All language subtitles for Lecture02 Scientific Secrets for Powerful Memory

Hello and welcome back.

I hope that your memory is feeling good.

You've had a chance to memorize
those letters and numbers from the major system.

What sound goes with four are right.

What sounds?

Go with one T or D, right. Or death.

How about the other way?

What number goes with each six?

What number goes with the nine?

If this isn't easy yet, or if you don't know what I'm talking about,
then you might want to pause the video and do a little more studying.

I won't know if you have them memorized or not, of course,
but I think you'll get a whole lot more out of these next

few minutes of this session.

If you've mastered the major system, links.

For the moment, I'll presume that you have.

Let's talk
about how you can use these tools to encode groups of numbers.

The basic idea of the system is that you take two or more numbers.

We'll start easily here with groups of two
and convert them into the consonant sounds of the major system.

Then you add in as many vowels and other non-major system
sounds as you'd like to convert those sounds into words.

Once you have words, you convert them into a meaningful
and hopefully memorable image.

When the time comes to remember the numbers that you have encoded, you
just recall that image you've created and decode it back into numbers.

Let's give it a try.

Say you want to remember the number 56542911.

Now you could repeat it to yourself over and over again.

Memory scientists call this rehearsal.

Five, six, five, four, 291156542911.

You can do this over and over again,
but if you're ever interrupted or distracted, you'll likely lose it.

Even if I just say a few numbers, 7 to 8 three 623
that that's probably enough to disrupt your rehearsal long enough

that that original number is gone.

If you encode the number using the major system,
however, you can remember this number forever.

Okay, So first, let's break this number into pairs of two digits.

Five, six, 542911.

In the major system,
five six corresponds to the sound, the sounds O and or L, and then S-H.

We're going to go with L and S-H within this system.

Now you're allowed to intersperse vowels into these phonetic sounds
and then make up words.

Ellen S-H for me becomes lash. Could be something else for you.

There are a lot of words
you can make up here, but Lash is the one that comes to mind for me.

In general, you're going to want to use
whatever that first word is that comes to mind.

So I can clearly imagine eyelashes here

for our next two digits, five, four.

The major system gives us l.

R For me, I think of Leer as in someone leering at another person.

Two nine converts into an. P

I think of nap there. Someone taking a nap.

Finally one one turns into tipped to a t
that makes me think of tot as in a a teeter totter.

Okay.

So all together then our number 56542911 is lash Lear nap tot.

So we could try to encode these words
individually as as particular images.

But given the relatively small amount of information here,
the best thing to do is try to group these four terms

into a single coherent image image that we can think about for lash.

I think of someone with very, very long eyelashes.

This person this long lash person is leering at a second person.

That second person is taking a nap and the napping person is holding
a a giant tater topped kind of like a teddy bear.

Now I really want to remember this image.

So it's important that I spend a few seconds really vividly
imagining it.

I can see the odd curl of those very long eyelashes

and the really creepy looking eyes of this lash man
as he's leering at the unsuspecting nap.

And I feel some of the uncomfortable emotion
that one might have while watching this scene in real life.

The Nap man is wearing checked flannel pajamas.

He looks very cozy in his bed.

They're oblivious to this creepy,
leering man, the grease from the freshly cooked tater top

getting all over everything, making a mess of the pillow
and causing the napping man's cheeks to get shine.

Okay, so that's a pretty memorable, very detailed image for me.

I think, though, that I'll have that in mind for a long time,
probably years.

Whenever I want that number back, all I need to do is
call that image back and unpack it into the digits again.

So Lash, Leer, nap tot, That's the image that I have in mind there.

LSH and LR and NPE.

Finally t t, which in turn becomes 56542911.

Voila. Perfect recall.

My guess is that this process makes sense to you,
but it probably doesn't feel very easy just yet.

Coming up with words and combining them into memorable images
while needing to recall those number

consonant connections over and over again probably feels quite hard.

Actually.

You'll have to trust me for the moment that this will fade
with practice in particular, those number consonant relations,

those will become second nature.

The number eight will just come to feel like,
or three will just be m for you.

You'll also get better and better at generating those images
and then decoding them back into numbers.

It's just practice

as you go through your day to day.

I would urge you to try that practice.

When you read numbers on street signs, try to generate sounds and words
and then images then decode back to the number.

The speed limit on some road on your drive is 45 miles per hour.

That's r l roll of paper, maybe a a rail on a staircase.

A gallon of milk costs 376 that's M and then K or G or H

Next, I'm tempted to say mug shot, but it has a light at the end,
so I might add one to the end by accident.

