Anthony Metivier

26:59You give it from memory. You tell us what you learned about the experience. I think that will be the ultimate change to my teaching, that it enables people to self-reflect on what they memorized, why they memorized it in a way that we can record and share with the world. When you would teach before doing the boot camps, I imagine it's from a more theoretical place. And now when you have feedback, are there any things that you've noticed, wow, I get a lot of questions about this and I wasn't really covering this when I was teaching it before? I'm not often surprised by new questions. As in martial art or as in chess or as in music, there seems to be a core number of questions that come up over and over and over again.

27:41But what I do get that's often quite a surprise more often is just interesting ideas that people have for how that they're going to proceed. And then they ask me, basically the way they frame their question is, how likely do you think this idea is going to work? And I almost always say, there are no memory palace police. Go, experiment. And then if it works, tell everybody about it. And I don't judge it. I don't prejudge it. Are all of the memory techniques rooted in a visual system? No, that's a really hard thing. And I mean hard in terms that it's challenged a lot of people and blocked them out of using memory techniques.

28:18Because it seems, in my view, to have emerged in the 20th century with the memory competitions and some of the vaudeville showmen who would do various stunts. And then people like Harry Lorraine and so forth kept using picture, visualize. But in the ancient books, it's not really that way at all. It's about deep sensory lived experience and thinking. And image and imagination, for some of the Renaissance memory writers, imagination meant memory. It was not so clean, the vision between imagination and memory. So it's not really a visual thing at all. Of all of the techniques that you are familiar with and that you use, what would you say is the oldest one?

29:03I guess it's probably the memory palace, but the memory palace, I believe, is just a form of association. So association is probably the oldest. Do you always have a number associated with each location, or is it more open than that? Yeah, you can have an open system without numbering, or you can make it a bit more closed. You can letter the different locations inside of a memory palace. It depends on what your goal is, but if you have particular goals, then numbering would make sense. If it's a different goal, then lettering them might make sense. And if you have another goal, keeping them open.

29:37I tend to keep them open for most of what I memorize because I don't invent memory palaces and I don't choose locations that I have to struggle to remember. So the journey that I just make a quick little drawing or a sketch and I just make sure that I don't have to think about it. but I don't have to have some work involved. It's just in that location, that room was there. It has four corners and four walls. I'm going to start right here and go around in a circle. And so labeling it is just an additional cognitive load that turns it into a kind of memorized palace as opposed to a memory palace, which not to be dogmatic about it, but if we were going to be, a memory palace is based on what's in your memory and you don't enhance it.

30:18You don't elaborate it. You don't cause it to become a memory task. You just ground what you're doing on what you remember and how you would move through there so that the maximum mental effort can go on laying the associations so that you can remember sometimes very complex things so that more you can place your mental energy on the imagery and not worry about the memory palace. It's like a canvas. The painter doesn't want to be constantly thinking about, okay, so it's not paint by numbers. Like, okay, so there's 96 and there's 97. It's not like that. You want to be in command of that canvas because it's already you.

30:53we could say that the palace is a location yeah you would even say that a memory palace is a location-based mnemonic and in terms of location do you use the same location for all of your palaces no no far from it i use as many as i can and i've i've been lucky and fortunate to have been around the world but i know some people don't have that that luxury but from a spatial memory perspective you want to use as many different places as you possibly can. Do you have categories of, I don't know if I'm going to remember this kind of a list, I'll use this type of a palace? Yeah, you can do that. And so if I'm going to do this kind of list, it depends on what is the list.

31:35And one thing that might be helpful is that I'm not aware of anything we would ever memorize that isn't a list. Is everything a list? It seems like in some ways a sentence is a list essentially. Yeah, that's an example I often give because people use it as an objection to say, I can't do this. And it would just be me ending up memorizing lists. And I said, no, that's the solution to all of this. And it may be overthinking it, but we live in the arrow of time. And so when I memorize a speech, which I've done, I'm actually just reciting a list of paragraphs. And in each of those paragraphs is a list of sentences.

32:10And in each of those is a list of words. And even then there's a list of letters that form the words. So whether it's the Dirac equation in physics or whatever it is, it's just a list. And that's very freeing to understand that. Yeah. If you memorize a speech, if you were to ad lib in the middle of the speech, could you still come back and continue the speech? Or once you break, it might be hard to come back. Yeah, you can. That happened to me, actually, when I was giving a speech. People laughed at a time. They didn't laugh when I planted a joke, and then they laughed when I wasn't expecting it.

32:45And I looked like a deer in headlights for a second, and I see it on the video sometimes. And I got back to it because I knew exactly where to go in the memory palace. How do you think most people think about memory? I wish I knew. I wish I knew how they experienced it. And I feel maybe there's an eternal present coming where we will know how others experience memory. And in a way we do, but I don't want to assume that I'm correct in that. But that's kind of what our books and our music and our art is, is a way of experiencing how others experience memory. But I wish I just knew better. It would be amazing.

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35:26What are the different memory techniques that you're aware of? uh well there's the memory palace there's linking which i think memory palaces are a form of linking or association there's rhyming like one is a bun two is a shoe three is a b you could have in in the corner of a room a bun and then that's going to remind you that that's the first item and then the second item is is two is a shoe so that's rhyming there's basically alphabetical peg words So you're prepared in advance that for every letter A, you've instantly got Adam Sandler. For every letter Z, you've instantly got Billy Zane. You can even get more granular on that with what's called a double alphabet.

36:06So you could have like Andre Agassi is your AA. And then someone named Albrecht Borenstein or whatever, just to make something up, would be your AB. And then you go AC, AD, and you go all the way through the alphabet from ZA and ZZ. So ZZ top would be an easy one for ZZ, but you go all the way back through those. And some of the memory competitors who want to be really fast, that is indeed what they do. And then there's what's called a major system, which allows you to link the alphabet to the numbers 0 to 9. And then you can further develop that into what's called a 0, 0 to 99 PAO, where you would have an image for every digit from 0, 0 to 99.

36:47Do you have a symbol for numbers from 1 to 100? Yes, yes. And I use them pretty much every day. Wow. Can you walk me through them? Sure. So 00 is either Dr. Seuss or Thomas Zas. And the rationale for that is that zero is associated with a soft C, S or Z. So when we have 00, Dr. Seuss is S and S. Then for 01, I have SAD, which is the tragedy mask. But to make it more alive and real, I just used William Shatner, who played Oedipus Rex in a production where he's wearing a sad tragedy mask. Then you go to two is Sun. I used the poster for Sunshine, the Danny Boyle movie, I think, directed it. For three, I use Sam because S and M.

