What Memory Champions Know That the Rest of Us Don’t

Deborah Kan is an award-winning journalist and founder of Being Patient. In this “Thought of the Week” column each Friday, she highlights one of the key stories shaping the future of brain science. 

Dear readers,

Around a decade ago, someone recommended the book Moonwalking with Einstein to me. The book follows Joshua Foer, a journalist who covered the US Memory Championships in 2005. He became so fascinated by the competitors that he decided to train for a year and enter himself, and then won the whole thing. What made the book impossible to put down was not the competition itself. It was the underlying question: What if the people who are extraordinary at memory are just ordinary people who learned something the rest of us were never taught? 

I honestly forgot about that question, but as many of you know because I write about it frequently, I’m terrible about remembering names and faces. My husband’s theory is that my multi-tasking abilities sometimes lead to extreme distraction. Last week, I had a conversation with Nelson Dellis, a six-time US Memory Champion who has also climbed Everest four times, and within about five minutes of talking to him, I realized I was closer to finding the answer to that question. 

Nelson was not born with a remarkable memory. He will tell you this himself. He had an average memory, grew up like the rest of us, had no particular gift, and did not have any of this on his radar until his grandmother died from Alzheimer’s in 2009. Watching her decline in those last years sent him down a research rabbit hole, and what he found there changed the trajectory of his life: The people winning memory championships were not savants. 

They were average people who had learned a set of techniques, trained them the way you’d train for a marathon, and gotten genuinely extraordinary results. The skill existed. It could be built. Nelson was competitive enough to place at a national level within a year of picking it up. That is not a small thing to absorb. For most of us walking around, frustrated with recalling names or finding our keys, our train of thought has been operating our whole lives on the assumption that we got what we got, and that’s that. 

Here’s three things that Nelson told me that stuck with me:

1. Your brain is not bad with names. It treats them as noise. Nelson explained why the primitive brain has no natural grip on an abstract string of letters attached to a face. The fix is not willpower. It is a format. He started to walk me through it, and I stopped him because I want you to hear the whole thing live. 
2. He said something about cognitive reserve that I was not expecting. It’s not a researcher’s answer, and not a false-hope answer either. He was careful about the uncertainty and specific about what he actually believes, and because of that carefulness, I trusted his opinion. If you have a parent with a diagnosis and you have wondered what any of this means for you, this part of the conversation is worth showing up for. 
3. He gave a number about multitasking that I couldn’t believe. I am leaving it there. The live talk will cover his full technique, including the specific thing he does every morning before his kids wake up, and we will be taking questions, so if you have one, bring it. I’m going to ask him to teach me something on the spot so you can watch whether it actually works.
   

Join us for a live talk with Nelson Dellis, Thursday, June 11 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET. Sign up here.

I hope to see you there. 

Deborah

P.S. Apologies to people who signed up for the previously scheduled talk with Nelson. Due to technical issues, we have now rescheduled it to June 11th.