I think mug then shoe is going to work for me here.

I can imagine a mug of hot liquid being poured into a fancy shoe.

Now these practice things are aren't
necessarily things that you actually try to remember in the future,

although you may find that you do.

I'm suggesting these things as practice to do
until that major system becomes very comfortable.

And second, nature, ideally

at that point you'll be able to focus not on those links
but on the information that you actually do want to remember.

Again, you should be prepared to find this challenging at first,
but within a few hours I think you'll notice it getting very easy.

And once you have it down, it's like riding a bike.

That is, it will stay easy
and just get easier and easier with additional practice.

So that's the major system for the remainder of this session.

I want to tell you about another system called the Method of loci.

Eventually, we'll come back

to discuss how the major system
and the method of loci can work together in a really powerful way.

I'll then spend a little time pondering why the method of loci works.

What is it about our brains and our species history that's led to this?

We'll finish this session
with a discussion about the capacity limits of your long term memory,

or rather the seeming lack of any limit to it.

This this complex network of hundreds of millions of neurons
and many trillions of synaptic connections.

It's really a marvel in terms of memory.

Don't worry about wasting space
with the many trivial little examples that I give you in this course.

There will be plenty of space left for memories
that you actually want to encode there in the future.

Okay. The method of loci is this other memory system.
It's like the major system.

It it takes information that you want to remember and encodes it
into a format that your brain is especially good at using.

Unlike the major system, however, there's surprisingly little
you need to do to learn this one.

The method of loci is something that you almost get for free.

The invention of the method of loci is credited to a Greek poet
named Simonides, who lived around 500 B.C.

He was commissioned to write and perform a lyric poem about a great
military victory and the general wonderfulness of the leaders involved.

So I'm honored he's recited this lyric poem at the dinner.

But afterwards he was called Outside the Building
on some urgent business.

During those few minutes that he was outside the entire structure
collapsed, killing everyone inside.

The collapse was catastrophic, with giant slabs and columns of marble
falling all around.

Not only were the people killed,
they were pulverized beyond recognition.

The party was so large, there were so many people there
that it wasn't even clear who had been in attendance.

Grief stricken families arrived in the following hours, fearing
the worst and wanting to at least claim the remains of their loved ones.

But no one knew exactly who had been where.

Simonides, in that moment, invented what's become
a staple of modern memory science, something called the method of loci.

He walked through the wreckage of this great hall
where the dinner had taken place.

Among the rubble were all of the dead bodies
and shattered remains of the grand tables and chairs

where he'd recited his poetry just several hours earlier

as he recalled his lyric poem Walking through the Hall,
which, of course, he had recited from memory.

He walked through

at least what was left of the hall, remembering who had been sitting
near him as he recited particular lines of that poem.

According to the story, Simonides was able to remember the names
and seating locations of every single person who'd been at the party.

Now, if someone had just asked same oddities to list all of the people
he could remember just off the top of his head,

he would have remembered some, but not all of them.

Somehow placing himself in the locations where he had been
when he encoded the information made it all come easily to mind.

This is an interesting story, but it's far from clear that the events
ever actually took place, let alone that same oddities was accurate.

In his naming of all these people who'd been at the party.

However, this method of loci is one of the simplest and most effective
tricks for memorizing things that's ever been discovered.

Whatever it is you want to

remember a list of Supreme Court justices shopping
list a to do list, even a sequence of numbers.

If you can tie that information to known physical locations,
then your memory for it will be dramatically improved,

dramatically improved relative to
if you simply try to recall it without those spatial associations.

Let's try it out.

I'm going to talk you through a list of items

that I need to buy at the grocery store
and describe how you could use them to memorize that grocery list.

Now, we don't have a Greek hall
made of marble to use to store our memories.

Like some oddities, but you don't need one.

Any familiar path through a familiar space
with definable locations in it will work.

Sometimes memory experts call these buildings their memory palaces.

By the end of this course,
I'll be urging you to develop several of them for your everyday use.

For me, my first memory palace was the house
in which I grew up in Media, Pennsylvania.

The path I remember starts at the end of my parent's driveway,
then progresses to the top of the driveway where a slate walkway begins.

Next is the. At the end of that slate pathway outside the front door.

Then just inside the front door.

Next is the start of the hallway.

Then my bedroom, then the linen closet across the hallway.

Then my sister's room, then my parents room, then the bathroom light.

My list of locations actually goes on and on,
but that's more than we'll need for this particular shopping list.

Demonstration.

Okay.

The list I want to remember is apples, tomatoes, dishwashing soap,

toilet paper, dish detergent, milk and orange juice.

