How to Train Your Memory, According to a Six-Time Memory Champion

Can memory be trained? Six-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis says the answer is yes. He explains simple techniques to help people strengthen recall, focus and confidence in everyday life.

Dellis is a memory coach, author, speaker and one of the world’s top competitive memorizers. Inspired by his grandmother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, he began training his memory in 2009 and later founded Climb For Memory, a nonprofit that raises awareness and funds for Alzheimer’s research through mountain climbing.

In this conversation with Being Patient’s founder Deborah Kan, Dellis explains how memory techniques work, such as turning information into vivid images and linking items together through stories. He shares practical tips for remembering names, lists and numbers, and discusses the role of practice, attention and repetition in moving information from short-term recall to longer-term memory. Dellis also discusses how technology and artificial intelligence may be changing the way people use their memories, and why memory remains closely tied to identity, storytelling, and daily life.

Being Patient: I have typically never been able to remember people’s names or faces. Is that something that is controllable that I can improve?

Nelson Dellis: Yeah. And I was surprised to find that out as well. I’d always thought that you kind of just had what you had, whether it was good, or bad, or average. And sure, there were little tricks maybe you learned in school to memorize this fact or this list of things, or anatomy, or whatnot. But that was kind of like a one-off. It wasn’t actually improving your brain. It was just a little trick once in a while. But that’s not the case. 

I had a hard time believing that for myself until I threw myself into techniques and memory training and memory competitions, where I discovered that it is a trainable skill and that no matter who you are, whatever you think about your memory, you can improve it. We all have this capacity latent within us to have an amazing memory.

Being Patient: Before we go into what the technique is, tell me a little bit about your personal story and how you got into this.

Dellis: Yeah, I did not have it on my bingo card to be a six-time champion. I don’t think I ever would have believed that. If somebody told me at a young age that I was going to be that, I would have laughed. But it’s something that just kind of came into my life — being aware of my mind and memory — because of my grandmother. 

She passed away from Alzheimer’s and had been deteriorating for a number of years before that. Watching that, and then, of course, losing her kind of set this inspiration inside of me to do something about my mind. Not that it was bad at the time. I was in my 20s, very young and spry, but I didn’t want to end up like that. And I was curious if there was anything I could be doing now, at that age, such that I’d be setting up my brain for a longer cognitive life, health-wise. 

That’s when I discovered memory techniques. And I was like, that’s interesting. I’ve never heard of that, that you could train your memory. It feels like a superpower, honestly, when you tap into it. And the fact that you can develop that superpower and make it even stronger, you just can’t stop once you learn how to do it. And it’s crazy that it’s just always there. It wasn’t really something you learned. It’s a different way of thinking, honestly. And once you learn how to think that way, it just becomes the way you think about everything in the future.

“It feels like a superpower, honestly, when you tap into it. And the fact that you can develop that superpower and make it even stronger, you just can’t stop once you learn how to do it.”

Being Patient: Have you taken cognitive tests? Since learning these techniques, have your memory scores or cognitive assessment results — such as executive function or other measures — improved? Obviously your memory has improved because you’ve learned all these techniques, but I’m wondering how that resonates — if you were to have a cognitive assessment.

Dellis: Yeah, there’s a lot anecdotally that I would say I agree with — that just because I’ve improved my memory, a lot of other facets of my cognition have improved as well. 

I don’t want to advertise that I’m some superhuman machine now just because I did that. That’s not the case. I definitely mess up and have brain farts and lapses like the rest of us. But I have more control over my mind. And that, I think, is the most powerful thing, because if I’m lacking in one area, I feel like I know what I can do to elevate it. Knowing when you can train one aspect of your cognition to transform your brain, you believe that you can do that for anything with your mind.

Being Patient: That’s a segue into my next question, you’ve climbed Everest four times. Not many people do that at all. So I’m just wondering about that relationship — this new skill that you’ve learned, that training, and your life as a mountaineer. Do those two things intersect anywhere?

Dellis: Yeah, I think they do. It’s probably not a coincidence that I got into both things, mountaineering and memory, at the same time. I was obviously very interested in pushing myself to the limits of both, mentally and physically, to see what’s possible.

