 Balance, balance, balance, balance, balance. Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Let me put on my mic real quick. OK. So we don't know that much about memory, but what we do know is that if I were to start reading off a list of random words, you would only be able to memorize about four of those things. And then if we wait 20 to 30 seconds and talk about anything else, you're only going to remember about two or one or none. We kind of know that, right? Almost every person I've met has told me I have a really bad memory. So that's understood. But at the same time, if I walk up to anybody in this room and I ask how to get to the restroom, you could probably tell me. And you could probably tell me with like really good detail. Like walk out of that door. There's going to be the thing with the coffee and the tea on it. Just past that is the registration desk. Take a right. We're going to pass the escalators. Then we're going to have two sets of elevators. The one on the left only goes up to the 17th floor. Right, the one on the right starts at the 18th floor. Keep going. We're going to see the women's restroom first and then the men's restroom. We could all do that. So on one hand, we have a memory that completely sucks. But at the same time, we're able to like magically memorize the blueprint of this building. And we don't even try to do it. So how does that work? What memory athletes do when they memorize gigantic list of words is instead of using that short-term memory that we call it or present memory, they use their spatial memory, the same memory that we use to memorize locations. Which is what I try to do today. So we'll see how we did with 10 random words, which is more than double the amount of words that we're supposed to be able to memorize. So the first word was me staring on my watch. Anticipation, does anyone remember what happened next? Clown, perfect. And then what? Yes, clown and opera. And we did a little trick there where we combined the two. I was wearing the clown thing and I was singing. Does anyone remember what happened next when I came over to this side of the step? I don't even need to remind you, perfect car. And then what happened over here? Discovered in orange. It's awesome. You guys are doing really well. After that, what happened next? Sprint, great. So I balanced on my hands and then we sprint back over to the other side of the stage. And there was a countdown playing on the speakers. And then we ended with applause. So that's excellent. That's the entire method. That's what everybody uses to memorize thousands and thousands and thousands of digits or hundreds and hundreds of random words. It's just by visualizing it and using that spatial memory. So now we're going to see how to apply that to a few different things. The first thing is going to be names, because everybody has a hard time with names. How many people do you think you've met at this conference? I think I've met maybe like 200 people, right? I think there's 1,500 people here. I remember about half of those names and I was actually trying to remember them. So it's probably a lot worse for some of you who weren't trying. When you first meet somebody, what you want to do is actually listen to them tell you their name. Because a lot of the times when we're meeting somebody, we're five seconds into the conversation and we completely forgot their name. While our memories actually aren't that bad, we just weren't paying attention when we were introduced to them. So remember their name. The second thing you want to do is kick in that spatial memory. So to do that, this is Ryan. Everybody say hi, Ryan. All right, so you've got the first thing down. You listen to the name. Now you want to look at Ryan and find something that stands out to you. Now Ryan's got, obviously he's got his own look going on, so he's given us a lot of things to look at. But first thing I notice for him is a tattoo on his neck. So if I want to remember Ryan, I'm going to look at that tattoo and I'm going to think of a word that rhymes with the word Ryan, something that I can easily visualize and then attach it to that tattoo. So Ryan, for me, makes me think of Ryan. So I'm going to imagine coming up on Ryan's right hand side, a big lion running. He's got a bright orange mane. He's breathing hard. He jumps up in the air and he bites Ryan in the neck and just rips off his tattoo and he's flailing it around. There's blood everywhere. The lion's throwing the tattoo at you and you're super grossed out. The most offensive you can make the image the better, because then it's going to be more memorable. So the next time we see Ryan will immediately notice his tattoo. We're going to remember that crazy scene of a lion ripping off his tattoo and throwing it around the room. And then we'll be able to connect that again with Ryan. Makes sense? So names are pretty easy. And I bet you all can start doing that right now. Let's move on to the next thing. And that is memorizing a shuffled deck of playing cards. This is the first thing that I started getting interested in when I got in memory. It's actually more useful than you think it is. The reason you want to memorize cards is because it's the only thing that you can memorize that will actually impress your friends for number one. The second reason is because it teaches you everything you need to know to compete in the world memory competition. All the