Let's encode that list in our memories.

One of the first things

to know about memory
is that simply repeating the list over and over won't really help me.

It will work as long as I keep doing it over and over.

But if I'm ever distracted for a few minutes or in some cases
even a few seconds, some item on the list may drop out and be lost.

To remember the list, I have to make it meaningful.

I have to connect it with other things that I already know.

In this case, I'll connect the images of these items on my list
with my memory for these locations in my old house.

Okay. Apples.

So I could just imagine an apple sitting at the end of the driveway
at that first location along my memory path.

But that's not especially memorable.

I want to imagine something salient, something striking.

Recall it.
The same was true for encoding numbers using that major system

for apples.

And could you imagine the giant basket of giant red apples?

Big apples.

I'm imagining them vividly as I can hear their bright red.

They have flecks of yellow and green near their giant stems.

But the smell those giant apples can imagine their smooth, cold texture

and the rough texture of the unfinished wood
that makes up the apple basket.

There it is, sitting at the end of my parent's driveway right next
to the lamp post and the grass that probably needs to be mowed soon.

It's a very hot day in my memory palace.

I can feel the asphalt give a little under my feet.

The more vivid and striking and detailed your memory images,
the more likely it is to stick to me.

Memorable.

Okay, Apples are done. What's next? Tomatoes.

I move on to the next location in my memory palace.

That's the top of the driveway at the start of the slate walking path.

But going to imagine a large steel tub filled with tomatoes

and someone is stomping on them in their bare feet.

Julia Roberts is stomping on them.

She's smiling and saying, Remember tomatoes?

I can hear the sound of the squishing tomatoes.

This is very distinctive.
That's going into the tomatoes are well anchored.

Okay.

Onto the next stop along the memory path
outside the front door and dishwashing soap. But

Jeff Goldblum is standing there.

Not sure why he's balancing some white porcelain dishes on his head.

A very precarious while holding one plastic bottle of dish soap
in each hand and then one in his mouth.

These are strange images.

I'm producing some unusual images here, but that's on purpose.

Strange, Unexpected. Even bizarre images are the most memorable.

They're the most likely to produce
accurate recall in the future when I want it.

Okay.

Now I'm at the next location inside the front door of the house.

And I want to remember toilet paper

is 80.

Celebrities are on my mind for some reason today
because now Madonna is dancing around.

She's singing Lucky Star
while wearing clothing made entirely of toilet paper.

She's also holding a roll of toilet paper and tape.

Welcome to my subconscious, everyone.

Sorry, it's kind of messy in here.

These images are not only unusual.

In order for these techniques to be most effective,
you should try to generate images that are really striking.

Even a little racy.

Okay, Now back to our shopping list.

The next stop on my memory path here is my old bedroom.

I need to encode dish detergent.

I hope I don't can get confused with that dish soap here.

So I'm going to imagine a dishwasher running very loudly
while sitting there in the middle of my bedroom.

The water is being pumped out of the machine,
but there's no drain. It's just my bedroom.

So it's making a very big mess.

On top of that
machine is a large box of powdered Colgate dish detergent.

I'm not sure if I'll buy that brand,
but it'll be enough to trigger the item on the list from me.

Okay.

I think one more location will suffice here. I have two items left,
but I'm going to try to group them together.

I leave my room.

I open the linen closet across the hall,
and there is Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

Still with the 80 celebrities.

Tom is holding a carton of orange juice and meg a gallon jug of milk.

Tom says he likes orange juice in the morning.
Meg says she likes milk in the afternoon.

She says you've got milk.

Like the movie title. You've got mail. Okay.

So have you got the lists to recall it?
Pretty much at any time in the future.

I just have to take this imagined walk
from my driveway to the linen closet.

There's the giant apple baskets.

Julia Roberts crushing the tomatoes.

Jeff is still balancing the plates while holding the dish. Soap.

Madonna's inside with the toilet paper. In my room
is that dish detergent.

And across the hall in the linen
closet are Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan with orange juice and milk.

This method of loci works.

You need to do a bit of work.
You have to engage in some effort to memorize a list.

But something about this method of mass
memorizing is remarkably effective.

You really should try this for yourself.

Certainly after the end of this session.
But it might even be good to pause the session.

Now just to give it a shot.

First, the first thing you want to do is develop your list of locations.

I recommend using your childhood home or your current house
if you've lived there for many years.

You may actually want to walk through a particular set of locations
physically if you can.

Certainly you want to imagine them vividly.

For the list itself that you want to encode with this, create
striking images and place them those events within your memory palace.