37:34How did you come up with these associations? I'm using the major system. So maybe better go back. Yeah. So the major is very old. It's premised in something called the Katapayadi, which is an ancient Indian system where you link numbers to consonants. And then you form words out of the consonants. So zero is associated with soft C, S or Z. One is associated with T or D. Two is with N. Three is with M. Four is with R. Five is with L. Six, you get options. Ch, J, Sh, J, and maybe some others. Seven is a K or hard G. Eight is an F or V. Nine is a B or P. So now back to 00 being Dr. Zeus, S and S, and then SAD, 1 is D or T.

38:21So the 0 is the S, and then the D in SAD is T or D. Now, if we just skip to 99, the singer from Ghost sometimes refers to himself as the Pope. So 9 is a B or P, and so 9, 9 is PP, so I get Pope, and that's who I think of. and I can hear some of ghost music now as I do it, which is the pleasing effect of this. Isn't there also a version where there's a symbol with what the numbers look like? Oh, yes. That's number shape. And there's someone who made or shared a version, I think he calls it the shaper system. I think he has two Guinness World Records named Dave Farrow, and he has a slightly more, at least in my mind, it's a slightly more elaborate shape system.

39:07and he applies that to playing cards as well. Often it's quite mysterious what the memory competitors, how that they're interpreting it. But there's a very interesting book called A Question of Memory by David Berglis, who was an astonishingly well-accomplished neminist. And he said in A Question of Memory that everybody has to interpret the ancient tradition of memory in their own way. And in a way, how else could it be? It's just a sentence I've never forgotten. Wow. I'd love to hear more about that book. Sounds great. Yeah. Have you heard of David Burglass? No. I think he was a kind of mentor or at least a strong influence on Darren Brown and that style of mentalism.

39:49And what he would do is he would just give very, very strong demonstrations of memory as part of what he's doing, but legitimate real magic. And so in A Question of Memory, he's just teaching the mnemonics that he used, which we've been covering now. And he has some exercises there with faces so you can practice memorizing the names of the faces that are pictured in the book. But what was most interesting to me about the book was the theory part at the end where he kind of describes what you're trying to get to. And he calls it the Kennedy effect. I think he says the Kennedy effect without the violence.

40:29where you want to, when you're using memory palaces or you're just using linking without memory palaces, you want to experience that as vividly as you can to the effect that it has that kind of feeling of having been a historical event that you will not write out of your memory. And then he goes from there into some intellectual noodling about what the nature of memory is and how different people need to learn it. I just love that book. It's fantastic. Can you explain the shapes and the numbers? So the one that I built for myself is zero. I have a donut and I usually have Homer Simpson doing something with the donut.

41:04So I remember that, that it's a zero association. One, I have a candle. Two, I have a swan. Three, I either have open handcuff or I have a mustache that's on its side to look like a three. Four is a sailboat. Five is a seahorse. Six is a fishing hook. Seven is a boomerang. Eight is a snowman And a nine is a golf club. And when you get past nine, do you use multiple images or no? That's where I go to the zero, zero. Because 10 is the don't tase me, bro. Because one is a T and zero is an S. It's worth it to have the multiple systems and just switch between them. Because if you have a zero, zero to 99, you asked about, do I have it to 100?

41:45Technically I do, but it's actually two different systems. because when I get to 100, rather than having images for three-digit numbers, if I have to deal with a three-digit number, I will use the Pope. Let's say it's 994. Rather than trying to have a three-digit image, I'll just have the Pope on a sailboat because sailboats look like four. And it just makes it much more economical because some people do. I think Florian DeLay called it the millennial system. And he had images all the way up to, I think, 999, or maybe it was even higher than that. That sounds great, though. Combining the two seems like a simple and smart way of doing it.

42:23It's a principle of chunking also. The easier you can make the chunking, probably for most learning tasks, the easier it's going to be and the more successful. But there's another thing that I teach people that I use quite a bit called a bridging figure. So when I'm memorizing something, whenever I can to reduce the cognitive load and increase the association in a line, I will have a figure carry more information. And that sometimes has to do with how I craft the list. So if there's a bunch of words that start with A, B, then I'll have Abraham Lincoln going across as many stations in that memory palace as possible.

42:59If I'm memorizing key points from a book, and that book's by Aristotle, then I'll try to imagine Aristotle going through as much of it as I can. And if I need to change the figure, I'll sometimes even imagine him passing the baton to the next person as if it's a relay race. But it's always alphabetically guided. And often what I do, and this is one question I get all the time. It's like, why do you focus so much on the alphabet? It's because it's there. I mean, if I wanted to use a house across the street and it's 32, well, three is M, two is N, 32 makes the word man. And I always use Johnny Cash because he was the man in black.

43:35So even though it's a number on that house, I have a name for it. I have a word. And then if I wanted to memorize an ancient mantra in Sanskrit, which is the, you know, man, so I can start right there. So that's bringing together the alphabet starts with M and the first word starts with M, even though it's based on a number. And the alphabet is the list of 26 shapes that we all already have memorized. Exactly. It's probably the longest list that most people have memorized. Yeah. Other than the productive ability to count in the thousands quite readily, But there you've memorized a combinatory system.

44:19Yeah, I was told at one point that the reason that phone numbers were seven digits was because that's the most that people could remember. Yeah, that's the chunking principle. So it's even not that it's seven digits, it's that it's three plus four, because we have a limit of three and four. And even our visual memory apparently has that limit of three to five items or something like that. So we have a perception that we see the world the way that we see it. But apparently our brain is actually just seizing on three to five items. And then from there, anticipating what we expect to see, which is kind of a wild thing.

44:54It's really interesting. I feel like in some ways, knowing that would make sense of why two people can experience the same thing yet come back with a different list of what they saw, because there are so many things to look at and we each get our three to five and they might not match. Yeah. And it may even be part of why we so easily change our own memories. And why we need external documentation so much to remind ourselves, because that external documentation can help us see the picture that we incorrectly saw and then recorrect it, so to speak. What do we know about memories of things that didn't actually happen?

45:32So there's confabulation, which is when you just make stuff up or it's based on a variation of something that never happened. And so there's court case things that they've had to get into in terms of false witness testimonies where that person will feel legitimately that they do remember that. But it's either confabulated out of something that happened that's become totally transformed or just sort of invented. But another thing that just recently came out, the researcher's name is Paul Garrett, and he is doing stuff about what's called fuzzy memories. So we tend to think that our fuzzy memories can't help us in any way.

46:10But the research suggests that actually, if you leave it to chance, you have a better than chance way of getting accurate answers based on fuzzy memories. But in terms of memories that don't exist or past life memories, I kind of have to refer to what it is that we know or what scientists are working on to try to think about that. But it kind of comes back also to that idea. Is memory nested in consciousness or is consciousness nested in memory? Or is that the wrong question? Are they somehow intertwined and there's spooky action at a distance going on all the time? Stuff like that. Would you say there's a creative side to memory?

