Boost Your Brain (21 page)

By the time my presentation rolled around, they’d also completed two rounds of “speed cards,” memorizing as many cards as they could in five minutes. As we dispersed for lunch, event organizer Tony Dottino read off the results of the morning’s contests. Dellis had come out ahead in the names-and-faces and poetry contests and had even set a record in speed numbers, reeling off 303 random digits in perfect order. In speed cards, eight mental athletes—Dellis included—had memorized an entire deck of cards in five minutes or less.

Rather amazing. And yet, if you’d gone around the room and asked, it’s likely that none of the competitors would claim to have been born with memories that were particularly noteworthy. Dellis says his memory before starting to train as a mental athlete was “a bit below average.” In part, he blames his once-poor recall on his education in physics, a discipline that requires intense focus on a limited area of interest. “I would be so focused on that one thing that other things just flew into my head and out the other ear, so I was never particularly good at remembering anything, not even numbers,” says Dellis. He’s being modest, of course, but there is truth to what he says.

In fact, I have no doubt that nearly all the mental athletes competing that day had fairly average memories before they started their training. And most—like nearly everyone I meet—probably mistakenly believed memory to be an innate quality rather than something that can be taught. Good memory or bad, you either have it or you don’t, right?

Wrong, actually. As Dellis and other memory champs have proven, memory is a skill that can be vastly improved with practice. Before he stumbled upon an article about the memory championships in 2008, Dellis hadn’t really considered that he could one day have a record-breaking memory. But listening to those who were already winning memory competitions convinced him to try it. “They were all saying the same thing, which was that anybody can do this,” says Dellis, who bought an audio book on the topic and started honing his memory skills. Almost instantly, he says, “I saw how amazing it worked.”

Dellis might have launched his bid for the championships right then but an employment offer shifted him back into workaday mode, with no time to seriously train. It wasn’t until 2009, and the death of his grandmother from Alzheimer’s disease, that Dellis tackled the task with vigor. Suddenly, having a fantastic memory seemed more important than ever. “That’s when I started really training every day,” says Dellis, whose laid-back style belies an intensely competitive streak.

That year he practiced one to two hours a day. By the time I met him in 2012 he was up to three to five hours a day. “Not because it takes that long to learn these techniques or to get good at them,” he explains. “It’s just, to win I had to make sure that I could do it very well.” An avid mountaineer—on the day of the competition he sported a T-shirt with the simple pronouncement, “Everest 2013”—Dellis stuck to an impressively rigorous exercise routine that included running and weight lifting, plus outdoor activities. He also worked on his diet, ditching junk food and focusing on healthy nutrition.

The training, of course, paid off. After I ceded the stage on that day in March, Dellis prevailed in the championship rounds—in part by memorizing two full decks of cards—and was crowned U.S.A. Memory Champion. But Dellis says he’s reaping more rewards than just a sleek trophy or the bragging rights that come with the title. “I didn’t really realize it back then but before I started training I was so sluggish,” he says. “Of course my memory has improved but there are a lot of bigger things in my head that have improved. I feel more on point with everything I do.”

You’re no doubt wondering, by this point, how he did it. There are actually a host of different techniques mnemonists use to overcome the limits we normally face when attempting to remember strings of items, such as numbers, names, or the order of a deck of cards. When he broke the record of the most digits recalled, Dellis used a technique that involves pairing numbers with images in his mind of people, actions, and objects.

To use the technique, Dellis first memorized a long list of numbers that he randomly assigned to people, objects, and actions. For example, 111 might be George Bush, 52 might be swimming, and 95 might be a garden hose. Committing the pairings to memory ahead of time, Dellis is able to use them when presented with any list of numbers, no matter the order. He simply “chunks” the list of numbers into strings of seven and then pictures in his mind the person assigned to the first three, the action assigned to the second two, and the object assigned to the last two numbers.

But there’s one more important piece to this technique: the “memory palace,” a concept fascinatingly detailed by reporter Joshua Foer, who transformed himself into a mental athlete and memory champion and detailed the effort in his book
Moonwalking with Einstein
. The memory palace is simply a physical location so familiar to you that you can walk through it in your mind with ease. To memorize numbers, Dellis combines his person, object, and action technique with the memory palace, mentally walking through a location and depositing the memorized items as he goes.

When he’s ready to recall the items, he simply walks through the location again “picking up” the images as he goes. It’s the “walking through” a scene in our minds, of course, that helps aid our memories. Instead of picking images out of thin air, we’re finding them in a given location, right where we left them.

For his win that day in March, for example, Dellis translated 0093495 as follows:

009 = Olivia Newton-John

34 = dunking

95 = a helmet

Putting them together, Dellis envisioned Olivia Newton-John performing a slam dunk with a helmet. He placed that image in the first location in his memory palace, which in this case happened to be the porch of his house.

To remember the next string of numbers, 7790141, Dellis created an image of soccer star Steven Gerrard (779) swinging an ax (01) through a sheet of paper (41). That image he left at the foot of the stairs. He proceeded to remember his long strings of numbers and deposited them around the home until he’d committed to memory a whopping 303 numbers.

Dellis thinks he still has room for improvement—and I agree. Not long after the competition he was back at work, this time enhancing his number system so he could remember strings of eight at a time and hoping to improve his memory of a deck of cards with just under sixty seconds to less than thirty seconds.