Take the time to imagine them in detail and voila, they will stick.

Why should this work?

Why does our memory work? Well,
if we imagine events happening in locations.

In a sense, it seems like it should be harder
since we have to encode not only the shopping list,

but the list of locations and people, all the other objects,
all the weird things they're saying.

You're encoding more information a lot more, not less.

Why should the recall be easier?

The best answer that modern science can give us comes
from evolutionary psychology.

Remember, during most of the history of our species, humans
have made their living, hunting and gathering.

Our brains are very good at remembering locations
and things associated with them.

You get this ability for free.

You were born with it, not having to do much of anything to earn it.

All you need to do to improve your memory is use this great mental tool
that you have by associating information

that your not very good at remembering when considered by itself
anyway, with information that you are good at remembering.

You get a boost in performance, a big boost.

As I mentioned, one of the primary
themes of this course is to teach you to remember things better.

Hopefully have convinced you already
that you have a great memory at your disposal.

All you need to do to remember better is convert things
that are hard to remember into those things that are easy to remember.

Things like images and locations.

When you want to recall those things.

The images will come back to you easily and you can decode them
back into the information that you want to have available.

Let's talk just for a few moments about how you might combine
the major system and the method of loci together.

Eventually, once you're very familiar with both of them,
you can try that yourself.

Given how new they probably are to you,
you're likely to find that quite challenging at this point.

With practice, however, the two are very easy to combine.

For now, let me just describe how they can be used together.

There have been performers actually, that are still out there
who've made their living as minimalists, as super memory experts.

Many of them are still out there
performing feats of memory as, say, one part of a magic show.

The common trick is to memorize a very large string of random numbers
before listening to this course.

You might have been impressed

if someone looked at a page full of numbers,
say 64 random digits, and memorize them perfectly within a minute or so.

It might have seemed almost magic to you, like something that would
require photographic memory or some other very special innate ability.

Hopefully

it's become clear to you that you yourself could do that
very trick using the major system.

I've just shown you how you can memorize eight digits
and remember them with perfect recall essentially forever.

Imagine next that I place that eight digit image.

So for us, remember that was the long lash leering man
watching the guy nap with the tater top.

So imagine that event is taking place at the first location
in my memory palace there at the end of my parents driveway.

For the next eight digits.

I walk up to the next location of my memory palace
and memorize the next eight digits.

If I continue doing this to the eighth location,
I'll only really have eight things stored in my memory.

These eight events in these eight locations, but I'll then be able
to unpack them at any time that I want into those 64 digits.

Memorizing numbers can be a useful skill.

Once you've mastered this, for instance,
you won't ever forget a phone number again.

Want to remember the birthdates of your friends, their anniversaries?
No problem.

That said, my reason for telling you about this is mostly to begin
the process of explaining how human memory functions.

This is pretty impressive stuff.

Memorizing 64 digits in a few minutes.

It's also remarkably unimpressive in a way.

Until now, you might have watched someone who could look
at a piece of paper and memorize 64 numbers and then very impressed

if the person stated to you very confidently
that they have photographic memory, you might have believed them.

How else could someone encode something so quickly, so massive if their
brain couldn't just take a picture that they could look at later?

Expert mnemonics, however, consistently
say that their memories are no better than those of others.

What they practice is a skill, one
that's associated with knowledge and effort, but not with any unique

or even relatively rare mental ability.

We all know people who have excellent memories.

They remember dates, places, the answers to trivia questions.

They remember what times and places
that events are scheduled to take place.

They never have trouble remembering
where they parked their car in the giant shopping multiplex parking lot.

They remember phone numbers, even your phone number.

They meet someone once, have a brief conversation with them, and then
recognize them and remember their name when they see them months later.

Some of these people may claim that they have a photographic memory.

Most just indicate that they simply recall things well.

All of them enjoy something really wonderful and useful.

The ability to have large amounts of accurate, detailed information

available to them on a moment's notice, information
they can use to guide their behaviors to make better decisions.

Information is that information they can use to identify relations
between different pieces of information that others might miss.

In this course, I'll present a wide range of evidence
that your memory can function just as well as those people.

With those people with seemingly photographic memories.

Indeed, I'll argue that there is no such thing as a photographic memory
based on evidence collected by dozens of different

memory research labs.

What makes some people's memory so much better than others?

I'll present that.

I'll present evidence that it's not what you have up here in your head
that makes memory different.

It's how you use it.

One of the most compelling sources of evidence
for these claims comes from studying these memory experts.

