(dramatic digital music)
- [Richard Feynman] You ask me if an ordinary person,
by studying hard, would get to be able
to imagine these things like I imagine them.
Of course. (dramatic digital music)
I was an ordinary person who studied hard.
(dramatic digital music) (voices whispering)
(heart beating)
(static flickering)
(easygoing rhythmic music)
- Yo, what's up, guys, and welcome back.
This is my very special guest, Mr. Nelson Dellis.
- Hello, guys.
- Nelson is a four-time Memory Champion.
Now what does that mean?
What is a Memory Champion, exactly?
- It's, I won a championship
where they test your memory, four times.
- And what's one of the hardest things
that you've had to do to test your memory?
'Cause a lot of people are thinkin',
"I mean, how hard could memory testing be?"
- Well, it can be pretty hard sometimes.
It's memorizing decks of cards for an hour,
or as many digits as you can for an hour.
- For an hour? - Yeah.
- How many digits can you memorize in an hour?
- About 2,000.
- 2,000 individual numbers?
- Yeah, think of like a 2,000 digit-long phone number.
- She better be worth it.
(Nelson laughs)
That's actually really great.
To somebody like me, who just got into this memory stuff,
and by the way, I found Nelson
through a documentary on Netflix right now.
What's that documentary called?
- "Memory Games."
- "Memory Games", he's featured in it,
and that's kinda how I found out about him.
He also has a YouTube channel,
where he teaches a lot of really cool memory hacks
and memory tricks to improve your memory,
not just for championship memory stuff,
just for everybody, which is why I wanted
to bring him on the channel, and feature him today.
What we're going to be learning with this chap over here
is first of all,
we're gonna learn how to create a Mind Palace.
And Mind Palace, it sounds fictitious.
You don't wanna be like, your friends ask,
and you be like, "Sorry, I gotta go to the Mind Palace."
And then you're just like,
it's nothin' weird like that, right?
- No, not at all, it's a very pleasant experience.
- So, in a nutshell, what's a Mind Palace?
- A Mind Palace is basically a place
that you know very well, that you mentally map in your mind,
and you walk through it mentally,
placing mnemonics for the things you'd like to memorize.
- Right, okay, and so by mnemonics, you mean like imagery?
- Imagery, associations, something memorable
to represent the thing you're trying to remember.
And you leave that in, like different rooms,
and locations in that place.
Now usually, that place, like for me,
I chose my home, which is the place that I know best,
and I also have another Mind Palace, which is my office,
another place that I know really well.
How hard is it to create a Mind Palace?
- Super easy, I mean,
our brains are really good
at remembering spatial information,
so think of especially the places that you see all day long.
Where you live, your bedroom, your office,
your way to work, those are Memory Palaces right there
waiting for you to just start using.
- Awesome, and that's something that you use
in absolutely everything you do in terms of memory, right?
Like almost everything?
- Almost everything, especially the things
that have a sequence to it, like a list-type thing,
or a deck of cards with order.
Memory Palace is amazing for keeping those orders preserved.
- And you won't look super crazy doing it,
this isn't Benedict Cumberbatch, you know,
goin' through his-- - Cumberbatch?
- Yeah, yeah, Jennifer Cumbersnitch.
Bandadar Bumblebutch, this isn't him goin' through his head,
and getting all crazy.
This is literally a place that you can just think about,
and get to, which I thought was really cool.
I always thought it was kinda fictitious
when I first heard about it,
so I'm really happy it was a real thing,
and I'm really happy
that it was actually quite easy to learn,
so we're gonna teach you guys
not only how to create your own Memory Palace,
which is awesome, also we're gonna teach you
how to create information
that you can store in that Memory Palace,
so you need the place,
and you need the things to put in the place,
and for that, we're gonna teach you a system called--
- Major System, it's basically a phonetic code
to help you remember numbers.
- So without any further ado,
Nelson's gonna take it away,
and he's going to explain to you,
first of all, how to create a Memory Palace,
if you've got a piece of paper, and a pencil,
you wanna take some notes, by all means,
and after that, he's gonna teach you how to create imagery
that you're gonna place in your Mind Palace.
Guys, check out Nelson's channel, it's linked below.
Let's get into learning this right now.
- All right, so let's talk about
our first Memory Palace together.
So, what I want you guys to do
is to maybe take a piece of paper, or just close your eyes,
and imagine you walking up to the front door
of your house or apartment,
or whichever place is comfortable for you.
