This is me reciting pi.
This is Nelson Dellis, he’s a four time memory champion...
...Grandmaster of memory and multiple memory record holder.
Speaking is Dr Julia Shaw.
This video will teach you a technique that is over 2,500 years old.
The method of loci, also known as the memory palace.
We’ll explore the science behind why this ancient technique is so effective
in helping you to hack your own memory...
...and remember absolutely, well, almost anything.
Things like memorising speeches, names of people you meet, even decks of playing cards,
and in my case, 10,000 digits of pi.
Before we get into those digits of Pi, let’s apply this technique to a relatively simple list,
the seven wonders of the world.
So, the first step is to take each of those seven items and turn them into a picture.
So, the Great Wall of China, I think of a wall.
Christ the Redeemer, I might think of Christ.
Three was Machu Picchu, I think of Peru, I think of a llama.
Four was Chichen Itza, maybe it's a chicken pizza.
That's close enough, chicken pizza.
Colosseum, which is in Rome, so maybe you can think of a gladiator.
Six was Petra, I think of like my pet or your pet.
And then seven was the Taj Mahal, I might think of like a bowl of spicy curry or something like that.
Using juicy mental images like these is extremely effective.
What you want to do is create big, multi-sensory memories,
where you can almost see your image of Christ,
or feel the fur of your pet against your hand, maybe you can smell the spicy curry.
And in this case, Nelson has placed the details he wants to remember
into a space he knows really well, his own house.
So, the first location is the entryway to my house and we have a wall for the Great Wall of China.
So, imagine opening up my entryway and boom, you're faced with this massive wall.
So, then we make our way mentally through my house to the next location, right next door.
So, I'm going to imagine my next image, Christ, for Christ the Redeemer.
He's just chilling on the couch watching TV, the weirder the better.
Next we go into the kitchen, that's next to the living room.
So I can imagine my stay at home llama cooking up a meal in the kitchen.
Next we go to the staircase. So I'm gonna imagine all over the stairs are
a bunch of different pizzas with live chickens on them, just squawking away.
We get upstairs, we go into my office and inside there we have our Gladiator fighting to the death - crazy stuff.
Then we walk down the hall to my bedroom and on my bed is my pet urinating all over my bed.
And then finally we make our way to my bathroom and inside
is me or yourself on my toilet because you ate too much curry.
Those are the types of images that you don't tend to forget.
But not everything is quite as easy to turn into weird images
that interact with your memory palace as the seven wonders.
For example, how do you learn the first 10,000 digits of pi?
The first step is paying attention. Full, effortful, attention.
We'd love to give everything our full attention so that we could remember everything.
But that's wishful thinking. The goal is to make things interesting.
When I decided to memorise 10,000 digits of pi, I would tell myself this mantra.
It's a simple mantra but it would align my attention and focus
on the task at hand and help me remember it better.
So the first true step to memorising anything, once you have your attention and focus in line,
is to think of it as a picture in your mind's eye.
Now you want to try to visualise it as close to the real thing in real life as possible.
What does make you feel? Does it make you uncomfortable?
Does it make you laugh? Is it grotesque?
All these things really make an image stick in your mind.
Images that are weird, and maybe gross or emotional, are “sticky”.
Cognitive neuroscientists have studied why this is the case.
When looking at the brain, researchers found that the amygdala, a part of the brain that
is important for processing emotion, encourages other parts of the brain to store memories.
More specifically, it kicks into gear the hippocampus,
which is mostly important when you're first making memories,
and the prefrontal cortex, which is important for ‘working memory’ and decision-making.
That’s how emotions make your memory more likely to stick.
Words are easy, you see a word and it typically evokes some kind of imagery in your mind.
But things like numbers, or cards or even names are a little trickier.
And those have systems that we've developed and learned so that whenever we see a name
or a number or a card, we already have an image preset for it.
So when I was memorising, 10,000 digits of pi, for example, the first 10 digits, let's say is
The first set for me when I see it, 14159,
is Sam Neill in an Iron Man suit.
It's just the way it goes.
And the second set is for example, my friend Ellen
dressed as the gladiator Emperor, from
the movie Gladiator, with his thumb down.
Once you have those pictures for things you want to memorise, the next thing you want to do
is organise those pictures to store them, so the next step is storage.
To do this, most memory athletes will use something called a memory palace.
This method has been traced back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece.
And is particularly useful to remember the order of information,
like the order of a series of numbers or a list of items.
A memory palace capitalises on your existing memory of a real place.
It is a place that you know - usually your home or another location that you know really well.
Like Nelson walking through his own house to memorise the seven wonders,
you place the images for the things that you want to memorise along a path through that space.
When you need to remember the list, you can mentally retrace that same path,
and pick up the images that you left there.
For those 10,000 digits of pi, which I broke up into groups of five, I needed 2,000 locations.
So my memory palace was huge.
The way I approached that is I basically took my home town, Miami, and I broke it up into neighbourhoods.
And each neighbourhood housed 1,000 digits each, so I had 10 different neighbourhoods
that all kind of connected one after the other, and each one had 200 locations,
each one housed those 1,000 digits.
Neuroimaging research has shown that people show
increased activity in this part of the brain
when learning memories using a memory palace.
This means that the technique helps to bring in more parts of the brain that are usually
dedicated to other senses - the parietal lobe is responsible for navigation
and the occipital lobe is related to seeing images.
By activating these two additional areas your memories are bigger, and better connected.
Once you've encoded the information and you've stored it in your memory palace,
the next logical step is to keep it there.
Now, the only way to do this is through review.
Mentally reviewing a memory palace only means walking through your memory palace in your mind,
and seeing the weird imagery that you left there.
In the case of the 10,000 digits that I've memorised, I was reviewing constantly,
and I have to because it's so much information.
So I would do it when I would run, before I would go to bed, in the shower, while I was driving the car.
I tried different ways to access that imagery or to jump through my memory palace.
And those different kinds of reviews were key to fortify and strengthen those connections.
Most memories never make it into your long-term memory.
That’s why it’s so important to repeat the information,
to transform a short-term memory into a long-term memory.
So that you can access it during, for example, a memory championship.
To become a memory champion I had to work at it every day, train very hard
and make it something that was just instinctive to me.
And that only came with practice.
If you want to remember almost anything, you can create your own multi sensory memory details
and your own memory palace.
And if you’re thinking that sounds like a lot of work, well, that’s why it’s effective.
The more attention and effort you put in, the better your memory will be.