People who make a hobby out of challenging themselves to perform
great feats of memory and recall

some of the most impressive mental athletes
you can find in the United States.

Compete at the USA National Memory Championships. Each year.

They participate in a competition
that includes several different memory challenges.

My favorite memory Championships event is speed Cards.

Competitors are handed a deck of freshly shuffled cards
and asked to memorize their exact order.

Their time while they study.

The watch stops
when the competitor says ready and sets down that first deck.

The next thing I have to do

to get credit for this time is rearrange
another deck to perfectly match the order of the first day.

Record here one minute and 3 seconds.

Perfect recall of the order of 52 cards in only 63 seconds.

Records like this are impressive, and it should be noted
that there are a lot of people who are just a few seconds behind them.

Do these mental athletes possess some special innate gifts?

Do they have photographic memories?

The performance of these athletes is undoubtedly impressive,
but the most interesting thing for me and people who study memory

is what they say when you ask them about their memories.

Essentially,
all of them will profess to not having any particular special ability.

None of them claims to have been born with some special ability
to remember things well.

They possess no latent
superpower that emerges in their early teens or anything like that,

quite to the contrary.

Most of these mental athletes make a point of saying
that they have no more innate memory ability than than anybody.

What makes them so good and encoding and recalling information
is how they use their memory.

They work very hard to develop memory systems
and then practice using them.

But it's not what they have in terms of memory that counts.

It's how they use it.

When someone does set a world record for a number memory,
one of those mental athletes at the USA Memory Championships,

for instance, they essentially never chalk it up to the discovery
of a special genetically endowed ability.

Usually what they've done is invented
and mastered a new and better system for encoding numbers.

For instance, when we used the major system,
we encoded groups of two numbers into letters and then words.

A real expert in
this would be able to encode groups of three numbers into words.

For instance, if I have three, five and one that turns into m l t,
which could be a malt or a mallet,

if they can think up an image with four words just like we did,
they would have 12 numbers instead of just just eight.

If they have 12 numbers in each of eight locations,
they'd have a string of 96 digits in their minds.

A great deal of research has been done on how human memory functions.

There's still many compelling theories
and a lot of unanswered questions.

But two relevant things are very clear in this domain.

The first is that there is no such thing as a truly photographic memory.

That's just not how the brain functions.

There've been many claims of photographic memory and some truly
impressive demonstrations presented to support those claims.

But essentially, every time there have been careful
studies of people claiming to have photographic memory,

it's been found that their memory exhibits
all of the same operating strengths and limitations that govern us all.

To be clear,
there are people who have much better memory performance than others,

but it's not because of a magical and mysterious brain power
which with which with which they've been born.

Another thing that's very clear in this domain

is that the things that provide certain individuals
with better memory performance than others can be learned.

People with better memory performance
do a better job of encoding, storing and then recalling information.

If you learn to do a better job of encoding, storing and recalling
information, then your memory performance can be improved as well.

If you learn to encode, store and recall information at a world class
level, then indeed you will produce world class memory performance.

That's a surprising fact to most people.

Those individuals with a great memory
don't have a fundamentally better or even different brain.

They don't have any great mental power
that a typical person doesn't have.

What they do in order to achieve their great memory
performance is to make better use of the capacities that they do have.

Now, I can tell you about these techniques
already been doing that actually, these tricks, if you will,

are things that are
I can describe, but you should know that they all require practice.

As with any course,
you should be prepared to do your homework on this one.

If you just watch these sessions straight through to the end,
you'll learn a lot about human memory.

But you won't possess a fundamentally better memory
when you wake up tomorrow.

In these first two sessions.

We've talked a lot about the overarching characteristics
of human memory, the sorts of things that memory is good at,

and the things it's not so good at.

I've described that memory works by encoding things in a meaningful way,
not as an unprocessed photograph.

We've talked about the essentially limitless capacity of our long term
memory, presuming that we manage to get things meaningfully,

meaningfully encoded into that long term memory.

And we've spent a lot of time talking about the memory power.

You can gain by converting difficult to remember information
into easy to remember formats.

In our next session,

I want to start to talk more about the specific characteristics,
the subcomponents that produce our memory.

I'll start by talking about a few brain injured patients
who've lost their memories by better understanding amnesia.

We can better understand how normal memory functions
and ultimately use it better.

One of the greatest memory difficulties for many people,
including myself here, is remembering the names of people we meet.

I'll illustrate the value of enhancing encoding of that
to describe some solutions to this difficulty.

So if you want to remember many more names much more easily
and learn some things about how your brain functions.

I hope you'll watch our next session. I'll see you then.