All right, guys. In this video, I'm going to reveal some secrets. There used to be a show on TV
where a magician revealed how other magicians did their magic tricks, and I love that show. Well,
here is something, I'm going to reveal how some of the memory experts do their memory demonstrations.
I'll pick a couple different memory demos here that I've seen done on TV. One I saw done by
Harry Lorayne. Harry Lorayne was a memory expert. He lived to be in his 90s. In the 1980s, he was
on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson 27 times. One of those times he was on The Tonight Show,
he handed Johnny Carson a magazine. He said, "Pick a page," and Johnny Carson picked a random page.
He might've said page 17, and Harry Lorayne said, "Ah, that was the article about motorcycles." The
audience goes crazy. This was a magazine that Harry Lorayne had been given maybe prior to
the commercial break. And at the end of the commercial break, he hands it back. And then
Johnny Carson says, "Okay, what was on page 25?" The audience had just watched Harry memorize this
right in front of their eyes. He's like, "Ah, page 25, that's what this was about. Page 17, page 12,
page 11, this is what this was about," and it got a great reaction from The Tonight Show audience.
Years later, decades later, The Martha Stewart Show called me and they said, "Ron, what kind of
demonstration could you do for The Martha Stewart Show?" I said, "Well, Martha has a magazine. Why
don't you give me the magazine before I go on the air? Let me memorize what's on every page."
That's what they did, and I go live on the air and Martha Stewart picks a random page. She says,
"What's on this page?" I tell her what's on this page, and the audience goes nuts. How did Harry
Lorayne do it and how did I do it? The exact same way. The first thing is is we needed a location,
a mental location for each page number. For me, I use the mind palace or the
memory palace. I just have 200 pieces of furniture numbered, and I'm sure Harry did
something similar. He might've had 200 pieces of furniture numbered in this mind palace.
Page 17 was about a motorcycle. On the 17th piece of furniture, in this route,
this journey that he has memorized, he sees a motorcycle jumping over that piece of furniture,
or something like that. Essentially a mind palace is where you memorize a map of a room. You walk
into the room. You have a desk, a bed, a TV, a dresser, a poster over here, and then you memorize
those locations, and that's one, two, three, four, five. Well, the first five pages of the magazine,
you create brain triggers to do that. I went all through my house, 1, 2, 3, 4,
5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 through 15, and that's how I did the magazine demonstration. I'm not
100% sure that's how Harry did it. He might have done it another way. But if he did it another way,
it's pretty close to that. It's pretty close to this way. There was another memory demonstration
that some memory experts do. I saw Harry Lorayne do it on The Tonight Show, and I have copied it
since then. The second demo is this. He goes down the row and he meets somebody.
They say their, "Hi, my name is Isaac." He meets Isaac. Then he goes to the next person. "Hi,
my name is Doug. Hi, my name is Henry. Hi, my name is Jessica. Hi, my name is Steve. Hi, my name is
Brian. Hi, my name is Tom," and he gets all their names. And then he goes back and he says, "Okay,
everybody stand up," and everybody stands up. He says, "Isaac, you can sit down. Doug, you
can sit down," and he goes through and he tells every single person to sit down in the audience.
I do the same thing. I'll go and speak at a conference or a convention and I will meet
up to 200 people as they're walking in the room. And as they walk in the room, they tell me their
name. Hi, I'm Steve. I'm Brian. I'm Lisa. I'm Karen. I'm Wendy. I get up on stage and I say,
"If you're one of the 200 people I met, stand up." 200 people will stand up I will point
to them and I'll say, "Steve, you can sit down. Lisa, you can sit down. Karen, you can sit down.
Brian and Tom and Wendy and Stacey and Jacob," until everybody in the room is sitting down.
It's a demonstration that I first saw Harry Lorayne do on The Tonight Show in the 1980s,
and I have taken it and stolen it, and now I use it for my own memory speeches. How do we do it?