46:47Certainly there is. The immediate gut response, though, is that if you're memorizing something, you want to be generative or combinatorial so that you can memorize the material. And I mean, I shouldn't say you want to. I don't mean to say anybody should do it in any particular way. But in terms of the kinds of effects that myself and other neminists have achieved, a lot of it has to do with constraint. So is Shakespeare being creative when he writes a sonnet? Yes. But also he's being generative because he's accepting these rules, like iambic pentameter. So it's kind of a little bit of both, actually.

47:23It's not that it's not creative. But by setting up your systems in advance, you can forego the energy of creation in the moment and just use more or less pure combination. How does memory change our understanding of the world? Well, that's an ongoing process. There's a guy named Florian Neukart I saw in New Scientist some months ago, and I haven't been able to interview him yet. But he thinks that maybe dark matter or whatever is memory. And if that proves true, then that would help me answer my question about whether consciousness is nested in memory or vice versa. People either don't think about their memory at all.

48:02They just are just going about their lives. And in a way, we are just deeply, intimately involved in memory regardless of what we think about it. And then there's the implications of computer memory and how that maybe you could train an AI to use memory palaces to better. I don't even know what memory is still. I'm still trying to figure out just what that word even means. What are the hardest things to forget? And what are the hardest things to remember? Well, for me, the hardest things to forget are when I get on some kind of loop where, due to the way my brain ticks, either from bad LSD experiences when I was a kid or whatever.

48:40I live in a kind of Philip K. Dick world sometimes, or maybe I shouldn't attribute it to him, but kind of like a paranoia sometimes. so that if that gets switched on, it can be very difficult. But luckily I have these mantras that I've memorized that really help a lot with that. And then in terms of what's difficult to memorize, I deliberately try to find the most difficult things. And right now I'm working, I've only just started, but working to memorize Tao Te Ching in Mandarin. And I have to coach myself because why am I even trying this? It's rather vast, but I've done it before with Sanskrit to quite a volume.

49:16And so, so far, so good. Just going at a bit of a slower pace, but it's very difficult. And the Sanskrit that I've memorized, I also went through this thing of like, why are you doing this? And this is so much stuff that I just am able to use that repelling through relaxation and then just get on with it. Do you speak those languages or are you learning them phonetically? No, I don't speak them as such. I have done some study in Mandarin, so passing level three in Mandarin doesn't mean anything really. but I speak a little bit of Mandarin every day at home with my wife and I don't speak Sanskrit.

49:50I don't know who I would speak Sanskrit with. That doesn't mean I can't memorize the sound of it and the gist of what I'm memorizing. With Atma Boda, I get the gist of the individual pieces, but also the gist of the whole thing. And in fact, I don't think I ever would have understood what was going on in these texts if I hadn't memorized them because I'm just not that sharp. But by memorizing it, it's like a fine wine that just rolls around in your head a little bit. And then you go, oh, that's what they're talking about. So my strongest language is German. And I just learn these texts in these languages and make sure I get the gist of what I'm doing.

50:28I haven't tried it yet, but I'm told that you could have a conversation in any language with AI, and that would be a good way to do your conversational testing. Yeah, that's interesting. There's a technique that precedes the AI called laddering. And that was one of the first things that I did is I asked ChatGPT to teach me Latin or tutor me in Latin in German. And when I first started with Mandarin, we didn't have ChatGPT, but I was in Berlin and I deliberately went and purchased all my Chinese instructions in German so that I was able to improve German while I was learning Mandarin. And that's called laddering.

51:06And that's a person named Benny Lewis. I heard that from him. He wrote a book called Fluent in Three Months and really interesting guy. Does laddering work for anything beyond language? Yeah, probably. Is it Victor Wooten who's the bassist who often talks about martial arts, applying martial arts? I don't know that he's actually a martial artist, but it seems that he has enough chops in that world to sort of think through how you could ladder those two together. And I'm sure there's many examples of artists who put various disciplines together that are diverse enough that they're not quite necessarily art, but they become art when they're put together.

51:42And that's kind of the question of polymath, I guess, being skilled in multiple areas. And then if you have a unifying vision, do you bring them to the service of that? Or is it just like a chaotic polymathy where you're just racking and stacking without putting them together? But no, I think you can ladder for sure well beyond language learning.

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53:39is it easier to learn something you're interested in for example if there's a poem that you love and you want to memorize that versus a list of the same number of words that you have no connection to yeah this scientist i was just talking with two days ago paul garrett i asked him Why don't they put mnemonists who love language learning into brain scans so that we could answer that question? They get people to use mnemonics to learn vocabulary and they have a higher rate of retention. But whether the enjoyment factor actually changes things, I don't know. But for myself, it's that kind of repelling principle.

54:16I try to not really care whether I'm having fun or not. It's do I want to do this? And then there's going to be days when I'm having fun with it. There's going to be days when I'm not. And does it in the long run, does it make it better or faster or easier or more effective if I'm having fun? I have to say in the grand scheme of things, I've memorized a whole lot of stuff that I have no interest in. But man, do I ever have a lot of fun that I have the outcome. I kind of save the whether it's easy or not for later. And I just enjoy the swimming pool of accomplishment. Tell me about the mantras that you use when your brain makes too much noise.

54:51there's four key ones and a fifth that i kind of stopped using because it just started not feeling quite right but they are the atmoboda which i don't have the entirety of the atmoboda but but just enough to work then there's a piece called ripugita which is an extract that gary weber put together in a book called evolving beyond thought there's upadeza sharam and the song celestial well the song celestial is the one that i i put aside the other one that i'm looking for is the nirvana shatakam i think it's sometimes called atma shatakam and that's the one i mentioned earlier with the johnny cash across the street manobu jahankara and i rotate between them depending on you know what exact remedy i think i need are you focusing on the sound or on the meaning it depends because i don't always do it out loud so it has a different effect if you do it quietly than if you do it out loud.

55:46I was just telling somebody the other day, I do it at the beach when I also do qigong moves, or sometimes I'll have to do it before I even start any kind of qigong because I won't be quiet enough yet. So it's like an inner gong to sing out loud. And then after it's done, there's this vibration that allows you to focus on the vibration so that the mind isn't there as much, or even sometimes it feels like it's not there at all. but there's a different effect when you do it quietly and the meaning yes sometimes like if i have to use it i will in the ripu gita the first lines basically mean that that you know your mind is like a little untrained boy and it's kind of a funny image when you think about it that way and then further down the track it's like a real thought is as rare as a rabbit with horns and that can just lighten the mood immediately but not necessarily if i do it in the sanskrit I have to remind myself that that's what I'm saying.