techniques that are important for that. So looking at a card, here we have the seven of diamonds and the seven of hearts. The reason why this is so difficult to memorize is because they're just hard to visualize. These two cards almost look exactly the same. If I wanted to just close my eyes and try to use this visual technique we've been talking about, and I visualize a seven of diamonds, and I visualize a seven of hearts, I'm probably still going to forget it. It's difficult. So what the pros do is instead of memorizing cards they memorize people. So the seven of diamonds for me is Isaac Newton. The seven of hearts is Einstein. So these guys are much easier to memorize. They're completely different. You can imagine them interacting with each other, doing different things. So the next step is to think of a person for every single card in the deck. That's 52 people. And when I first heard this I almost stopped because that sounds like, I mean, I got to use my memory to do that, right? But there's a technique, a trick, called mnemonics. And mnemonics just take information that's available to you, that's already right in front of your face, and uses that information to remind you of the thing it is that you want to remember. So looking at a card we have two bits of information. We have the value of the card, so four of hearts, it's a four, and then we have the suit of the card. Just looking at those two things can remind us of the person it is that we associated with that card. So we'll go through the values really quickly here. You'll reference these later, I'm sure, but every ace and every two in the deck is an athlete. Doesn't matter what the suit is. Ace of clubs, ace of spades, ace of diamonds. These are all athletes. Ace is a male athlete, two is a female athlete. Every three and four is an actor. Three is a male actor, four is a female actor. Every five and six is a controversial or sketchy person. Somebody has done something that not everyone agrees with. And these are people that you can think of. Five is a male, six is a female. So you might see a pattern. Every single odd card in the deck is a male. Every single even card in the deck is a female. Seven and eight, these are people of like any kind of science field. Physics, math, any scientist. Remember my seven of diamonds, seven of hearts. I had Isaac Newton and Einstein. Again, seven's a male, eight's a female. Nine and 10, these are people of power. That can mean political power or super human powers. Any of that stuff. And Queen and King, this is a couple. This could be a famous couple, a couple you know. This could be you, whatever. And then finally Jack, there are four of these in the deck too. And these are all religious figures. Okay, the second thing, suit. There are four suits we have. Each of these are a specific type of person. So a diamond is a rich person. Or a fancy person or a shiny person. Think diamonds, right? Shiny, fancy. Hearts, these are people you love. It's gonna be family, friends. Clubs, these are like bad people. You can think strong. I have used Arnold Schwarzenegger for one of my club cards. Sylvester Stallone, another good example. Or people who are just like bad at what they do. Spades, this means funny. These can be comedians, friends, jokesters, or other things that are funny to you. So taking those two things combined now, we can try to memorize three cards. So we have ace of diamonds, jack of spades, and four of hearts. So first thing we wanna do is look at the suit, right? May not remember, but ace is a male athlete. And diamonds is super fancy, or extravagant, or rich. So this for me is Michael Jordan. And for the rest of my life, this will always be Michael Jordan. The next card we have is jack of spades. Remember Jack is a religious person. Spades means funny. So a funny religious person, Dalai Lama. Next card is four of hearts. Remember four is a female actor. Hearts is somebody you love. So it's a female actor that I love. Well, we may have all different opinions on this, but I'm married, so this is my wife. Remember, this is just, you can use whatever pictures you want. This is just a reminder. So four of hearts is my wife. She's not an actor. And she's putting a Santa hat on my dog, Baxter. So now we have three very different images that we need to memorize. And we could, if we wanted to, build a story, like we did with the words. And we already know you guys can do that because you just did it, right? So you could imagine there's a basketball court. Michael Jordan's dribbling down the basketball court. He jumps up, slam dunks the basketball, and for whatever reason, the Dalai Lama is like, he's down below the basketball, who's praying. And so the ball just hits him in the back of the head and boom, his head hits the ground. There's blood everywhere. My dog comes running out of the locker room. He's running around in the blood. He's leaving footsteps all over the ground. Luis is screaming. It's crazy, right? So you won't forget that. And that's how you would memorize three cards. But there's actually a more popular technique of memorizing when you have lots of things to memorize. So we have to memorize 52 cards. So we're probably gonna wanna use this. This is called the method of Loki, also known as the journey method or the memory palace. Most people have heard of this. The way this works is you take a location that you're really, really familiar with. You're probably