 Balance, balance, balance, balance. 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. So we people have been studying the human brain for hundreds of years, but we still have no idea how memory works. What we do know is that if we were to all sit down together in a room, kind of like this, and I pull out a list of random words and ask you to memorize those words, you're only going to be able to remember about four. And if we wait 30 seconds to talk about anything else, you're only going to remember two. Some of you just one, and we wait a little bit longer, and you'll forget every single word that we went through. But at the same time, if I asked anybody in this room how to get to the restroom in this building, you'd be able to tell me. And you'd be able to tell me with amazing detail. I could be outside, and you'd say, Chris, go into the door, front door. You'll see all the swag. Walk past the swag to your right's going to be the stairs. Take the stairs down to the bottom. When you get to the bottom of the stairs, take a right. Breastrooms are right there. Women's is on the left. Men's is on the right. You can all do that. So on one hand, our memories are horrible, and we joke about it all the time. But on the other hand, we were able to memorize the blueprint of this building, and we weren't even trying to do it. So memory athletes, realizing this, just use that same spatial memory to memorize everything. Not just bathrooms. So they're able to memorize thousands and thousands of digits, poetry, shuffled decks of cards, and we just tried to do this with 10 random words. So I started, and I was staring at my watch. We had the word anticipation. Does anyone remember what happened next? Clown and opera. Perfect. Then made my way over to the other side of the stage. Does anyone remember how I got here? In a car, right? Then I found something on the floor. What happened? What are the next two words? Discover orange. And then I went over here, was listening to something. What happened next? Balance. I heard somebody say it, good. And then we came back over to where we started. Sprint, count, and finally, everybody gave me a round of applause, right? So you just memorized, a lot of you in the room, memorized 10 random words, which is more than double the amount of words that psychologists say that you're supposed to be able to memorize. Pretty crazy, right? So we're going to see how to apply this to other things as well. The first thing we're going to talk about is names, because everybody says they're horrible at memorizing names. So we're going to just get this out of the way, because it's really easy. There are two things you need to know when trying to memorize someone's name. The first thing is when you meet them, actually listen to them tell you their name. I can't count the number of times this has happened even today. Like, I've met somebody five seconds later. I forgot their name, right? Our memories are not that bad. The reason you don't remember it five seconds later is because you never heard it. So this is Ryan. Everybody say hi, Ryan. Oh, sorry about that. So the first, the second thing you want to do when you memorize somebody's name is think of a word that rhymes with that person's name. So I gave you a little preview in the corner there. When I hear Ryan, I think of lion. And this is something I can easily visualize, because I can't visualize Ryan's name, right? So look at Ryan's face. Find something that stands out to you. He's made it super easy, because he's got four piercings and a tattoo on his neck, right? The first thing I notice about Ryan though is that tattoo. So I'm gonna look at Ryan's tattoo. I'm gonna think of the word that rhymes with his name, lion. And I'm gonna build a crazy story. So I might imagine a lion running in from the right-hand side of Ryan, jumping up, biting his neck, wrangling through the ground, like ripping off his tattoo. There's blood everywhere. He's screaming. It's really gross. But I will never forget his name. So every time you see Ryan, you're gonna immediately notice the neck tattoo. You're gonna remember this crazy story of a lion ripping it off. And you're gonna go, oh, lion, Ryan, hey, Ryan, how's it going? Totally cool. So don't tell anybody your stories. The second thing, the second thing we're gonna learn how to memorize is a shuffled deck of playing cards. And this is awesome for two reasons. One, it is the only thing that you're gonna be able to memorize that will actually impress your friends. Everything else is really cool, but if you memorize a shuffled deck of cards, I mean, people think you're a savant. It's crazy. So the second reason you wanna learn how to memorize a shuffled deck of cards is because it teaches you everything you need to know to compete in a world memory championship. So we'll go through that. Why is memorizing a shuffled deck of cards seem so difficult? The number one reason is because the cards all kind of look the same. Like a seven of diamonds and a seven of hearts, I could visualize those, but I could see how those would get mixed up, especially when