CHAPTER 6
6. Why (and How) to 10X Your Memory
Years ago, I had the great honor to interview Harry Lorayne, widely considered the godfather of modern memory improvement. In fact, TIME magazine once called him “the Yoda of Memory.” What a nickname, right?
Since 1957, Harry was on the vanguard of rediscovering the ancient, lost art of superhuman memory. Throughout his illustrious career, he wrote over forty books and publications on the topics of memory and magic. He also founded his own memory school, coached individuals and major corporations, and spent decades in the public spotlight. Harry is perhaps best known for his dozens of appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he regularly memorized and recited the names of up to 1,500 audience members—in order.
Why, then, have you never heard his name?
When I asked Harry why, in his sixty years of teaching these techniques, he was unable to bring them into traditional schools, his answer was this:
“I made a big mistake…I started to interview the teachers first…and they all insisted: ‘We don’t use memory.’”
Lorayne shared a story of walking into a classroom, pointing to a poster of the periodic table, and asking a “silly” question.
“I’ve been out of school for a very long time. I noticed that you have the periodic table on the wall here. Do you still teach that?”
“Of course,” replied the teacher.
“If you teach it, do you still test it?” Lorayne continued.
“Absolutely,” replied the teacher.
“Then could you tell me: What mental calisthenics would a student have to use in order to fill in the blank?”
This continued for a good ten minutes, before the teacher sheepishly admitted:
“I guess they would have to remember it.”
And therein, my friends, lies the problem.
As Lorayne wrote in one of his early books, “There is no learning without memory.” The problem is, memory has a bad rap. Even if they don’t always show it in the best of ways, educators today know what you now know—that learning must be experiential. It must be engaging. And it must draw upon the learner’s own experience and knowledge. Thus, in an effort to do away with rote memorization, educators and policymakers have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Except where unavoidable, they’ve done away with anything that even resembles memorization. But in doing so, they’ve completely neglected the foundational—and highly experiential—skill of memory mastery.
Don’t get me wrong: for the majority of things you need to learn, rote memorization doesn’t work. But that doesn’t mean that all memorization is bad. Quite the contrary. As Lorayne painstakingly pointed out to educators decades ago, you can’t “know” something unless it’s securely stored in your memory.
This is even more important if we wish to upgrade our overall learning prowess. I mean, what’s the point of increasing our learning speed, if we’re just going to forget everything we learn shortly thereafter?
Most of you have probably heard the quote from Woody Allen: “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
Indeed, with your average speed-reading course, that’s about the level of comprehension you can expect.
If you want to read and remember faster, doesn’t it make sense that you upgrade your memory first?
In our SuperLearner courses, I like to illustrate this with the metaphor of a garden hose, a funnel, and a bucket.
Imagine that the hose is your reading speed—or your listening speed, if you’re a fan of audiobooks. When everything is working normally, the hose feeds information into the funnel, which represents your working and short-term memory. This, in turn, moves information into the bucket—your long-term memory.
Imagine, now, that you switch out the garden hose for a fire hose. Suddenly, instead of a calm stream of water, the overflow immediately blows your funnel to smithereens. A fraction of a second later, your bucket overflows as well.
This, more than anything else, is the problem with your average two-day speed-reading seminar. Without upgrading the infrastructure of your memory, you’re destined to fail. Until you understand how to input information to your working and short-term memory in a way that makes it stick, you won’t remember much of anything in the long term. Furthermore, in order to organize and store all the information you input, a simple bucket isn’t going to cut it. No, to be able to learn and memorize everything you aspire to, you’re going to need a swimming pool—and a way of maintaining that swimming pool.
Of course, even with the memory techniques you’re about to learn, no swimming pool can avoid some evaporation and water loss. You see, even with advanced memory techniques, your brain will naturally forget “unused” information to keep things running smoothly. After all, though your brain has a theoretical capacity of 2.2 petabytes, it’s also a bit of an energy hog—at least relative to the rest of your body.
At just 2 percent of your body mass, your brain consumes around 20 percent of your body’s oxygen and energy.5 For this reason, you have two dedicated centers deep inside the brain—the hippocampi. Their primary job is to figure out what is worth keeping and to get rid of everything else. Thanks to the hippocampi, our brains are incredibly adept at forgetting. And while it may be a source of frustration when you’re looking for your keys, it’s also part of the reason the human brain is so insanely efficient.