It’s interesting — when I first started mountaineering, you just think you’re physically climbing a mountain. It’s all physical. But I would argue, and I think a lot of mountaineers would agree with me, that it’s probably more mental than anything else. You spend a lot of time in your head dealing with the elements, fighting your thoughts through these long periods of tedious, step-by-step progress up a mountain that’s not fun to be at — in terms of, it hurts, it’s cold, it’s difficult to breathe, all that stuff. I really like mountaineering for that reason, that you also have to dig deep into your own mind to take that next step and get to the next camp and so on.

Being Patient: This topic has been on my mind since I read a book called Moonwalking with Einstein by a journalist who actually taught himself mnemonics, which is the ability to learn long sequences of information at a time. What I learned from that book is that anything that’s more shocking is implanted in our memory. So a lot of these people have these techniques where they’re memorizing visual alphabets of outrageous things to symbolize A, B, C, and that becomes an imprint of their mind. So it’s easier to remember those shocking things. Is that the technique that you learned?

Dellis: Yeah, there’s a collection of different approaches to how to memorize specific things. But they all stem from that principle idea that our brains remember certain things better than others. And if you understand that, then really all memory techniques are finding a way to take the complicated stuff that is in our daily life — names, numbers, instructions, abstract concepts, whatever — and turning it into the things that we know our brain likes. That is, pictures — pictures that have meaning and association to things that are filled with emotion and sensory information. Things that are exaggerated, over the top, grotesque, silly. Those are the things that we remember. Our brains are wired to remember that. 

I personally believe it all comes back to the idea that we are, as a species, storytellers. And for thousands of years, that’s how we have survived — by sharing and spreading our own stories to preserve our culture, to create songs and poems and oral tradition. And I think that’s just how our brains are hooked in to survive. 

That’s essentially what memory techniques are: you’re taking the boring, the mundane, and giving it life through this mental story. Ultimately we’re just turning things into pictures that are easy to visualize, that are titillating our senses. And we each have different interests and things we find funny or not, so you kind of have to develop it for yourself. But generally, those shocking, out-of-the-norm images — if you can find a way to turn complicated information into that, you’re going to remember it better.

Being Patient: how do I do it? Can you take me through maybe one of those techniques that we can do together right now?

Dellis: Sure. Yeah, we can start very basic, with just memorizing a list of, say, five things. This would be a very common thing that might have to happen where they have to go to the grocery store and pick up five things. 

There’s a few approaches. With a grocery list, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you have the order. You can go through the aisles however you want, as long as you come home with the five things. So we can use a technique called the linking method, or another word for it is the story method. And it dovetails nicely into what I just explained: that we remember stories better. 

A simple way to memorize a sequence of things, like a grocery list, is to come up with pictures for the individual items, and string them together with a narrative. And again, tapping into making it silly, over the top — the more you can do that, exaggerate it, the better. Because again, in your mind’s eye, you’re making it something that pops out from the everyday thing. If it’s something boring and drab, what makes it stand apart? But if you make it something that’s colorful and stinky or sexual — that’s the stuff that we can’t forget oftentimes. 

If you think about your own life, some of the most memorable moments will have some of those components to it: something emotional, something out of the norm, something you don’t typically do. Those are the things we remember. 

Let’s just make a list here. Let’s say you needed to get broccoli as the first thing on your list. So you start your story: there’s a big stalk of broccoli. You can give it a face, give it human qualities. There’s a broccoli just walking around with a goofy face. The next thing you need to picture or pick up from the grocery store maybe is a gallon of milk. So imagine that this broccoli now picks up a gallon of milk and just starts bathing himself in this white liquid. This broccoli’s just rubbing the milk all over him. It’s kind of weird. Maybe it’s erotic and maybe some sexy music plays in the background or something. But you got the broccoli pouring milk on itself. 

Next, let’s say we got to pick up some bread. So after he takes a shower, this broccoli now is starving. So it goes and makes itself a sandwich. And now you’re picturing this broccoli munching on a PB&J sandwich. So you got the broccoli pouring milk and now eating a sandwich made of bread. Let’s do two more things. Maybe you need some laundry detergent. You can think very linearly, like, okay, after he eats a sandwich, he goes to clean his clothes and he’s pouring laundry detergent in there. 