56:44And then I can see the levity and the humor and the tragic comedy and some of the things in life that get the engine started. Do you use it silently as well? Yeah, frequently. Often when I'm walking. I really don't want to be thinking all the time, except for when it's productive. I work on various books and so forth. And so then that I think is good thinking or planning thinking, et cetera, is good thinking. But I will ruminate. I would much rather be thinking through these things that I've thought through hundreds of times than these thoughts that are never going to be productive of anything because they're, I mean, Eckhart Tolle talks about this, this sort of madness of the insanity of it all.

57:25Yeah, I keep working at it because some of the other techniques that he talks about just don't quite work for me. The idea of sitting like a cat, you know, waiting for what mouse is going to come out. I love that as a concept, but I have to be more proactive about that. Do you tend to say the mantras at the same speed? No, actually. There's different variations that have emerged. I don't know if that's a regional thing or if a tactical thing, but I will use them tactically quite differently. So to give you an example, that manobu jhankara jhitaninam. It can be manobu jhankara jhitaninam. I'm just imitating the singing that I've heard on different videos.

58:03But sometimes I will get that more cadenced one. But if I'm really not pushing through the noise, then I'll switch how that I do it, either out loud or even in my mind. And that's just a cool thing to know, that different people have produced videos where they chanted in different ways. And you can have more than one version in your toolkit to draw upon. What's memory's relationship to magic? Oh, it's so huge because, I mean, if we're talking about magic in terms of illusions, you have to learn a variety of processes. the actual mechanisms that make illusions work. You have to think about where you're going to, the blocking, either blocking in terms of your body in front of an audience or on a stage, many, many dimensions to be remembered there.

58:50You have your patter, whatever you're going to say, you have audience management. And then if you're using a memorized deck as part of your routine, lots and lots of relationships to magic for sure. I probably haven't even gotten started. In performance of magic, there's the relationship between magic and memory, like someone like Harry Lorraine or Darren Brown. That may be a deep historical relationship that has to do with the role of images on cards in how that whole thing emerged. So I don't know the whole history of how the tarot may have become the standard set of playing cards that we have here today.

59:31But let's just say that that relationship is there. those people who were using those cards were using them for magical purposes in the sense of transformation personally or some sort of inner alchemy and whatnot. And then if they really were doing cups and balls back in ancient Egypt or whatever, I mean, they would have needed to remember those moves as much as we need to remember them today. The choreography aspect of it is what you're describing. Yeah. And multiple levels of it because it's not just your choreography, it's the choreography of the gaze of the spectator or the multiple spectators.

1:00:06And then it's also memory management. So most of my magic performance history is the after show parties when I was on tour with a band and just hearing from people say, do that thing again, where you make the watermelon come out of the tiny cup. And it's never happened. Now I know why that they have that memory because it was a, rather large orange that came out of a small cup. But I was later telling them, if you really want to see something, you should see Gatso when he takes a melon, right? But it was never a watermelon. It was more like a cantaloupe that I told them, but in their memory. So now I did that just inadvertently, but many magicians will do that on purpose and they will have slight of mouth in order to manipulate future recall of what happened.

1:00:56Do you think memory has gotten more or less important in today's world? I feel it's gotten significantly more important. The exact ratio that it plays out in our lives relative to its importance to corporate storage systems and so forth, I think is one of the key things that we constantly need to be asking, or at least it's on my mind quite a bit. And I have a feeling it's going to get even more and more important. And I'm sort of looking to when exactly schools will return to complete oral testing, just because writing will have a different relationship altogether. And in that case, then I imagine memory training may come into a kind of guild format as part of schools or be more essential to schools.

1:01:44If not central to schools, it'll have more memory training schools. And there are. When I've been in Spain, there's these sort of little centers I see that teach memory. But that's also where Juan Tamariz lives, which is the king of the memorized deck, if ever there was one. What do we lose when we offload our memory to a device like using GPS or a Rolodex instead of memorization? We have to kind of think about what did we ever have? you know like how many of us were so skilled with using the sun to figure out the directions and so forth and what do we remember of those people i often think of that because i think about my dad and so forth and i remember using maps and whatnot but i don't remember my dad ever like telling the time of day by the sun or so forth i think part of the problem is is that we don't really in our time have an awareness of what we've lost so then what is it that we lost so i think part of what we're losing is a bigger question.

1:02:39We may be losing archives. We may be losing people whose stories and experiences needed to be recorded, but weren't. And then we can't. So we're losing all those sorts of things. But in terms of GPS, yes, we may be losing spatial orientation in a way that could deeply harm us. And then that could harm our ability to use memory techniques. And that might be part of why when I started teaching this, people didn't have the exact struggles they have now, they were much more readily able to adapt it. But we're also losing our attention and our focus. It's such a pleasure to go around the world and be in the car or be on the street walking and be attendant to it, as opposed to in this screen world where you're not now engaged in the world.

1:03:25So we may lose the world, basically. That's a huge risk. Krishnamurti said, once you teach a child the word bird, they'll never truly see a bird again. It's the idea that when we label things, we make them smaller. Does memorizing undermine our ability to know things? Quite possibly in some circumstances. I totally can see that. One dimension of that is studying for the exam. And this whole series of even entire countries that are just devoted to, if you can pass this exam, then you've written your ticket in life. And it just kind of degrades itself in so many ways, because now you have all these workers and bureaucrats and stuff that are there by virtue of having memorized something once upon a time, and they didn't care about it.

1:04:19You know, so it can be that information just becomes a meaningless weapon, basically. So that's even less than the meaning being degraded. Now it's supercharged in some very negative ways. Tell me about memorizing faces. Well, the best that I've come up with to help myself with that was in some research I read many years ago, and it was to look very closely at faces. And they found that people who would relate the eyes to a kind of infinity symbol, like an eight on its side, and a nose to an upside down seven, they would tend to have better facial recall. So I've played around with that since.

1:04:59I don't really have a hard time remembering faces per se, but that has been interesting to experiment with and share. For people with face blindness, that's maybe something to think about and try. I had a professor, now that you mentioned it, named Don Summerhays who passed away and he was going blind. And his strategy for navigating this is he insisted each year or each semester on taking photographs of the students exactly where they were sitting, and then that they would sit exactly where they were sitting. And then he would have the photograph so that he would be able to map out who was where.

1:05:36And that memory always stuck with me. That's another way of doing it. Can you tell me more about the eight and the seven? I may be just turning the science in my memory into what I wanted it to be rather than what they were saying. The way I applied it was literally if you're looking at a person, You would maybe put like a raccoon mask on them, on their eyes, or just really focus on the distribution of their eyes relative to the idea of an eight on its side or an infinity symbol. And then the seven would be, if a seven is very, very sharp and it's upside down and it curves onto that nose, what is the relationship there?