gonna start with your house because you're probably really familiar with your house. And you imagine yourself walking from room to room to room. So you would walk through your front door into your bedroom and here you would place the first thing you want to remember. So if it's Michael Jordan, you might see him jumping off your bed and slam dunking into your laundry basket. The important thing is to look at everything in your room and imagine your memory interacting with those things. So it's firmly planted. Then you go to the next room, say the bathroom. You do the same thing here with your second memory. So here we'd have Dalai Lama. Maybe he's in the shower and the boot is in the sink. I don't know. You then leave the bathroom, you walk into the living room and here's where you place your third memory. You look at the TV, you look at the carpet, you look at the couch. You imagine your memory interacting with all of those things. And then you retrace your steps from the beginning of the journey and everything will be right where you left it. It's really cool. So if you're like me and you're from, I'm in Portland now so I have a little bit more room but if you're coming from San Francisco or even here in Chicago, your memory palace might look something like this. So I would actually recommend, and this is a better method, is to go outside to make your journey. Because you have a lot more room this way. So this is a run that I do a couple times a week and I've ran it so many times that I could close my eyes and run it and I have 34 locations that I could place memories. And then I just start my run over again and I go back through and they'll all be sitting there waiting for me. And 34 doesn't seem like a ton but that's actually enough to memorize two shuffled decks of playing cards. Now explain how that works right now. Professional memory athletes need to memorize a lot of stuff and they don't wanna be building journeys that are like thousands and thousands and thousands of locations long. So they're actually able to compress their memories to take up less space. So if we instead of just coming up with a person for each of our cards, we also come up with an action and an object. For example, the first card is Michael Jordan slam dunking a basketball. The second card is the Dalai Lama praying in front of the Buddha. The third card is my wife Louisa putting a Santa hat on my dog Baxter. We can then compress those three cards into a single image, a single memory by taking the person from the first card, Michael Jordan, the action from the second card, praying and the object from the third card which is in this case my dog and then we combine those into a single image. So we have Michael Jordan praying to my dog Baxter. And the really, really, really great thing about this technique is not only have we compressed our memories to take one third of the space that they used to before but we automatically get these images that are extremely memorable and we don't even need to think about it. You know, I'm not gonna forget Michael Jordan like on a mat in my bedroom praying to my dog who's on my bed like ripping up pillows. Like it's very memorable and it's easy to retrace. So that's good. If you wanna get started, the gift shop here I checked actually has Chicago themed gift card playing cards so you can go check those out. If you start getting quicker I wanna just have shuffled decks to practice on. You could go to this URL, it's just spinning out shuffled decks of cards and it'll time you. This is also a GitHub repo that shows the people that I use for these associations. That may be a good starting point but it's pretty good to come up with your own pictures so you actually remember them. All right, that was kind of intense. We're gonna take a quick 30 second break and practice our memories. So find a person to your left or to your right to your front to your back that you haven't met and memorize their name. Now I'm gonna give you a quick reminder. Quick reminder, hold on, hold on, quick reminder. Okay, find something on their face. Attach their name to that something on their face and don't actually tell them the image you create. That's important, go. Okay, time's up, sit down, time's up. Time's up, everybody back, get down, all right. Good job. So does anybody remember this guy's name? Yes, good, that's hoping no one'd get it and I'd give you a prize but I don't have no prizes for everybody. Okay, moving on. We're now going to memorize something that is probably the hardest thing to memorize but since we've all learned how to memorize cards it's not as hard as it once was. We're going to memorize numbers. This is definitely the hardest thing to memorize but the person who sets the world record for this is able to memorize 937 random digits in 15 minutes which is four credit cards a minute. Kind of amazing, right? This guy can make bank at a restaurant. So memorizing these 16 digits isn't actually that difficult. We're gonna use a system a lot like we did for the cards because numbers are basically impossible to memorize. We're not gonna memorize numbers at all. We're gonna memorize pictures instead of numbers. So here's a grid I've made. You could do the same exact thing. Each of these squares represents a two digit number from 00 to 99. It's your task to fill all of these squares with different pictures that you can memorize every two digit number. So if you started