Your brain runs on about twenty watts of power—a little less than two of those eco-friendly CFL light bulbs. According to Stanford researcher Kwabena Boahen, a robot with similar processing power would consume at least ten megawatts.6 That’s ten million watts—or about as much as a small hydroelectric plant. It’s unfathomable, and yet, it’s true. Your brain has an insane amount of processing power, and it’s five hundred thousand times more efficient than the best microprocessors ever built. How exactly this is possible remains one of the great mysteries of the universe. But suffice it to say that forgetting useless information is a big part of it. Luckily, as you’re learning, there are ways to “trick” the hippocampi into storing more memories—and maintaining them long term.
All this sounds great—but you might be asking yourself, “Can I actually do this? I’ve always had a below-average memory.” Nonsense. The fact is, unless you were dropped on your head or have a rare neurological disorder, there’s no such thing as a “below-average memory.” Over the last five years, I’ve interviewed quite a few national and world memory champions. These include four-time USA memory champion Nelson Dellis, Swedish memory champion Mattias Ribbing, world champion Mark Channon, and others. Guess what? Not a single one of them had an “above-average memory” when they began training. In fact, one memory games competitor, Joshua Foer, went from skeptical observer to world champion in just one year of training. Then, he documented his entire journey in the bestselling book, Moonwalking with Einstein. Best of all? Foer’s 2006 record, memorizing a deck of cards in eighty-five seconds, wasn’t even in the top six hundred by the end of 2018. (China’s Zou Lujian Igm completed the feat in just 13.96 seconds in 2017.) The sport of competitive memory continues to push the limits of the human brain, but in the end, it all comes down to knowing—and improving upon—the following techniques.
But surely, the folks who succeed with these techniques have some type of genetic advantage. After all, the only reason that Michael Phelps has won so many gold medals is his freakishly long arms. It must be the same with competitive memory, right?
Nope. In fact, a 2017 study by Radboud University sought to determine just that. For forty days, participants with average memory skills and no prior training spent thirty minutes a day practicing mnemonic techniques. At the end of the study, participants had, on average, doubled their memory capacity. What’s more, they were able to reproduce these results four months later—with no further training. Just to be sure, researchers compared the brains of five memory champions to “average” people using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In doing so, they expected to see notable differences in brain anatomy, similar to the differences between an athlete’s body and a nonathlete’s. What they found, however, really surprised them. The hardware was exactly the same. The memory athletes were just using their brains differently.
So, how do you actually do it?
First things first, we need to master our visual memory.
As we learned from observing our Paleolithic ancestors, we are each gifted with visual memory. Perhaps, up until this point, you’ve believed you’re an auditory learner. This is understandable. After all, through years of rote memorization and listening to teachers lecture at us, most of us have our natural aptitude towards visual memory beaten out of us by the time we reach high school. Perhaps you have always wished you had a “photographic” memory. Good news: you do! You just haven’t switched it on yet. But once you do, you will see: creating mental pictures is not only much more memorable, it’s also much faster. In fact, research has found that our brains are able to recognize an image in as little as thirteen milliseconds. That’s 0.013 seconds! When working with students, I often compare the mental “upgrade” to switching out the engine in your car from gasoline to electric. It’s an entirely different means of getting around, and so it may take some serious getting used to. But in the end, it’s faster, more reliable, and much more efficient.
For this reason, a growing body of research has proven that visual memory is vastly superior to rote memorization—or any other type of mnemonic device you may have used in the past. They don’t call it “the picture superiority effect” for nothing. This is also why, in one way or another, every single one of the world’s top memory champions and record holders use the techniques I’m about to show you.
Now that you understand how powerful visualization is, you’re ready to learn the big secret.
Are you ready?
If you want to improve your memory tenfold, create novel visualizations, called “markers,” for everything you wish to remember.
Yes, you read that right.
The crux of the “big secret” behind tripling your memory boils down to imagining pictures in your head.
Anticlimactic, I know.
But that really is half the battle—or more.