1:06:15so that if you wanted to recall it later and really work out the contours of that nose, you would have something to compare it against so that your memory wasn't just your memory of what you perceived, but perceived in association with something else. For example, you could see three faces next to each other and you would visually place the same infinity sign over three sets of eyes and then see, are the eyes smaller? Are they bigger? How do they fit in that picture? Yeah, that's how they did it in the study. I don't exactly understand properly, probably, but that's how I did it. And then I would go back and think, okay, so what was that relationship between the eight and the seven with the eyes?

1:07:00And then I've shared that with others. And they've said that that has given them a little bit of a boost for their desire to remember faces better. But it might just be that the act of doing that just gets you to pay more attention to the face in a way that you wouldn't have paid at all, right? So you could then extend it. What else could I do? Could I imagine doing a little thing like this to try to figure out with your fingers how much space is between the chin and the head? Or maybe you go and study some Da Vinci formulas and figure out what the box would be that Da Vinci might impose over there.

1:07:35And there's lots of different things that you could do. How would someone like Harry Lorraine or Kreskin memorize 500 names based on people's faces? I never got to talk to Kreskin, but I did talk with Harry Lorraine. He insisted that he didn't use a memory palace, which I found quite bizarre. Because what he would do is he would place an image on the person's face. So if it was Charles Cabbage, he would have like a big cabbage hanging on that person's face. Or he would try to find, let's say it's a boxer who just has those sort of cabbage ears. He would use that and hang it on their face. And he would do that at the clip of 500 in some of these demonstrations, if not more.

1:08:14I think 500 was one of the big demonstrations I saw. And I said, but Harry, how is that not the memory palace technique? Oh, he would do his thing. He was so against the idea that that had anything to do with it. But it has to do with it in at least two regards. He's naming the people where they stand, which is where he memorized them. And he's placing images in a very specific location on their face. I don't know if he had other techniques or strategies, but that's how he teaches what he did. And that is how a lot of people do it. And when I do demonstrations and I memorize everybody's names, the only thing I change is I don't use their face because I want to be really focused on them.

1:08:51And I'll place my associations above their heads or on their shoulders. Tell me about that. That's really fascinating. Well, the 8-7 experiment aside, normally when I meet people, I want to be just undivided from them. Even if I'm memorizing little things that they mention or whatnot, I'd rather use their body, but not their face. I don't want to create some sort of interstitial screen between myself and another human. It quote unquote never worked for me to do it in the first place. To me, it's a kind of connection thing. So I've always used or worked out very early on to use the space above the head or the shoulders.

1:09:31Also, I could imagine it putting the person in a setting. Like if you meet someone on the street, but you picture them in a particular coffee shop because you know the name of the coffee shop. It's very direct, but I used to do something similar to what you're talking about. But when I was first using these techniques as a professor, I would memorize the names of the people where they were sitting. But then later I would index them into different memory palaces. So if there was a Bobby, I would put her in a bakery because B is for bakery. And if it was that sort of thing. But then as I got better with the skills, I just didn't need to go to that extra step.

1:10:03I could just use the place where I met them.

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1:11:38With these techniques, do you get better over time to where shorthand develops or is it always every step needed? It's not always every step needed, but best practices are advised because there's a weird thing I've noticed that I can't anticipate what information is more difficult than something else. So some things will seem, oh, I'll get that, no problem. Well, that's the time you got to really pay attention because, you know, don't be too sure, right? And so I try to encourage others and myself to always go through the ropes because what seems like it's a sure win is probably going to be the thing that slips.

1:12:18And then sometimes the really difficult thing is the thing that turns out easier or vice versa. And in terms of it getting easier, I don't know. I mean, I try to think of like, what would Bruce Lee say? And Bruce Lee would say, you know, just be trained. I don't know if he would say that, but that's what in my imagination he would say. you know, be trained, be prepared to execute one last move, even with your head cut off, that kind of thing. I think that's from Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, that quote, the way of the samurai is just being prepared. So yeah, I don't find that it really gets easier per se.

1:12:50It gets that I just have the tools. And then if I fail to use them, then it's on me. It doesn't have anything to do with the tools. So if one is always a candle and if two is always a swan and you remember a list and you have a particularly colorful candle for the list that day, and then later that night, you're memorizing another list. Does the candle ever get confused with the candle from earlier in the day? Oh yeah. Yeah. Those things can happen. This is part of the argument for memory palaces. Because if candle one is in memory palace one and candle two is down the street in memory palace two, well, then they're much less likely to interfere.

1:13:36And there's even more insidious problems you can have that some of the memory competitors, I'm not sure where the term originates from, but it's called ghosting. So if you're reusing a memory palace, then the previous images can interfere. And that's also sometimes called the ugly sister effect because Prince Charming is looking for Cinderella, but everything but Cinderella is showing up at the door. Since you started using memory palaces, do you pay more attention to the world around you to be able to call on those places that you go to now for future memory palaces? Yes and no. I prefer to use memory palaces just based on what I remember.

1:14:17I mean, sometimes I'll go, this is such an amazing place. I definitely have to use this, and then I may pay extra attention. But on the main, at least as I enjoy the practice and as I think it works best, if I just use what I remember and I don't start cooking up any special additional memory tasks around it, then everything is just smooth sailing. And that is actually, to contradict myself a little bit, that is a way that things get easier. You don't get in your own way. You don't start turning the technique into something other than it is. That's just my quirk, maybe, and others may feel differently.

1:14:53But there are people who use Matterport and real estate websites to mass memorize all these locations. And my only criticism of it is a kind of Morpheus move. Show me. It's like a lot of activity that doesn't have accomplishment behind it. There's exceptions. But overall, it has this feeling to it in all the forums and all the questions. It's just like, there's got to be another way to do this, which seems to me a procrastination tactic. Rather than Genchi Genbutsu, go to the real place and do the real thing, there's a whole realm of activity that just won't hear what I think also the ancient and the Renaissance and the medieval teachers of this were saying.

1:15:32There's a real way to do this. It's pretty simple, but you have to do that actual thing if you want this result in as seamless a way as possible and with duration of the content. Tell me about the types of places that you regularly use, because I think of the house I live in would be an easy one for me to remember the details of, but I don't know how many places I could know in detail from memory. So there's elementary schools, there's high schools, there's universities, there's various studios you may have been in, there's parties, There's even cars. The 2019 Canadian memory champion used my suggestion of memorizing his cards inside of cars.

1:16:14So there's an abundance of car memory palaces that we could have in our own personal lives, depending on how many vehicles we've had. There's airplanes you could use, there's airports, there's concert halls, there's art galleries, there's churches, there's museums, bookstores, you name it. I mean, if it's a location and you remember it, then you can use it. How is memorizing a list different than memorizing a poem or a Bible verse? I don't distinguish the two. I see it as we discussed before, the idea that every sentence in a paragraph is a list of sentences in the paragraph. The way it might be different, though, is if you wanted to memorize the verse number, then you might want to set up your practice, if it's Scripture, a little bit differently to track those verse numbers.