It's actually a very simple process. When that person walks in the room and they're
walking towards us, the first thing we're zoning in on is, what stands out to me about
their clothing? Do they have a bright red shirt on? Do they have a baseball cap on?
Do they have glasses on? Do they have a beard? Do they have big ears? Do they have a big nose?
Do they have a beard? Do they have stripes on their shirt? We zone in on that distinctive
feature. We're doing this very rapidly, the first thing that catches our eye. Let's pretend
like a woman named Lisa's walking towards us. We don't know her name right now, but we know
she's got bright red earrings on. We are zoned in on those earrings. Then we get close to her,
she says, "My name is Lisa." Instantly, we have a picture for the name Lisa.
Mine is the Mona Lisa, so I imagine I'm painting the Mona Lisa in those earrings. I go and I meet
the next person. I'm walking towards him and I'm zoned in on those stripes on his shirt. He's got
stripes across his shirt, and I'm just seeing those stripes. And then I walk towards him and
he says, "Hi, my name is Doug." I imagine now I'm digging. I'm digging holes, and I'm digging holes
in a row on that shirt, Doug, dig. Now, I'm doing this very rapidly though, and I'll go through it.
I'll get two or 300 people. The trick or the key to this is is you're not going to be able to do
this if you don't have images for names. If I'm in the moment and I'm having to think, "What's
Doug? Doug is dig. What's Lisa? Lisa's the Mona Lisa," I'll be able to do this, but maybe I'll
only be able to get five or six names. But over time, once you determine that Steve is a stove,
Lisa's the Mona Lisa, Karen is a carrot, Brian is a brain, Wendy is a windmill, then the speed,
you can do 100, 200 or 300, and you just have to look at their clothing or their face and their
brain trigger leads you back to their name. Now, this is a great demonstration that you
see the memory experts do on TV shows, or you see them do it in front of an audience as a speaker.
Here's the flaw with it though. Let's say it's a three-day conference. This happened to me. This
happened to me just last week. I go memorize the people based on their clothing at this conference.
I memorized 200 names in the audience. They sat down and they think it's great. Well, day two of
the conference, I'm walking around the conference and these people had the nerve to change clothes,
so I was kind of not so certain of their names. The people that I used, their beard or their
facial features, I was still able to get. In real life, you don't want to zone in on their clothing.
But as a memory expert doing a demonstration for a TV or on a stage, that is how they do it. They're
zoning in on their clothing. And then I'll tell you another demonstration that I did. In 2016,
there was a TV show called Superhuman, and it had Mike Tyson was on it and Kal Penn,
who is a famous actor. What they did was is they had 15 girls lined up on stage.
I'm from Texas. I'm from Fort Worth, so they assumed that I was a cowboy. They had
all these girls dressed up in cowboy hats and they were dressed up like cowgirls or
whatever. I went up to each girl and I said, "Give me your name, a fact about yourself,
and a 10 digit phone number," which was a Google Voice number. It wasn't a real phone number. When
this aired later on Fox, random people weren't calling these girls. Girl number one, this is
my name. This is my 10 digit phone number. I like gymnastics or whatever. Then I went to
the next girl. This is my name. This is a 10 digit phone number. This is a fact about myself. I did
that with all 15 girls. In essence, I memorized 15 names, 150 digit number, because 15 girls
times 10 is 150, and then 15 facts. It was 180 pieces of information, but it wasn't just 180
pieces of information. I had to assign it to the right girl. When I got all the way done with it,
Mike Tyson was sitting over there on a couch and he was just watching this whole thing happen.
And then Mike Tyson said, "Ron, the girl in the red hat. Call her."
They gave me a fake phone, and I would said, "Oh, the girl in the red hat, that's Ashley. Her phone
number is," and then I said the phone number out loud as I dialed it. And then if I got it right,
Ashley's phone would ring and I'd say, "Hey, Ashley, your favorite subject is," whatever.