At first, this might be difficult. Coming up with these markers is a creative endeavor, and many of us haven’t trained our creativity muscles for years. Fortunately, we know from the research that creativity is NOT something you have or you don’t. It’s something you train, and something you can relearn very quickly. By simply practicing visualization over time, you will come up with more and more creative visualizations—and it’ll become both faster and easier to do so.
So, what kinds of these “markers” should you come up with?
Well, as you can imagine, not all visualizations are created equal.
As a general rule, the markers you come up with should abide by the following rules.
Create Highly Detailed Visualizations
First, picture as much detail as possible. By creating a high level of detail, you ensure that you are adequately visualizing a vivid, memorable image in your mind’s eye. Fuzzy, nonspecific images are much easier to forget. Plus, remember that the average person’s working memory can only retain three to five individual items at once. This means that breaking information down into “chunks” of three to five items makes it inherently easier to remember. That’s why phone numbers and credit card numbers are formatted the way they are. As you’ll see in the upcoming examples, every detail that we insert into our markers can represent a new piece of information. In this way, we effectively “chunk” more information in there, condensing it into one easy-to-remember visualization instead of three to five. This might seem a bit silly, but it’s actually quite a powerful hack. At the highest level of memory competition, the difference between winning and losing comes down to how many cards or numbers the competitor can chunk into one visual marker. Every year, competitors engineer newer, more complex ways to fit more detail into fewer markers for this very reason.
Opt for the “Out There”
Next, wherever possible, your visualizations should include absurd, bizarre, violent, or sexual imagery. Though it might make you blush, the truth is, our brains crave the novel. Our hippocampi are very attuned to picking up and remembering things that seem strange to us. This is the so-called “bizarreness effect,” and it’s the reason why you’ll want to keep these visualizations to yourself. When it comes to mnemonics, the stranger, the better.
Leverage Your Existing Knowledge
The next important principle in developing our visual markers comes from our dear old friend Dr. Knowles. Wherever possible, you should make use of images, ideas, or memories you already have. Research has determined that our brains pay special attention to information that’s related to stuff we already know and care about. This is the basic idea behind Hebb’s Law, which is often summarized as “neurons that fire together, wire together.” By creating connections between new information and your own knowledge, you leverage existing neural networks of people, places, and things. This creates stronger, more densely-linked synaptic connections and “tricks” your hippocampi into thinking something is more important than it is.
Connect It Back
Finally, it’s important that as you create visualizations, you also create logical connections to what you’re trying to remember. Obviously, a visual marker is no good if you can’t remember what it stands for. For this reason, it’s important to choose markers that will clearly symbolize the information you’re trying to remember! As you’ll see in the following examples, each visualization you come up with should explain some element of what it is you’re trying to learn or remember.
***
With the theory out of the way, let’s dive in and see the method in practice.
Let’s imagine, first, that we were trying to memorize someone’s name. After all, names and faces are one of the most common challenges that students come to us with, and for good reason. We all know the embarrassment of forgetting someone’s name.
Let’s say that we meet someone named Mike. For the sake of visualization, let’s say it’s Mike Tyson, and that somehow, you’ve never heard of him before. As soon as you go to shake Mike’s painfully strong hand, I want you to take a split second, and create a marker. In this marker, picture him holding a microphone, singing embarrassingly off-key karaoke on stage.
Get it? Mike?
Now you try it.
Seriously—stop and do it, right now.
Close your eyes if you must—but don’t read on until you have a visualization so clear that you can see Mike belting out the missed notes: face tattoo, lisp, and all.
By the way, when I say “clear,” I must be clear myself. Visualization doesn’t mean I am hallucinating the image before me, or that I see it instead of what my eyes are seeing. Things you see with your “mind’s eye” are always going to be less vivid than the things you see with your own eyes. That’s perfectly normal. If you can imagine a marker well enough to be able to describe or reproduce it, you’re doing it right.
Got it? Congratulations! You just made your first marker.
Let’s try it again. Imagine that after having your hand crushed by Mike Tyson, the next person you meet is named Alice. We can remember her name by picturing her chasing a rabbit down a hole, like Alice in Wonderland, blue dress and all. Your marker for Alice might look something like this:
Both of these visualizations work well because they are vivid, bizarre, and built out of existing knowledge and pictures in our mind. Another way to achieve this is by using people we already know as pre-existing knowledge. Imagine picturing a new person named Jenna fighting it out to the death with a Jenna we know from childhood. It sounds too simple to be true, but trust me: when you use visualizations this way, memorizing names becomes easy.
