memorizing these sixteen digits isn't actually that difficult.
We're gonna use a system a lot like we
did for the cards, because numbers are basically impossible
to memorize, we're not gonna memorize numbers at all.
We're gonna memorize pictures instead of numbers.
So here's a grid I've made. You could do
the same exact thing. Each of these squares represents
a two digit number, from zero zero to ninety-nine.
It's your task to fill all of these squares
with different pictures that you can memorize every two-digit
number. So if you started with cards, like I
recommended, then there's no problem just using those images.
So numbers one through fifty-two can just be the
same images you used for your playing cards. So
now you're over halfway there. You're basically done. You
only have forty-eight more pictures you've gotta come up
with. Some of these are gonna be super obvious.
Like zero zero is a person favorite of mine.
This, every time I see it, I see a
set of eyeballs. So it's really easy to remember
that one. It could be eyeballs. It could be
sunglasses or goggles. You might imagine, like, Arnold Schwarzenegger
putting on shades.
So then we only have now forty-seven numbers left
that we need to memorize. And some of these
will have special meaning to you. So 1984, that's
the year I was born. So I imagine a
birthday cake with big bright candles, burning fire. 1974,
that's the year that the Rubik's cube came out,
and I really love the Rubik's cube so I'm
never gonna forget that. 1991 was the year that
the first episode of Doug aired, so I imagine
the Quail Man every time I see the number
ninety-one.
And, and, so that leaves with with now forty-four
more pictures that we need to come up with,
and none of these have any meaning to us
whatsoever, so we'll use another mnemonic to build pictures
and remind us of those pictures. And a mnemonic
for this is called the major system. The major
system is also known as the phonetic system. Because
each number from zero to nine is assigned a
phonetic sound. So zero is z or zeh. One
t, teh, teh. Two is n, neh, neh, neh.
Three is m. Or muh, muh, muh. Four is
R, ruh. Five is L, luh. Six is J.
Juh. Seven is K. Or keh, keh. Eight is
F, or feh, feh. And finally nine is P.
So. Those are all the phonetic sounds. So let's
break out a number real quick so we see
how this works. We'll grab a number, eighty-three. This
number we don't yet have a picture for. And
we'll apply the major system to give us a
picture and be able to remind us of that
picture later. So we take eight and we grab
the phonetic sound for the number eight, which is
F, and then we do the same with three,
so we have M. So some of you might
see FM and go, oh, FM radio. Well, that's
totally fine. So your picture now for eighty-three could
be an FM radio. And that's all you need
to remember that.
But you could also just start sticking in vowels,
things that aren't part of the major system, until
you make a word that makes sense to you.
So foam is the first word I found. And
this is a really good word cause it's extremely
visual. You can imagine being in your room and
just spraying foam all over the place. You're not
gonna forget that. But I kept searching just to
see if I could find something else. And I
found FIM. Does anyone know what FIM is?
No. FIM is not actually a word. But it
sounds like Vim. Now, remember this is the phonetic
system, so you're looking for things that sound similar,
not necessarily spelt the same. So eighty-three, for me,
is Vim. So I imagine, maybe, my beautiful color
scheme. Working on some Ruby. Just, basically sitting behind
the computer, it would be my memory for eighty-three.
So, we could take the major system and apply
it to all the rest of the pictures, until
eventually we have one hundred unique images that are
easy for us to recall, either by the major
system or they just have special meaning to us.
So now, memorizing a credit card number is just
like memorizing the cards. We go through and break
the number down into sets of two. So we
look at forty-four, we grab our image for forty-four.
We place it in the first room of our
memory palace.
We go to the next room. We grab the
image for eighty-five, we place that in the next
room. We then move over to maybe the living
room. We take the image for thirty-four, and we
put it in there. And then, again, we retrace
our steps to remember the number. And if you've
taken the time to create the person, action, and
objects that we did for the playing cards, then
the same exact compression can be used here too.
So you can memorize a binary number like this,
which is huge, in a single image. This is
one image. So when someone memorizes something like, you
know, fifty-thousand binary digits, it's not quite as impressive
when you realize this is a single image in
their memory palace. The way this words is you
can break it down, just like you might imagine.
So zero zero one is one. Zero one zero
is two. One one zero is six. One zero
one is five. One one one is seven, and
one zero zero is four. So we now we
have three two digit numbers, which can either be
three pictures or we could compress them, right, with
person from the first, second an action, and action
from the third into a single image.
Well, it's not as difficult as it sounds. So
I'm, I'm coming up on time, so I'm going
to give you something to read in the future,
and that is this book here. This is by
Dominic O'Brien, and he is the eight-time world memory
champion. So he really, really knows his stuff. He's
a horrible writer, but the techniques are, are, are
very good. So he's gonna talk about everything we
talked about today and then give a little, little
bit of advice and like practice problems for some
other techniques. But they all come from the same
technique of using your, your spatial memory.
Another book, if you're interested in competing, or just
learning more about how competitions work, this is a
very popular book that you may have already read.
It's Moonwalking With Einstein by Joshua Foer, and he
is a journalist that decided he'd start learning how
to memorize and he ended up just winning the
US Memory Championship, so it's, it's pretty impressive.
That's it. I'm Chris Hunt in real life and
on the internet. If you have any questions. Thank
you.