1:16:59Or if you want to memorize the numbers of the lines in the poem so that you know specifically this is the 11th line, then you might set up your practice a little bit differently. But other than that, it's pretty much the same. Are there practical accepted ways of memorizing the Bible? That's an interesting question because some people are concerned that they would bring all of these horrible images I sometimes share and associate them with what they find to be sacred. So rote is sometimes preferred so that they're not associating what they consider to be sacred with me, like Proverbs 18, 13, I've got J.

1:17:36Edgar Hoover in there and what he's doing ain't nice, but they might not want to do that. So yeah, there's a lot of those issues. Also the issue of having your associations be quite aggressive with each other. Many people won't want that regardless of what they're memorizing, even if it's French vocabulary. And that's why some of the Renaissance memory teachers are so fascinating. I don't know if they anticipated that or not, but they would go deeper and deeper into layers where you could just use logic in various ways, or you can use breaking things down into little parts. So for example, Giordano Bruno, he has this thing, he'd say, instead of using the entire bull, just use the horns.

1:18:18And if you had to have Satan for some reason in your memory palace, if you really were not feeling great about that. Well, could you still have that basic idea and have cloven hooves or something of that nature? Can you break it down so you're unbothered in the way that you need to change the techniques to work? And that's very clearly spelled out in some of those older books. Are there other things you can do in life that support memory outside of the memory techniques? Oh, yes. I'm a big advocate of journaling and journaling of different kinds. So there's the discursive journaling where you talk to yourself.

1:18:56I use a snapshot journal, which is a particular product by a company called Paperblinks, and it lets you see five years at a glance. So I'm in the third year now of my current snapshot journal. And as I go through, I'm just making notes of the major events of the day, just in five lines or less. And that's very, very helpful as a kind of archive. and sometimes I'll use a spreadsheet to document certain things that happened just on a day-by-day basis especially if I have to reconstruct something from my snapshot journal to create a quote-unquote chain of evidence of what I'm trying to work out that I missed or something like that and that's a powerful memory strategy to be keeping your own archive.

1:19:39Another thing I do is I use a lot of index cards. And I use index cards in quite a variety of ways. It depends. If I'm writing a book, I'll use them in a particular way. If I'm memorizing, I will use them in a particular way to set the stage for using the memory palace later. So the idea is, if I'm reading a book and I never want to look at it again, or I never can, because it's in an archive somewhere, I take a stack of index cards and then I will read the book. The first card will be the the bibliographical information, the title, the date of publication, author, all that sort of stuff. Then every card after that will be the page number as I proceed through the book.

1:20:18So let's say it's a Marshall McLuhan book, McLuhan 35, and then whatever that key point is, and then McLuhan 48, and that sort of thing. And then later, if I never get to see that McLuhan book again, I have two possible outcomes. I can reconstruct the book from my notes for writing purposes, or if McLuhan says some crazy Latin phrase and I want to remember what that is, boom, I just, that's 38, Max Maven is my 38 and I can just associate the card as a little mini memory palace with Max Maven with the page number or I can put it into another standard memory palace so I can mix it up with other information.

1:20:54And that's what I did a lot in university and it helped me a lot just keep pushing forward because I wasn't feeling so well and I don't know how I would have done it otherwise if I didn't have those techniques. And what do you do if you forget or get something wrong? Well, I think the first thing that you need to do is some ego management, because you will get it wrong, or at least unless you're really extraordinary. I mean, I don't think any of us are free from making mistakes. And information comes in so fast, and often certain words are spelled differently than you would expect they are pronounced.

1:21:27So you might make pronunciation errors. And also pronunciation changes over time, and people use it different. So sometimes it's not even an error, but you might get your ego in your way because somebody called it an error when technically it isn't, and they're turning pronunciation into a shibboleth. So ego management, I think, is one of the first things you have to do is just accept that mistakes happen and that you will make them. And then the number one strategy when you do make a mistake is either just ask, I'm sorry, you just said your name. And I don't remember if you said Christine or Christina, or maybe I'm totally off.

1:21:59And then they will pretty kindly tell you what their name was again, or if it's a name of a place or whatever it is that you might have mispronounced, just ask and get it corrected. The other strategy I think, and it's my favorite because it kind of keeps you bulletproof, is if you really know you want to remember something, the number one thing is just to write it down. So if someone tells you a name and it's really not that important or you want to remember it, but it's not the end of the world if you don't remember what it was, then by all means, don't write it down and just ask for a correction.

1:22:34But if they tell you the name of a band or something and you want to look it up, I have no shame in just writing it down because writing down the name of albums or bands that you want to look up later, writing down is a technique. and then it's a little bit, it's not totally error free, but at least then you could do both. You can use a memory technique and go, oh, they mentioned Bark Market or something like this. And you get a dog barking at a market that you're familiar with. And then you can go look up what that band is. But if you really want to memorize it, there's no shame in having a journal with you at all times that you write with.

1:23:09And I do that frequently. This is strategy that I did when I learned Mandarin. I made lots of mistakes because I was trying to read the Anglicization of Mandarin, which is called pinyin. And it never made sense to me why they're using a C when it has like an S or a Z sound sometimes or why they're putting vowels together. So in order to help my own pronunciation have less mistakes, I just invented my own pinyin. And because I wrote it down, I could then practice my understanding of how better to pronounce these things. And then in terms of forgetting, well, I mean, that's a kind of puzzle because sometimes I have these experiences where it's just like, did I even ever remember this in the first place?

1:23:50Because sometimes this inkling comes and you think that something happened and then you realize that it was a dream. I swear there's a quote where Nietzsche wrote somewhere that the problem with power is that it makes you want more power. And I can't tell you the amount of time that I've tried to spend finding this quote to verify that it actually exists. And I have finally concluded that I fell asleep while I was reading Nietzsche and I dreamed it. Now, it may be the gist of what Nietzsche was saying, but I want to find those exact words. And so I've just forgotten it. And so the strategy for dealing with this is, well, I think that there's something in Nietzsche that equates to power.

1:24:29The problem with power is that it makes you want to have more power. And then I just say, but I don't know if those are the exact words. And it seems like you're prevaricating or you're dodgy or shifty or whatever, but I think it's just honest. and I mean, you can't be on radar all the time and it makes you seem kind of weird. And maybe that is what people who get into memory techniques are is weird. But at the end of the day, I feel that it's just better when you've forgotten something and you can't verify it and you haven't memorized it verbatim like Shakespeare. And even then, if you make a mistake with Shakespeare and the director says in the stage play, that's wrong, did you just fix it?