But let’s take it further, because the weirder it gets, the better. Imagine he’s just suicidal. He doesn’t want to live anymore because he’s just broccoli and it sucks to be broccoli. And he’s just going to drink all of this laundry detergent to end his days. That’s a pretty sad, emotional thing, but that’s the stuff you remember. And in your mind — you don’t have to share it; we’re sharing it here — but the weirder it is, the better. 

Ice cream. He finds himself passed out on the floor—it didn’t do the job. He wakes up and suddenly, to make himself feel better, he’s just gonna go get a gallon of ice cream and just eat it to cheer himself up. So you’re at the grocery store and you’re like, what was that list? And you just think of, okay, well, my little story.

Being Patient: Okay, wait, let me do it. Okay: broccoli, milk, bread, laundry detergent, ice cream.

Dellis: Ice cream, exactly. Yeah. And you can continue that process. Five things isn’t too challenging, but that works if you extend it to 10, to 15, to 20. And at memory competitions, we do lists of things that go up to the hundreds of things using a method like that.

Being Patient: Doesn’t it take a long time to build these sequences in our brains? Let’s say you’re going to memorize 100 things. Is it instantaneous? I guess in a memory competition, they’re giving you words that you have to remember. So you’re narrating in your mind these outrageous narratives, stories that are connected, right?

Dellis: Yep. And it’s time. So when I first did it, I was like, “Oh man, how do the top people put so many images together in such a short amount of time?” Just a few minutes, hundreds of things. And at first, maybe I could do 10, 20 things, because I was very slow. But with practice — just like training for a marathon or training to play the piano — you start off slow, clunky, awkward, and then you develop the skill, the strategies that optimize it. And then you get faster. And then you can get to a point where you can do those grocery store item lists in just a few seconds. And everybody can get to that. That’s where the practice comes in.

Being Patient: How important is it that it’s a narrative? Do they need to be joined together into a narrative?

Dellis: The reason for connecting them into a story is so that you remember them as the list — like they are chained together. That’s why it’s called the linking method. Because if you imagine a chain link — like a link of chains — they’re unbreakable. They come together. 

And usually, when you want to remember a list, you don’t want to remember part of it, you want to remember the whole thing. And so if you don’t have that connective tissue, then potentially some of those items could get lost. The story is what holds it together; it’s the thread that connects it all.

Being Patient: Okay, so what was your greatest achievement as a USA champion six times? What was the longest sequence that you’ve been able to remember?

Dellis: At World Championships, they have these marathon events where you get an hour to memorize as many digits as possible. And then there’s a separate event where you have to memorize as many playing cards as possible. And so in that hour — that’s probably the most I ever did — I did 20 decks of cards and I think I attempted a 2,000-digit number. I ended up making some errors, so my score was like 1,500 to 1,600. But in practice, I’ve done 2,000 digits in that hour.

Being Patient: So, when you’re doing digits, is that an alphabet in your mind that’s outrageous? Is that how you do it? Rather than stringing a narrative together? Or is there a narrative within those digits?

Dellis: The basic process is the same: come up with a picture for the numbers and connect them all to very emotional stories, basically. There’s a little more to it than that. And especially with numbers — if you think about what we just did with the grocery list, milk, broccoli, you can picture it immediately. It’s a simple noun in our native language. But if I were to say a pair of digits like 67 or 35, that doesn’t necessarily evoke the similar kind of obvious image. 

What a lot of memory athletes will do is create what’s called a number system, where pairs of digits or even triplets of digits will be pre-decided as an image. And there’s a whole system of how to decide, come up with that list of things that you learn. You train it so much that when you see any two- or three-digit number, you already have a broccoli, a laundry detergent, or whatever it may be. And so you look at those numbers and you just, like the story, create your own story, but now out of the pictures that represent the numbers.

Being Patient: How can we remember names? 

Dellis: There was a time when I was terrible at names, but I trained myself out of that hole. And I think anybody can do that. The way you go about it — again, same principles. You have a piece of information, that’s the name, and in this case it’s associated with somebody. It belongs to the person you’re staring at or shaking their hand or meeting, whatever. And so you want to anchor it or link it to that person, such that every time you see that person or hear about that person, the name is attached, or that image is attached to them. 