you're trying to memorize 52 cards, right? So the trick is, instead of memorizing cards, you memorize people. So the seven of diamonds for me is Isaac Newton. The seven of hearts is Einstein. So now you need to come up with 52 different people that you can visualize, assign them to each of the 52 cards, and then remember those people, which is actually very easy if we use a little trick called a mnemonic. A mnemonic is a technique that takes information that's already right in front of your face that's already available and uses that information to remind you of the thing it is that you actually want to remember. So a card has two pieces of information. It has the value and it has the suit. Each of those has special meaning that's gonna remind you of the person that you've associated with that card. So we'll go through the values real quick. Every ace in the deck, every two in the deck, it doesn't matter if it's ace of spades, ace of diamonds, ace of clubs, two of hearts, whatever, these are all athletes. Ace is a male athlete and 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 person. They're sketchy, they've done something that not everyone agrees with. Five is a male, six is a female. You might see another pattern and that is every single odd card in the deck is a male. Every single even card in the deck is a female. We'll go through the rest, seven and eight. These are scientists, mathematicians, physicists. Nine and 10, these are people of power. This could mean political power, like superhuman power, whatever you want. And queen and king, these are a couple. So this could be a famous couple, this could be you, this could be somebody you know, this could be a girl and a guy, a guy and a guy and a girl and a girl. It doesn't even matter. And finally, Jack, there's four of these in the deck as well and these are all people of religion. So let's go to the suits real quick. As you know, there are four suits. Each of these have a special meaning too. So diamond are rich, fancy, extravagant, wealthy, shiny, whatever you think of when you think of diamond. That's what a diamond is. Heart, these are all people that you love. Family members, friends, clubs, these are bad asses. The way I remember this is I just think of like somebody with a club just like beating somebody to the ground, okay? So that's a club. A spade, you might have heard the expression like a spade is a spade. Spades are funny, they're comedians, jokesters are just funny at what they do, whatever. So now, knowing what the values of the card mean and what the suit of the card mean, it's easy to remember your people. So we're gonna memorize three cards real quickly just to see how this is done. Ace of diamonds. When I think of ace, I know ace is a male athlete and diamonds is rich, fancy, extravagant, right? So we want a rich, fancy, extravagant male athlete. The first person I think of is Michael Jordan. So the ace of diamonds for me is gonna be the Michael Jordan. It's always gonna be Michael Jordan and you can use anybody you want. The next card, Jack of Spades. Jack is a religious person. Spades is somebody who's funny. So we want a funny, religious person, Dalai Lama. This guy's a jokester if you know anything about the Dalai Lama. So my Jack of Spades is always gonna be the Dalai Lama. Last card we have is the Four of Hearts. Now Four is a female actor and Hearts is somebody we love. So it's a female actor that you love. We all have different people we're thinking of. This is actually my wife, though. Oh, sorry, I went back there. This is my wife putting a Santa hat on my dog Baxter. My wife is not an actor, but this is a reminder that you can use whoever you want for your cards. So for some reason, when I see the Four of Hearts, I think of my wife. So I just picked it because it's the first thing I thought of. That's usually the best way to go. So now we need to memorize our three different people. Now we can do this exactly like we did in the beginning with the words. That's one method to do it. We might close our eyes and imagine like a big NBA basketball court. Michael Jordan's all the way on one end. He's dribbling down to the other side. He gets the free throw. He slam dunks the ball. But for some reason, like right below the hoop is the Dalai Lama and he's praying. I don't know why, right? But the ball comes down. He hits him in the back of the head. His forehead gets clogged against the ground. It splits open. There's blood everywhere. My dog comes running out of the locker room is running through the blood. There's like bloody paw prints. My wife, Luisa's in the stands. She's screaming, no, Max, no. So now we're never gonna forget those cards. We just remember that story. It's very memorable. And we'll remember our people and be able to bring it back to the cards. But when you need to memorize a lot of things and 52 cards is a lot of things, there's a better method to use. It's called the method of Loki, also known as the journey method, also known as the memory palace. The way this works is you take a location that you're super familiar with. So for most of us, this