Now imagine opening the doors, and scanning the room,
and what I want you to do
is choose three kind of locations around the room
that you could place an item in your mind, all right?
Once you have them, number them one, two, and three.
Now I'm gonna place some images for you,
and once you've chosen those three locations,
I want you to try and place the things
I'm about to explain on those locations.
They'll be a bit weird, that's the whole point of this.
The weirder, the better,
the more memorable they will be.
So I want you to picture, on the first location,
the famous magician, Houdini, and you're standing there,
and you hear this zoom, (air whooshing)
right by your ear, right?
So zoom, and it's near, by you, right,
and it's a car, and inside this car is Houdini,
so I want you to picture those, that image,
but those three key words: zoom, near, and car,
and just try to make it as weird as possible,
add Houdini to the mix, he's in the car,
he's zooming by you, really close to you,
maybe it's part of his magic trick,
death-defying stunt, whatever.
Then the next location is gonna be position number two
in your Memory Palace.
I want you to picture David Copperfield, okay?
He's next, and imagine he's sobbing into a tissue,
all right, he's so sad, whatever.
Maybe one of his illusions went horribly wrong, right,
he actually sawed someone in half,
but he's sobbing into a tissue,
and maybe he puts a leash around himself
and walks himself offstage.
Totally bizarre, but those key three words there
are sob, tissue, and leash,
and then finally, our last location,
position number three, I want you to picture David Blaine,
right, he's a man on the street,
doing some casual card tricks,
and I want you to picture that suddenly he soars,
right, he soars into the sky,
or the ceiling of this location,
up above, and he's floating.
He soars, and then he soars even higher,
and then you realize that he's playing a board game.
He pulls out a board game,
out of thin air, (game pieces clattering)
and he starts playing, you know,
moving some pieces around this game board.
All right, so for those three key words,
it's soar, soar again, and game,
so now, you have these images placed.
The way the Mind Palace works
is all you have to do is mentally go back
to that same pathway through the locations that you chose,
and the images should be there.
Now, typically, the images
should represent something meaningful,
and from what I told you,
it sounds like they were pretty random words, right?
But actually, they do represent something useful,
and in this case, they are the birthdays
of these three famous magicians.
So now that you have your Mind Palace mapped out,
I'm gonna show how those birth dates that I mentioned
actually translate into those words,
and that translation process
is what's called the Major System.
It's a way to turn
these complicated things to memorize, like numbers,
into things that are easy to memorize, like words.
Simple words, right?
Like zoom, near, soar, game, all those.
So, to learn how to translate between numbers and words,
we need to learn the code.
So here's what the list looks like.
Basically, each of the 10 digits,
zero through nine, represent a consonant sound.
So what you can do is with words,
whenever you hear a consonant in that word,
you know how to translate that back to a digit,
and so now, every time you look at a digit,
or a pair of digits, or triplets,
you can then create these words,
and the way the words are created
is you can fill in vowels anywhere you please,
just as long as it has the consonants
to represent the actual digits,
so let's take a look at each of the numbers
and the consonants that they represent.
So zero is gonna represent the Z, or suh sound.
Again, it's important to note that it's the sound,
not quite always the letter,
so this is a zuh, or a suh sound.
Right, which could be a Z, S, or a C, even, sometimes.
And the way you can remember that
is zero starts with a Z, that's zuh, suh, suh sound, right?
They're all very similar.
Now, one is the T, or a D sound.
Tuh, duh, right, they're very similar,
and the way you can remember that
is when you write a one, you do one downstroke,
and when you write a T or a D,
you also start with one downstroke.
Two is the letter N.
Two is the consonant N, so the unh sound, right,
and you can remember that
because the N has two downstrokes when you write it.
Three is an M, has three downstrokes,
or if you rotate the three on its side,
it looks like an M.
Four is the consonant sound R,
so the er sound, right, because four ends with the er sound.
Five is the letter L, okay?
And I like to remember that by holding up my left hand,
and making an L here, and I see my five fingers there,
so five, L, or ull sound.
Six is the juh, chuh, shuh sound,
they're all very similar as well.
It can be any of those, and I like to remember that
by saying, okay, a six kinda looks like a J,
kinda flipped upside down, it has that hook, right?
So that helps me remember that juh sound.
And then seven is a kuh, or a hard G, guh.
You could also use a Q
if you're gonna make it sound like a kuh, right?
All those sounds are wrapped in that seven,
and to remember that, I like to think of a capital K,
and you flip it on its side,
it looks like two sevens back-to-back, right?