1:25:03You know, so, but you can fix things in advance by just being honest. And I think that's just a great strategy for peace of mind. when it comes to forgetting. Is there any benefit to physicality as it relates to memory? Yes. I'm exploring this a lot more these days. I have dabbled with it, so to speak, for some years, but the idea of using your hands as a memory technique, just for simple things, using the body a lot more, I think there's so much more to be explored. Right now, I'm thinking of learning some anatomy myself at a deeper level than I have, just to give examples for people. And one thing I've done recently.

1:25:40I probably don't have the whole of it, but just the muscles are named in a particular way. And there's like seven groups of names. So the first one in the list was direction. So I just think Dracula and I used the count from Sesame street rather than Bela Lugosi. That's just the way it came out. But so now I put a direction sign over his head. And then the next in the list was the location of the muscle. So on his nose, I put the idea of location. And then the next was the size of the muscle. Anyway, there's different ways by which muscles are named. And then that sets the stage for, let's say it's Zygomaticus, I think, major and minor, or something like this.

1:26:21Then as I'm learning anatomy, I can then link out of his body. So extensor polycus brevis, I think is more of a correct one. I can think of, what is the name of that muscle once I've finished learning, why is it named that way? And then who can I use? Like Hugh Jackman, because he's an X-Men, and then use his body to then stack on more related information. So now it's like a kind of a non-memory palace that's distributed across multiple figures, but limited to their bodies. Is there any downside to memorizing? Yeah, certainly there is. I don't know for other people, but personally, I think, and it may be a downside other people see projected, is that I just take it all way too seriously.

1:27:10But you would probably do that about anything. Well, yeah, theoretically. And maybe that is the human condition. But I feel like I have a self-awareness of my own seriousness of it that I can't quite contend with. I do know how to resolve it in my own spiritual practice and so forth, but it makes me a little bit OCD. And that may be related to the fact that there may be a little bit of willful OCD involved in paying attention to things to such a degree that you're linking it together with all these celebrities and pop culture figures and so forth to such a granular detail. but I see it as a gift at the end of the day.

1:27:49It's not an ego thing, I don't think. I want to be proof of concept and that requires putting a burden on myself. And I think it's maybe what other people intuit when they kind of go, ah, this is too difficult because it's the Spider-Man problem, I sometimes say. With great power comes great responsibility. And in this case, if you're going to go around saying, yeah, I memorize stuff, and then you can't get through whatever you say you've memorized, like whatever it is, Declaration of Independence or something that people want to do, it harms you because failure is inevitable. Anyway, my solution has just been to play it straight and say, you know, I make mistakes and I stumble over my own words and I share that as openly as I share everything else.

1:28:27Tell me about your spiritual practice. I don't know what it is. I don't feel that it belongs to anything. So I often tell people who ask that I wish I could find a religion so I could just be done with knowing what it is that I'm doing, but it's this smattering of having memorized some Sanskrit and concepts from there, doing Qigong, doing Nei Gong, poking around with Neidan, which I'm not even sure I really get what that is yet. And just informing myself with all of this. And basically back to Sanskrit, just neti neti, not this, not that. It's just trying to always be here. And so I guess my spiritual practice is the goal of, can I just be here?

1:29:06And can I get it that a flavor of just being here is that I'm not here. There is no me. And it's just this. And even this goes away. The whole idea of consciousness goes away. And I think that's what my spiritual practice is, is to get rid of the idea of spiritual practice and just, you know, be nervy kapha samadhi, I guess you would call it just like no particular thought and just bliss. And so far, so good. I have to say, I never would have thought that I would have this much peace that I have accomplished. Even when things go pear-shaped. It's still miles better than it used to be for me. Would you describe yourself as a seeker?

1:29:45I'm wanting to end the search more than wanting to be a seeker, I guess. But that's the magic of it. You do end it when you switch on to what's really happening, you know?

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1:32:01Learn more at lectio365.com Can you walk me through the greatest hits of the literature of memory from the beginning until now? So Aristotle might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I think there's really good stuff in there. Hugh of St. Victor has a book called Didis Galacon that I think is really required reading just for study purposes alone. But the book that you want that has his writing about memory compiled is called The Medieval Craft of Memory. Mary Carruthers is the head editor of that book. And that book has many, many other texts that are the greatest hits. Then I would suggest reading Jacobus Publicius and reading Peter of Rowena's The Phoenix.

1:32:56And Giordano Bruno, if you can find your way into Bruno, there are many, many wonderful mental adventures. And also Robert Flood is fantastic. And then beyond that, the greatest hits in the 20th century, I think Lynn Kelly's work, The Memory Code is kind of more of an archaeological, anthropological book, but she has another book called Memory Craft. And Nelson Dulles produces really interesting books that are a cut above the rest, Memory Superpowers and Remember It. And his latest one is called Everyday Genius. He just does it different, and that's cool. And other than that, I mean, it's kind of like Carpe Diem, but Caveat Emptor.

1:33:37There's just so much stuff out there. And I'm a proponent of just reading. Just read. Are all of the techniques ancient? I suppose technique itself is very, very ancient, and that's worth meditating on. When is the first time we know of there being talk of improving memory? Talk is the operative word. I think a lot of people attribute it to the Greek tradition where you have some writing there. But the very earliest book is lost, or there's just a small fragment, And Aristotle refers to it in his De Memoria. But I don't know what talk went on in the ancient Aboriginal cultures, for example. I don't know that they recorded in any sort of writing or marks because they had the songlines and they would use oral transmission.

1:34:28And apparently they had custodians that would pass on the memory techniques to the people that needed to learn them to become the next custodians. And then there's the Luba people who used Lukasa. Lukasa, I think, means like claw. So it's like a wooden representation of your hands, so to speak. And then you put various bees and shells, and then that would help you remember things you wanted to remember. Lynn Kelly is really the person to read about that. Her book, The Memory Code, goes deep into the prehistorical stuff with the Aboriginal tradition and all around the world. But yeah, in terms of quote unquote standard writing, I think Aristotle is referring to a book that we only have a fragment of.

1:35:08if that, and then that book may have referred to previous writings about memory techniques and how to improve it. I would imagine before there was writing, memory would have even more value. Well, to me, that's the question of our time as people talk about the internet challenging our memory now. And then I think often of some of the stuff Lynn Kelly talks about in the memory code, where in a drought, the Aboriginal people had to use these songlines in order to help them not only find where food and medicine would be, but to remember to make sure that the food and medicine that they found wouldn't poison them, that it would be the food and medicine.

1:35:46So in our time, if we think about the internet as this giant pharmacy, then there's beautiful things everywhere that can heal us. But if you put the wrong medicine on a certain part of your body, it's going to be a toxin. So the earliest we know is Aristotle. Did Aristotle talk about memory beyond that. I don't, I'm not an Aristotelian scholar, but Richard Srabji has a really good book called Aristotle on Memory that, that goes deep in the weeds on that. But yeah, in a roundabout way, like in his metaphysics, the only time I ever read Aristotle, he seems to be making a joke. And it seems to have a kind of memory twist to it.