is gonna be our house at first. You close your eyes. You imagine yourself walking in the front door and then you turn and you go into your bedroom and you look at your bed. You look at your nightstand. You look at the window and you imagine your first memory interacting with all those things. So you might see Michael Jordan jumping off your bed, slam dunking into your laundry basket or something like that. You then walk out of your bedroom. You walk into the bathroom and here is where you place your second memory. So in here you would look at the sink. You look at the toilet. You look at the shower and you put the Dalai Lama in here somehow and then you walk out of the bathroom and place your third memory in the living room. This would be my wife and my dog Baxter. You look at the couch. You look at the TV. You look at the carpet on the ground. You imagine interacting with all of those things. So to remember all your memories now, you just bring yourself back to the front door and take the same journey you did to place your memories and they're gonna be sitting there waiting for you. This works really well. It works exactly the same way as you've memorized where the bathroom is. It's automatic. Now I know a lot of you are from the Manhattan area. I've met some people from Brooklyn. I've also met some people from San Francisco. I'm from Portland. So your first memory palace might look like this. You don't have nearly as much room. But there's actually a better way to build your first memory palace anyway and that is to go outside where you have a lot more room. So this is a run that I take a couple times a week and I've done this run so many times that I have 34 different locations that I've placed that I could remember things. And 34 locations may not seem like a ton after all a deck of cards is 52, right? So you're thinking I can't even memorize a deck of cards with that. But 34 locations is actually enough to memorize two shuffle decks of cards. Crazy, right? And I'm gonna show you how. Now memory athletes memorize so much stuff that they've actually devised ways to compress their memories to take up less room. So if instead of just coming up with people for each of our cards, we also come up with an action and an object, then we can compress our memories to take up less room. So the first card isn't just Michael Jordan. It's Michael Jordan slam dunking a basketball, person, action, object. The second card is not just the Dalai Lama. It's Dalai Lama praying in front of the Buddha, person, action, object. Third card is not just my wife Luisa. It's my wife Luisa putting a Santa hat on, my dog Baxter, person, action, object. So now to compress, we take the person from the first card, the action from the second card praying, the object from the third card, my dog Baxter, and we build one picture using those three things so we have Michael Jordan praying to my dog Baxter. We can then take that one picture and move it into a single room in our memory palace. So the reason why this is so awesome is our memories are now taking up one third of the space they were before and we automatically get these crazy images that we're never gonna forget. Cool. So if you wanna get started with this right away and you're too lazy to go out and buy a deck of cards, you can check out chrishunt.co slash cards which is just gonna give you cards. Shuffled decks of cards and it'll time you as you try to memorize them. The GitHub repo for this is also gonna show you the associations I use for the cards. You could use that as a starting point but it's really gonna work better if you use the first person that comes to your mind. Cool. So we're gonna take the next 30 seconds as a little break. I want you to find a person in front of you, behind of you, to the left of you, to the right of you and memorize their name. Go. Okay, we're back in action. So good job. Does anyone remember this guy's name? Nice! Good job. All right, round of applause. See, if only one person got that, you woulda got a prize. But everybody got it, so really nice. Okay, so now we're gonna move on to our last thing here. This is what some people think is the hardest thing to memorize and that is numbers. Now the person who's the best at memorizing random strings of numbers is able to memorize 937 random digits in 15 minutes, which is about four credit cards a minute. That's pretty awesome, right? So the same technique that he uses in that everybody else that memorizes number uses is really simple. What you wanna do is make a grid, just like I've made for you here, it has 100 squares. Every square represents a two-digit number from zero, zero to 99. What you need to do is think of a unique picture for each of those squares, because instead of memorizing numbers, you're gonna be memorizing pictures. Now if you did what I said earlier and started with cards, then you're already over halfway done because you can reuse those people. So numbers one through 52 can be the same people that you've already thought of, so that's already done. So now you only have 48 more pictures you need to come up with. And some of