To help you remember it's a seven.
Eight is the sound fuh, or vuh, and you can remember that
because a cursive F looks kinda like an eight,
and then finally, the last one is nine, that's a P or a B.
A puh or a buh sound, and that,
you know, if you flip a nine around, upside down,
flip it around, it looks like a P or a B.
So now that we have those sounds, right,
we can figure out what the words I made you memorize
correspond to in terms of digits.
Let's think back to our Mind Palace,
the first location we have: Houdini, right?
And what were those three key words
if you try to imagine that picture?
We had zoom, near, and car.
So zoom, remember, we're listening for consonant sounds,
so the Z is a zero, right?
The M is a 3, so we have zero, three.
Then we had near, which was an N and an R consonant.
That's two and a four, and then finally,
we had the last word, which was car,
which was a cuh, and an er sound.
All right, which is a seven, and a four,
so we have zero-three, two-four, 74,
which is March 24th, 1874, or Houdini's birthday.
For our second location, we had Copperfield,
right, remember he was sobbing into a tissue,
and he put a leash around himself
and walked him offstage, right?
So the three words were sob, tissue, and leash.
Let's translate it, sob, the suh sound, right, was zero.
B was a nine, so that's September, zero-nine,
and then we had tissue, okay, now remember,
tissue is spelled with two Ss in the middle,
but I'm going for sounds, consonant sounds.
All I hear is a tuh and a shuh sound, right?
So those two consonants translate to a one and a six,
so we have September 16th.
And then finally, the year is gonna be the last one,
which was leash, L is a five,
and then the shuh sound again is a six, so we have 1956.
So the last one is David Blaine, right?
He was on your last location in your Mind Palace,
and he was soaring, soaring, and then playing a game,
so let's translate those words.
Soar is S and an R, so zero and four.
Then we got another soar, so that's zero and four again,
so that's April 4th, and then finally,
we had the year, which was game.
So guh is a seven, and then M was three,
so 1973, that's it.
All right, so you've done your first Mind Palace,
you've memorized a few numbers, what do you do next?
So typically, a Memory Palace should be longer
than three locations, and that's the beauty of Mind Palaces,
is you can make them as long as you want,
depending on what you want to store there.
What I would recommend
is maybe continue going through your house,
and go through all the rooms, and each room,
maybe choose five spots around that room,
so you can imagine by the end
of you going through your whole house,
you're gonna have a lot of locations
where you can store a bunch of facts, and figures,
and numbers, and whatever you wanna store.
It's also important to remember
that every time you populate your Mind Palace with images,
the next time you use it, you may have conflicting images
from the previous time, so what also comes in handy too
is coming up with separate Mind Palaces
that you can cycle through,
and you can have them on the ready
for whatever you need to memorize on the fly.
For me, for example,
I have actually hundreds of Memory Palaces
that I cycle through to memorize cards, and numbers,
words, all these things.
You don't need to do that,
but it's nice to have a few on hand.
So one last challenge before I go,
why don't you try to memorize Chris's birthday,
and then in the comments,
leave what crazy image you came up with in your Mind Palace?
All right, here are the digits.
It's zero-three, two-two, eight-four.
So March 22nd, 1984.
Leave your crazy description in the comments below.
(Chris grunts)
Come back from your Mind Palace.
- I need to go back, they need me.
That was Nelson teaching the Mind Palace
and the Major System.
Guys, I am completely floored away by this method,
by this whole new thing
that actually has a lot to do with magic,
and has a lot to do with puzzle-solving and all this.
It's right up my alley.
We're gonna have Nelson as well on another video,
and the next video that we're gonna feature
is him teaching you how to remember
an entire deck of cards.
Not this one, because this one's in mnemonic stack.
This one, an entire deck of cards,
shuffled deck, it's the most insane thing you'll ever see,
a shuffled deck that you can memorize
just by lookin' at the cards,
and you know exactly where all those cards are.
And this is just the beginning,
so if you guys want to learn more of this stuff,
check out Nelson's channel, I linked it below.
Nelson, any last words you wanna help our audience with
on their journey to becoming memory athletes?
- Yeah, I mean, the main thing is no matter how bad
you think your memory is,
it actually isn't as bad as you think.
With these techniques, anybody can be a Memory Champion,
shouldn't be tellin' 'em that, but yeah.
- (laughs) You're breeding competition.
- Yeah, exactly.
- All right, guys, thanks for watching,
check out Nelson's channel,
and we'll see you on the next video, peace.
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