What else does this work for, you might ask? A better question would be to ask: What doesn’t it work for? The answer? Almost nothing.
Foreign language words are a constant source of frustration for most learners. Where do you begin? How do you remember things that are completely new and foreign to your ear? And most challenging of all, how do you turn something so auditory—like a word in a foreign language—into a visual marker? Simple: break it down until you can find visualizations. For example: instead of trying to memorize the word caber, or “to fit” in Spanish, we can come up with a visualization of a taxi cab trying to fit a bear inside.
This is an example of a truly perfect marker. First, it has the sounds: “cab” and “bear,” which allows us to work our way back to the sound of the word. Second, it’s ridiculous! If you saw a bear hanging out of the window of a taxi cab, you’d remember it—wouldn’t you? Finally, what’s so clever about this marker is that it has the meaning, “to fit,” baked right in. This is what I mean when I talk about using details to add additional information to our markers.
In some cases, it might be trickier to find exact matches for the syllables in a foreign language word. Take, for example, the Russian word for “thank you,” спасибо, pronounced “spaseebah.” Unless you decide to mix and match with the Hebrew word בא (“ba”), you’ll have to get a little creative. Imagine yourself sitting in a Chinese restaurant just on the edge of Red Square in Moscow. Saint Peter’s Basilica is towering over you in the background. Now, imagine that a waiter is handing you a spicy bun, steaming and covered with tantalizing red peppers. Then, to your surprise, he announces that this appetizer is on the house. To show your gratitude, what would you say? Спасибо! Spicy bun. It’s not perfect, but it’s highly memorable.
A fun aside: the beauty of learning foreign language vocabulary this way is that the more languages you know, the easier it gets. Someone who only speaks English wouldn’t have an exact visualization for the syllable “bah.” They would have to come up with an approximation like we did above. But someone who speaks Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, or Japanese would have no problem. Conveniently, “bah” is itself a word in each of those languages!
But what about numbers? After all, how can you create a visualization for something like a phone number? With the right system, it’s easy. All you need to do is spend an hour or so learning something called the Major Method for converting each digit into an individual consonant.
Once you know that system, you can create words out of the numbers and use visualizations to memorize those words with ease. Using the Major Method, for example, the phone number 740-927-1415 transforms into Crazy Pink Turtle. Even if you’re new at this, that’s really easy to visualize, and therefore, easy to remember.
You might not believe it yet, but it’s possible to create visualizations like this for literally anything you can imagine. You can create visualizations for each card in a deck of cards, and memorize their order. You can memorize music theory or the order of chords in songs. You can memorize the geography of a region—or its entire history, complete with dates and names. You can even memorize scientific formulas by creating these types of creative visual markers. The possibilities are limitless—all you need is some practice and a vivid imagination.
But here’s the thing. This technique only works if you actually use it, so starting today, I want you to use it for anything and everything you want to remember. From now on, this is just how you remember stuff—even if it’s slow going at first. When you meet someone new, create a marker. When you get a new credit card, memorize it with a marker. When you learn an interesting fact in a blog post, stop for a moment, and create a marker. From now on, I want you to make it second nature to visualize everything that’s important to you.
And let me remind you: there are no excuses. This technique is scientifically proven to work for everybody—young and old. All you have to do is practice—and confidently use your imagination.
Once you do, this simple technique alone—the technique of visualizing everything you want to remember—will take you very far. In fact, in that same interview conducted with Harry Lorayne, he admitted to me that he used this technique—and nothing else—throughout his career. Imagine that: memorizing 1,500 people’s names, with perfect recall, on live TV.
It’s remarkable. It’s unbelievable. It’s downright superhuman.
But it’s nothing compared to what you can do with the tool you’re about to learn: the tool I like to call “the mnemonic nuclear option.”
5 Daniel Drubach, The Brain Explained (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000), 161.
6 Jeremy Hsu, “How Much Power Does The Human Brain Require To Operate?” Popular Science, November 7, 2009, https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/neuron-computer-chips-could-overcome-power-limitations-digital.