those are super obvious. So zero, zero is one that's really obvious to me. Every time I see this, I see a set of eyeballs, and I can't unsee that. So you might think of eyeballs or sunglasses, maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger like putting on shades, something like that. Other numbers might have meaning to you as well. So when I see 84, I think of 1984, which is the year I was born. So I think of a birthday cake. Big candles, big flames, pink frosting, it's a very vivid image. Another number that stands out to me is 74 because in 1974, the Rubik's Cube was released and I'm addicted to the Rubik's Cube, so I'm not gonna forget that. Another number that stands out to me is 91 because in 1991, the first episode of Doug aired and Quail Man is super memorable. Anyone seen Doug before? Yeah, it's the base. Wow, a lot of people have seen Doug. Yeah, so I'm not gonna forget this. I don't know why I know this year. So we still have 44 squares left that we need to fill with pictures, but it's not that hard to do because we have another mnemonic that we can use to build those pictures. This is called the major system. It's also known as the phonetic system. The way this works is each number gets assigned a phonetic sound. So zero is the sound for z, z. One is t, t, two is n, n, three is m, m, four is r, r, five is l, l, six is j, j, seven is k, eight is f, and finally, the last number, nine is p. Okay, so all you gotta do is grab a number out of that grid that you don't have a picture for yet. We'll grab the number 83, bring it up and replace each number with the phonetic sound that it represents. So eight gets replaced with f or the sound for f, three gets replaced with m, and then you try to think of a picture. So some of you might see FM and go, oh, FM radio, right? So that's perfect, use it. 83 for you could be an FM radio. You might imagine an old school radio with big knobs, yet you're turning it, it's very visual. But if you don't see FM, that's okay. The next thing you wanna do is just start sticking in vowels and try to make a word. So the first word I saw was foam. And foam is a really good word because it's very visual. I can see myself spraying pink foam all over the room, getting on my bed, getting on my window. I won't forget that. But it's also good just to keep searching to see if you can find something better. So the next word I found was FIM. Does anyone know what FIM means in English? FIM is not a word in English. But it sounds like VIM, right? Remember, this is the phonetic system. You're looking for words that sound like it, not that are spelled like it. So 83 for me is VIM, and that's very easy to visualize. I imagine my color scheme, writing rubies, sitting in a cafe, something like that. So you go through and you fill in the rest of the squares with pictures using the major system, or if some of them stand out using pictures that you've come up with. After you've done that, the hard part's over. Memorizing numbers is now super easy. You do it just like cards. So take a credit card, you can break it down and set some two digits. Grab your image for 44, place it in the first room of your memory palace. Move on to the next two digits, 85, place that image in the second room of your memory palace. Then go to the next two digits, place that in the third room of your memory palace. And if you've taken the time, like you did with the cards, to come up with a person and an action and an object, then you can use the same compression for numbers. So when you see a binary number that's huge, like this, this can actually be memorized with one picture in your memory palace. Pretty amazing. The way it works is you break it down in chunks of three. So 001 is one. 010 is two, 1106, 101 is five, 111 is seven, and 100 is four. And now you're just memorizing three two-digit numbers. And you can compress this into one image using person from the first number, action from the second number, and object from the third number. Pretty cool. So now it's not quite as impressive when you hear that someone can memorize 5,000 random digits, but it's still pretty impressive. If you wanna review any of the techniques that we learned or see how to apply this to other things, I recommend you check out Domenico Bryan's Improving Your Memory week by week. Domenico Bryan has won the World Memory Championships eight times, so he really knows what he's doing. His writing skills are horrible, but these techniques are really good. Another book you might wanna check out is Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foyer. A lot of you may have already read this because it's super popular. Joshua Foyer is a United States journalist. He decided he wanna learn how memory athletes memorize all this stuff. So he talked to a bunch of athletes hung out one for especially long, went to compete in the US Memory Championships and won it. So this book is about his progression, how the competition works. If you have any questions about anything memory related or anything else I've talked about, I'm Chris Hunt in Real Life and on the internet. Thank you.