The process that I go through when I meet somebody is, I’m looking at them in the face, usually in the eyes, but I’m looking at them, trying to study them and get a sense of who they are and what they’re about, their vibe. So I usually choose a feature on their face, something that I notice, whether it’s their blue eyes or their big nose or their beard or a dimple or a mole, whatever. And then when I get their name, I have this word, I turn it into a picture. So for a name, that could be, maybe you know somebody with that name, you think of a celebrity or a character from a TV show or your favorite book, whatever. 

If not, if you don’t know anybody, then maybe you can break the name down into something it sounds like, or parts of the name sound like. So, Nelson, for example, let’s say Nelson Mandela is what comes to mind for my name. Obviously, I have nothing to do with Nelson Mandela, but that’s a picture that you can hold in your mind if you know what Nelson Mandela looked like. He’s from South Africa, he’s kind of got the gray hair, older man. Next, you would take that image and then attach it to that feature that you chose about the person that you noticed. So let’s say you choose my beard. 

Now all your job is to connect that into a story again. So how do I make something weird, Nelson Mandela and my beard? And it could be as simple as just picture him, a little miniature version, kind of stuck to my beard. And you can make a whole story about how he’s trying to fight his way back to South Africa and he’s got to travel through the bush of my beard. And you’re thinking Africa, the bush. You can make all sorts of associations, even if they don’t make sense. The weirder they are, the better they stick. 

So the idea is that next time you see me, it’s not that you’re going to be thinking about my name — you notice the same feature or similar feature, and then the name or the image will be attached to it, which gives you the name.

“The weirder they are, the better they stick.”

Being Patient: So tell me, Nelson, a little bit about short-term versus long-term, because long-term memory stays with us, right? It’s kind of locked in. Do these techniques sharpen short-term, or is it putting short-term into long-term?

Dellis: What we’ve been practicing here, or talking about, is what’s called declarative memory, and that’s where you are finding things in your mind to declare them — kind of like a lookup. Then there’s procedural memory, which is what you’re talking about, essentially long-term memory. Usually when you say something’s in your long-term memory, you don’t really have to think about it. It just is there. You’ve studied it so much, you’ve used it so much, it just comes out of you like a procedure. You don’t have to look it up, it just comes out. 

Think of you trying to name a family member. My sister’s name is Jennifer. I did not have to look that up. I know that name inside and out. My sister’s been in my life for my whole life. So that is procedural. Or think about something you do, muscle memory. Maybe you play the piano, maybe you can do some skill, you knit, you cook a certain way. Sometimes you don’t even think about it, you just do it. That’s memory. You’re remembering something when you do that, but there’s no active process to it. It’s in your long-term, buried, deep muscle memory. 

How do you get the short-term to that? Well, that takes rehearsal and review, many, many times. And that’s just, unfortunately, how our brain works, because our brain has to filter out so much noise. You hear about these people who remember everything about their lives. And while it may sound kind of fantastic, and what a superpower, I would imagine it also to be a curse, because there’s nothing that gets filtered out. Everything gets remembered. And the reason we do forget is so that we don’t have to remember everything. So if you want to get things into your long-term memory, you have to review. That’s just how our brain was designed. 

There’s really three steps to memorizing. The first is to come up with a picture, which we talked about. The second is to anchor it or link it, which we also talked about. And that gets the information in your mind really quickly, to a place where it can be declared, or that declarative memory. To get it to that procedural point, you have to rehearse it, go through it. And that takes time and practice and rehearsal. It’s an active process. But when you have the information organized in your mind in a structured way that’s easy to review with memory techniques, then it’s not a problem to rehearse these things and go through them so that they get into your long-term memory. 

For example, in a memory competition when I’m memorizing cards, I’m just memorizing them quickly. But if I don’t think about them, say for a week, I won’t remember them. But if I did review them — and what I mean by review is not by looking at them again, I mean by going through them in my memory palace, this structured way that I have them up there — then I can remember them forever. All I have to do is just go visit them in my mind. And the more I do that, the more it will eventually get into my long-term memory. So memory techniques are great for getting information in your mind. And once you have it in there, structured, you can do whatever you want with it to get it into your long-term memory.