with cards like I recommended then there's no problem just reusing those images. So numbers one through 52 can just be the same images you use for playing cards. So now you're over halfway there, you're basically done. You only have 48 more pictures you gotta come up with. Some of these are gonna be super obvious. Like 00 is a personal favorite of mine. This, every time I see it, I see a set of eyeballs. So it's really easy to remember that one. It could be eyeballs, it could be sunglasses or goggles. You might imagine like Arnold Schwarzenegger putting on shades. So then we only have now 47 numbers left that we need to memorize. And some of these will have special meaning to you. So 1984, that's the year I was born. So I imagine a birthday cake with big bright candles, burning fire. 1974, that's the year that the Rubik's Cube came out and I really love the Rubik's Cube so I'm never gonna forget that. 1991 was the year that the first episode of Doug aired. So I imagine the Quail Man, every time I see the number 91. And so that leaves us with now 44 more pictures that we need to come up with and none of these have any meaning to us whatsoever. So we'll use another mnemonic to build pictures and remind us of those pictures. And a mnemonic for this is called the major system. The major system is also known as the phonetic system because each number from zero to nine is assigned a phonetic sound. So zero is Z or Z. One is T, t, t, sorry. Two is N, nuh, nuh. Three is M or muh, muh, muh. Four is R, ruh. Five is L, luh. Six is J, juh. Seven is K or kuh, kuh. Eight is F or puh, puh. And finally nine is P. So those are all the phonetic sounds so let's break down our number real quick so we see how this works. We'll grab a number 83, this number we don't yet have a picture for and we'll apply the major system to give us a picture and be able to remind us of that picture later. So we take eight and we grab the phonetic sound for the number eight which is F and then we do the same with three so we have M. So some of you might see FM and go oh FM radio. Well that's totally fine. So your picture now for 83 could be an FM radio and that's all you need to remember that. But you could also just start sticking in vowels things that aren't part of the major system until you make a word that makes sense to you. So foam is the first word I found and this is a really good word because it's extremely visual. You can imagine being in your room just spraying foam all over the place. You're not gonna forget that. But I kept searching just to see if I could find something else and I found FIM. Does anyone know what FIM is? No, FIM is not actually a word but it sounds like FIM. Now remember this is the phonetic system so you're looking for things that sound similar not necessarily spelt the same. So 83 for me is FIM. So I imagine maybe my beautiful color scheme working on some ruby just basically sitting behind the computer it would be my memory for 83. So we could take the major system and apply it to all the rest of the pictures until eventually we have 100 unique images that are easy for us to recall either by the major system or they just have special meaning to us. So now memorizing a credit card number is just like memorizing the cards. We go through and break the number down into sets of two. So we look at 44, we grab our image for 44, we place it in the first room of our memory palace. We go to the next room, we grab the image for 85, we place that in the next room. We then move over to maybe the living room, we take the image for 34 and we put it in there and then again we retrace our steps to remember the number. And if you've taken the time to create the person, action and objects that we did for the playing cards, then the same exact compression can be used here too. So you can memorize a binary number like this, which is huge in a single image. This is one image. So when someone memorizes something like, you know, 50,000 binary digits, it's not quite as impressive when you realize this is a single image in their memory palace. The way this works is you can break it down just like you might imagine. So 001 is one, 010 is two, 110 is six, 101 is five, 111 is seven and 100 is four. So now we have three two-digit numbers, which can either be three pictures or we could compress them, right? With person from the first, action from the second and object from the third into a single image. Well, it's not as difficult as it sounds. So I'm coming up on time, so I'm going to give you something to read in the future. And that is this book here. This is by Dominique O'Brien, and he is the eight-time world memory champion. So he really, really knows his stuff. He's a horrible writer, but the techniques here are very good. So he's gonna talk about everything we talked about today and then give a little bit of advice and like practice problems for some other techniques. But they all come from the same technique of using your spatial memory. Another book if you're interested in competing or just learning more about how competitions work. This is a very popular book that you may have already read. It's Moon Walking with Einstein by Joshua Feuer, and he is a journalist that decided he'd start learning how to memorize and he ended up just winning the U.S. Memory Championships. So it's pretty impressive. That's it. I'm Chris Hunt in real life and on the internet if you have any questions. Thank you.