The first person, obviously, that I would like to introduce
so everybody understands who you're you're kind of aiming for today
is our defending champion from Texas, and that's Ron White.
Ron, can you please stand up.
When I first read about it,
I heard these memory guys were memorizing these numbers and these cards,
and I was like there's no way, you know?
There's no way I could memorize a deck of cards in under two minutes, and I did.
Basically, to remember anything you need a place to store it.
You need a place to put the information.
So let's say now I wanted to memorize five pictures that
represented the presidents of the United States,
and then once I have my five spots selected,
these become places where I want to store whatever I want to remember.
I would take the first president, which is Washington.
I would turn it into a picture and I would see
a washing machine interacting with the Bank of America signs,
maybe see the the clothes flying out and the soap going everywhere,
but a washing machine on the Bank of America,
and then right here on number two, which is the American Eagle sign,
I would visualize the dam,
and the dam's breaking, and it's filling up with water,
and it's flooding this area because a dam for Adams,
and then number three over to like that basketball player had a chef's hat.
Our third president was Sheperson or Jefferson and
then to now it's visualize Nyquil falling all over the stock market over there,
the fourth president was Madison and so I put medicine over there.
First of all, I have a lot of respect for my competitors.
Nelson Dellis is a guy who was a surprise last year,
and then he breaks one of my records, the nerve of the guy, you know.
So he's a guy who could walk away with it this year.
In terms of training, I do about three to four hours a day.
For about a year, I've been doing that.
I'll do, you know, numbers, cards, names of faces, poetry.
Going to this competition, I just have to kind of rely on my training and hope to get those scores.
Okay mental athletes, if you are ready, you may begin.
I got this glossary in my head that I know that Steve equals stove.
Lisa equals the Mona Lisa.
Brian equals a brain, so then when I meet somebody and his name's Brian.
He's got really thick eyebrows.
I see a brain coming out of his eyebrows. His name is Brian.
You know, you talk to like an olympic swimmer or
something like they're intense in the water but out of the water,
they may be like the slowest, kind of chilled back, you know,
they're not always an athlete right?
So a lot of people expect me to always have an awesome memory, which is not necessarily the case.
I can kind of turn it on, you know, when I need it.
A lot of people think that, 'Okay, this is not for me. I have a horrible memory,'
but that's the thing is like I didn't have a good memory.
I just had, you know, a little desire to do something.
Five minutes remaining.
The hard part about numbers is that a number is really abstract,
but what mental athletes do is we'll learn kind of a way to translate those into pictures,
so like 32 3 stands for C 2 is B so C B I thought of Charlie Brown.
Good job man. New USA record.
What's your name?
Kayleigh.
How old are you?
Six.
And what are we about to do?
Memorize the presidents. And how are you going to do that?
By furniture. Furniture. Okay here we go.
If I ask someone, can you imagine opening the front door and walking me through your house?
And if you can do that, you can become a memory champion.
Jefferson. There you go. Jefferson, four.
Madison.
Madison, five.
They have a deck of cards, and you pick it up, and you run through it as fast as you can.
And then you pick up a second deck of cards and reassemble that one to match the first deck
without looking at it.
One minute thirty three?
No, three seconds.
No, one minute zero seconds. That's a new record.
One minute three seconds?
Yes. Oh my goodness.
One o three is our new record. Almost broke the minute mark. One minute and three seconds.
Ace of spades.
Two of hearts.
Jack of spades.
Four of hearts. 0:05:12.624,1193:02:47.295 Ok. Jack of spades.
A lot of competitors in this sport, they became kind of obsessed with improving even more.
Three of diamonds. Four of hearts.
You kind of harness this power in your brain, and you're like
Oh I would just like to be the first one to congratulate the new USA Champion Nelson Dellis.
This is pretty crazy, like, how far can i push it?