Being Patient: Does using this type of memory technique and increasing ability to recall, does this, in turn, result in regeneration or an increase of brain cells?

Dellis: Yeah, there’s a couple things to talk about on that side. One is, yes, there’s actual growth in your hippocampus when you use your memory and train your memory. There are a few research results and findings out there that have shown that. 

One famous study is with cab drivers in London. They study for this exam called “The Knowledge,” where they have to study the whole map of London so that they can navigate through it. And it’s a pretty exhaustive test. There’s no grid system in London. It’s just all sorts of weird English, fancy little quirky names of streets, and they all are intertwining, and you just got to learn them. So when they study that, they did a study on them that showed that parts of their brain actually grew in size when they did that. There’s also research that shows that people who have larger-than-average hippocampi don’t get Alzheimer’s, or will get it much later. So it is an active process to stave things off. 

The other thing I wanted to talk about was this idea of a cognitive reserve, which is a little less tangible than actually creating actual matter in your brain or more cells. But it’s building these connections through training your mind. And memory training is just one of those cognitive abilities that can build your cognitive reserves. But a lot of neuroscientists will talk about this idea of cognitive reserve — as you age, having more of that will protect you, or prevent you from getting dementia.

Being Patient: I just want to talk a little bit about changes in technology, AI. What’s happening as technology evolves? Now AI — what’s that doing to our memory? Do we know?

Dellis: Yeah, I think it’s emerging more and more that it’s not necessarily doing much for our brains. And it kind of makes sense when you compare it to us not needing to look at maps anymore because of GPS, or even further back, not needing to remember phone numbers because we have them all stored on our devices — before we had to type them in with our fingers, or even further back, rotate our dials. Another example before that is calculations. We had the calculator come into schools. Before that, people were doing things in their mind, more on paper. And calculators introduced — you don’t have to do that simple arithmetic anymore. And people’s ability to do it in their mind goes away. 

You could argue if that’s good or bad. Even with the telephone numbers — what’s the big deal? I have all my phone numbers here, hundreds of them. I don’t have to remember them, I can remember other stuff instead. Cool, I get that argument. 

But there’s something with AI that isn’t just so narrow of a sliver of our cognitive reach — it’s threatening everything all at once. And if you can notice that our brains do decline when we stop using it for a certain task, then if we’re talking about something that can pretty much do almost all, and in the future probably all of it — our cognitive thinking, or outsource our thinking — then that scares me to death. That we’re just going to be these dumb — I keep thinking of that movie, “Idiocracy.” I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it, where in the future it’s just everybody’s just dumb because they don’t use their brains anymore. I feel like that’s what’s going to happen. Maybe AI will take care of us, and it really doesn’t matter, but we’re losing an element of what it means to be human in that process. 

Especially memory, watching my grandmother lose her memory. She was such a storyteller. So to see that kind of disappear — of course, she still had the elements of who she was and loved the same. But it was a big part of who she was. And I think that’s the experience for everybody: that memory is so closely tied to our humanity. And so when we don’t use it, we’re losing a fraction of that. 

And if we are truly never using our memories anymore, then what are we doing here? Those stories that are carried on through our lives that connect us to people — if we’re not remembering those, we have them all stored on digital files, in some digital brain. What are we anymore? And what’s the point of being human?

“I think that’s the experience for everybody: that memory is so closely tied to our humanity. And so when we don’t use it, we’re losing a fraction of that. “

Being Patient: So, Nelson, I want people to know how they find out more. I know that you founded a nonprofit called Climb for Memory, which raises money for Alzheimer’s disease research. How do people get a hold of you? 

Dellis: There are many different ways to learn about this stuff or reach out to me. A great place to start is just my website, nelsondellis.com. All of my content and information is over there. I’m pretty active on YouTube, sharing a bunch of content videos on fun techniques, fun little entryways to memory and learning about memory techniques. I’ve written a couple of books. “Remember It” is my first book. It’s a memory how-to book. I just wrote a book that came out in March called “Everyday Genius.” And it’s all about learning how to activate and tap into your inner genius through memory. That’s one of the skills you learn: mental math, intuition, creativity, all these different things that you can train.