Can he do it? With enough practice, yes, I believe he can. Could you do it? Yes, provided you devoted the same time and attention to it. After just a few minutes of training with Dellis—and practice on my own—I’m now able to memorize a deck of cards, a task I would not have considered attempting just a few years ago.

Your Memory In Action

You’re off to your niece’s fifth birthday party, a family barbeque held in her parents’ backyard. When you arrive, you’re greeted with a hug from the birthday girl and you comment on her adorable pink dress. You follow her to the backyard and wave hello to friends as you go. As you walk, you can smell burgers cooking on the grill and hear the squeals of kids playing tag.

Each of these different sensory experiences is filed in a different place in your brain, without you ever thinking about it. Later you may retrieve all or part of them, intentionally or involuntarily. The smell of burgers, for example, might one day bring you back to that afternoon in the yard. But unless something really noteworthy happened—a clown jumped out of a three-foot-tall cake, for example—you might retain no more than an impression of the day or a fleeting fragment of a memory. If something memorable did happen, you’ll likely retain more of the details of that afternoon. That’s because your hippocampus will have decided that, of all the information you receive each day,
that
information was worthy of remembering.

Cognitive stimulation is associated with a boost in the size of hippocampus and cortex. The more you practice memorization skills, take on challenging new hobbies, and learn new information, the more you will build a bigger brain. For optimal brain growth, I recommend fifteen to twenty minutes of memorization practice five days a week, plus one hour a week of a brain super challenge (such as memorizing a deck of cards).

What Makes Us Remember?

You will soon incorporate memory practice into your daily life as part of your twelve-week plan to grow your brain. But before you do, it’s helpful to understand some factors that affect the making of memories.

Information that’s tied to emotion, for starters, gets etched more deeply than information not tied to emotion, and thus is more likely to be stored long term. So, if you watched news coverage of a bridge collapse or other tragedy, for example, and felt helpless or deeply sad about the situation, you’re more likely to remember it than, say, a less visceral news item you saw on the same day.

Your hippocampus also remembers information it deems particularly relevant to you or particularly unusual. That makes sense, if you think of it in terms of evolution. A deer walking in the woods can’t pay too much attention to every squirrel it sees. It wouldn’t be able to function. But the deer
must
take note of predators for its own survival. So while a squirrel might not register, a strange shadow or the sound of a growl might. For early humans, survival often boiled down to basic matters, such as getting food, procreating, or finding shelter. Today, survival may mean a wide range of things, from success in business, to social skills, to complex decision making in political situations. What we deem memorable, then, has changed as well.

Thinking in the Digital Age

If you sometimes find it hard to think clearly, join the club. In the digital age, when we’re bombarded with information at every turn, many people find it extremely difficult to avoid distractions.

Most of us are just victims of too many stimuli. With so much vying for our attention, we’ve become adept at skimming and rusty when it comes to reading deeply, listening intently, and staying focused. What’s more, our wired lives make memorization a relic of a distant day. We’re rarely required to commit a phone number to memory or hold driving directions in our heads. And why bother remembering facts and figures when we have access to the Internet from the phones we carry with us everywhere?

In part, it may be a fair trade. I, for one, wouldn’t want to revert to the days I had to drive to a medical library and flip through paper journals to research other experts’ work. But we still don’t know what the ultimate cost will be. I suspect we’ll find that the hippocampus suffers as a result of this shift brought on by technology. That’s because to skim material you primarily rely on your frontal lobes, not your hippocampus. In-depth learning, on the other hand, requires the work of the frontal lobes
and
the hippocampus. As we skim more and memorize less, we’ll likely find our hippocampi shrinking.

That’s alarming, for reasons you already know. Having a healthy hippocampus is critical for enhanced brain function today and reducing the risk of dementia tomorrow—one more argument for spending a little time each day reading deeply or practicing memorization.

Of course, not all the information your hippocampus receives will be stored in a retrievable way. Some will be held only for a short time in your memory. If you’re making a plan to meet someone next month, you will remember the date and time for just long enough to enter it into your calendar. Unless it’s really critical to your success in some way, once it’s written down, you’ll promptly forget it.

Some information is worth keeping; most is not. You may remember quite clearly the sights and sounds of your wedding day, but you probably won’t remember much about a day three months before or after you walked down the aisle. Why not? It wasn’t that your hippocampus took the day off. It received plenty of information on those days, too. But it channeled to the cortex only those things it deemed worthy of the effort. Hence, the image of your spouse standing before you and saying “I do” likely will make it to your cortex for long-term storage, but the image of you sitting in your car at a stoplight three weeks before the big day will not (unless, of course, your car is rear-ended by a semi at that moment and you’re rushed to the hospital, all of which would likely make the long-term memory cut).

The Technology Gap?

Why is it that downloading an app on an iPhone is so easy that my eight-year-old daughter Nora can do it but so hard that her grandfather would find it too puzzling to master?

It’s not that older brains aren’t able to understand technology, although that’s a common misconception. In fact, difficulty with technology—whether it’s surfing the web, creating a spreadsheet, or programming a DVR—has more to do with declines in learning speed than the actual technology itself. As we age, atrophy in the frontal lobes makes learning certain new tasks harder. Older people may have to work more than their younger peers to learn to cook a complex meal or navigate in a new city. But, as you’ll remember from chapter 2, their absolute ability typically doesn’t diminish. With time, and persistence, a cognitively healthy older person should be able to master any new task.