Right now we're going to pick five women at random. You have to remember each of their names,
the facts they told you, and their numbers, and you're going to have to call them with this.
They quizzed me on five random girls. All five times I got it perfect. It was without question
one of the toughest memory demonstrations of my life, because I was doing it in front
of a live studio audience, I had Mike Tyson over there watching me, and I was having to
talk to 15 beautiful women while I was doing this. It was a distracting process. How did
I do it? Very similar actually to how you will see the memory experts memorize the magazine.
Before I went on stage that day, I selected 15 rooms that I was very familiar with, 15 rooms
that I just knew, my living room, my kitchen, my bathroom, my bedroom, my friend's house,
his living room. 15 rooms that I knew very well. I knew girl number one was going to
go in room number one. Girl number two was going to go in room number two. Girl number
three was going to go in room number three. The first piece of furniture in each room,
what's their name? I'll go up to girl number one. She says her name is Wendy. Well, I know that's
room number one. Piece of furniture number one, I put a windmill now. A windmill is
blowing on that piece of furniture. She gives me her phone number, a 10 digit phone number.
The area code I put on piece of furniture number two, the next three digits I put
on the next piece of furniture, and then the last four digits I put on the fourth piece of
furniture in that room. I'm not going to go into the detail on how to turn numbers into pictures.
Watch one of my other videos on how to turn numbers into pictures,
but I had a picture that represented that 10 digit number for me and I put it on that
piece of furniture. And then the favorite subject was easy. The girl says she likes
gymnastics. I see somebody doing gymnastics on the last piece of furniture in that room,
the fifth location. When Mike Tyson says, "Ron, the girl in the red hat,"
I just have to count, one, two, three, four. She's the fourth girl down. That's room number four.
Oh, what's on the first piece of furniture in room number four? Ashes. Ah! Hey, Mike, that's Ashley.
Ron, what's Ashley's phone number? It's on the next three pieces of furniture. I say her phone
number, Ashley answers the phone, and then I say what was on the last piece of furniture in
that room, which was her favorite topic. You're going to see memory experts doing demonstrations
just like a magician, that it's going to blow your mind. You're going to be like,
"What? How in the world did they do that?" It's often a very simple process of taking the
data that they want to memorize, creating an image for it, and then attaching that image to something
that they know. I'll say one last one. Here's a bonus one for you. 2010, I was on the History
Channel show called Stan Lee's Superhumans. Stan Lee was the inventor of The Incredible
Hulk and The Fantastic Four and all that. He had a show and he took me to a Home Depot. We went
around the Home Depot. They had a shopping cart, and they pulled items off the shelf.
Whenever they pulled them off the shelf, they would say, "19.95, and they put it
in the buggy. 17.28 was the price. That'd been a weird price, but they'd said that,
and then they put it in the buggy. We went to the cash register. I turned my back to the computer so
I couldn't see it. They scanned the items. I said the price, and once again, I got it perfect. It's
the same concept. Every time they said the price, I have a number for that price, 17.28 or 19.95 or
whatever it was. I looked at the product and I looked at something unique about the product.
Oh, that product has a yellow handle. I attached my picture for that number to the yellow handle.
That's where I stored the data. And then when they pulled it out of the shopping cart,
I saw the yellow handle again, I knew the data was stored there, and I said the picture for that
number. When you see memory experts doing memory demonstrations, what you're seeing them do is
take abstract information, a name, a number, some information on a book, they're creating a picture
for it, and they're storing it somewhere. They may be storing it on a person's body
themselves. They may be storing it on a unique feature of a product, or they may be storing
it in a room in a house, but they are storing it somewhere, and that is how memory experts
will do demonstrations that blow your mind. If you want to get good at memory and you want to
get pictures for names and numbers and all that, subscribe to my channel. By the way,
click the link down below. I have a free gift for you that tells you some memory secrets,
so you'll even be more of a superhero of memory. Do that and I'll see you on the next video.