1:36:21Like he's referring to the ways that other people think they know something about the moon or whatever. And so, I mean, And the logic, he creates these puzzles and so forth. And they seem very aware of the fact that you have to use your memory to think through the various processes that he's challenging you in order to come to your own metaphysical understandings. Do you know if there were any breakthroughs historically in the world of memory where, like, everything changed on this day when this was discovered? Maybe. when Herman Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve. Tell me about that. I believe it's 1895.

1:37:00He writes a book in German. It's called Überdesk Gudeschnis or about memory. And what he is doing is he's memorizing these nonsense syllables. They're usually like three letters, like Z-U-K or something like that, like Zuck, Zick, Clack. It was stuff like this, right? And then he's tracking what's the rate of decay in memory. And he does these charts and diagrams and so forth. He calls it the forgetting curve. And then these other principles emerge, which are called primacy effect, recency effect, and serial positioning. And so what emerges is a feeling or a sense, and it reproduces in the studies, that what you encounter first, you tend to have a greater recall of.

1:37:48hence the primacy effect, and what you encounter last in the list, you have greater recall of, hence the recency effect. And then serial positioning, if you can rotate so that everything has quote unquote equal doses of primacy and recency, then you start to combat the forgetting curve. And so that's the thing that changed memory science and to this day is still referred to and is more or less rock solid as far as I know. But I believe Aristotle was describing something very similar in De Memoria, just not quite as scientifically grounded or charting out all the words he memorized and tracking their rate of decay.

1:38:25Is memorizing numbers different than memorizing objects or faces? I think it is. And that's why we turn them into words, in order to make the numbers not so abstract and wild to our imagination. When you think about it, it's not just that you see a number, but the number refers to a number sometimes that you cannot see. Like if you have a nine that represents nine, it may be referring to nine objects, but at a glance, you couldn't tell that it was nine. It might be six that is nine, but appears like a six. So I think that's part of our history with numbers that makes numbers so much different to memorize than words.

1:39:03And that's why ultimately the long time ago with the Catapayati, they came up with a system to be able to memorize numbers with words. What is photographic memory? As far as I know, and sometimes I get in little debates about this, as far as I know, it doesn't exist. And with Artemis II, and the cameras that those people have, and the kinds of telescopes that we have floating around, I don't know why they even use that metaphor anymore. It seems like a weird metaphor for memory. Memory is so much more dynamic and vibrant than a photograph. Although I do know why people use it, but as far as I know, it just is not a real thing.

1:39:40Tell me about the relationship between memory and space. Well, there's a lot to say about that. Giordano Bruno was quite obsessed with that in his Renaissance writings. And then there's a guy named Stephen Cosselin thinks that there's a one-to-one correspondence somehow between how the brain maps space and then remembers it, the location in the brain. And that's called, it might come to be the title, a case for memory or something like that. And Bruno thought that we are somehow like the universe and memory is part of the universe and infinity operates in particular ways. If we're able to somehow become like the universe, our memory needs to be like the universe in order to encapsulate the thing that it's memorizing.

1:40:27The whole Bruno shtick is it's not pantheism as far as I understand it. It's totally resolving yourself into space as such and being like the way space operates. I don't think he would divide the objects from space from the space itself. So it may not be a pure non-duality in his case because he accounts for coming into being and then falling out of being. But then the idea is you could have infinite memory palaces because whenever you could imagine something in space, you could then use that space as a canvas upon which to paint. So you never need to run out of locations to use. And that's what a lot of his diagrams are in his books, are like working out how you can apply those concepts infinitely.

1:41:19And also a principle of recursion, where they refer back to themselves in greater and greater forms of density. And that's what he calls a seal. And so the seal, as you lay it out in space, how you use the space has various mnemonic outcomes that will be better or worse. What I'm hearing you say is, has less to do with the location and more to do with the relationship in space. Yeah, I think it's a relationship thing at the end of the day. And then what you're going to do out of the relationships that are available to you and how you're either going to make them diffuse or make them more and more dense and then other sorts of tools.

1:42:00All of the memory books have some kind of talk about space, the distance between the stations that you use, the quality of the light in the space. Peter Verwenna in the Phoenix, he says, don't use any location higher than you can reach and touch with your hand, which I think is super fascinating. Bruno apparently just goes against that. It's just like, okay, that planet over there, you can't touch it, but you can use it. Can memory be used to change habits? Yeah, I guess the question is, what is the habit and then how is that habit linked to memory? And I certainly changed habits in a way that was related to memory.

1:42:41I used to bite nails quite badly. And it was hypnosis that was what made the difference. So I guess I wouldn't say I used memory, but what happened was that I remembered a change in the hypnotic session. And because of the memory of the change, I think I haven't bit my nails since this happened in university. And that's 20 years ago. But I think that part of it is that I remembered the effectiveness of that particular session. What is active recall? Active recall is a fairly big topic, but part of it is when you're recalling something from memory, you specifically recall it first, then you write it down.

1:43:24And following that process is meant to be activating the recall at some level. And then it just seems to have better outcomes in some of the studies that I've read. But another element of it is related to how you actively read and so forth. And in some of the studies of active recall that I've read, you want to have variety, maybe use interleaving so that you're not reading the same book in a cramming sort of way, but you're maybe rotating between three to five books and so forth. The ways that I use it are that term is very actively working to make sure that you are following some kind of process.

1:44:04So you're bringing it to mind first, then writing it down. And also not judging if you get it wrong. Just analyzing what this sort of process is so that you're not labeling anything per se. If you get it right, also, what was it that made that a success? So you're actively recalling and actively analyzing. How does learning another language change you? It certainly opens up the avenue to have conversations that are inflected with flavors that you just wouldn't imagine. And then people make metaphors that are not in your own culture or anything you would even imagine. I remember reading an Einstritz and a Neubotten interview, and he said, I have my champagne for the end of the world already in the fridge.

1:44:52And, you know, you might hear that in English expressed in a certain way. We're prepared for the party or whatever. But this is just exactly the way it sounds in German, has this particular flavor to it that just wouldn't translate, or you can translate it. And you just feel more connected to people in that culture. I never felt so at home after I got decent skills in Germany. It was like I really belonged there because I could talk to anyone pretty much. the warmth of having a conversation totally in German, in a taxi or at a bar, and you just appreciate somehow language so much more. Is learning language a memory task or is it something different than that?

1:45:35I certainly treated it as a memory task due to my fascination. Even in my own experience, it was a lot more than memory. It's absorption and it's also anticipatory thinking. Because when you don't know what exactly it's saying, your mind starts to think, well, what is it likely to mean? And then you get better and better and better at guessing. Now you may remember your guesses, but it's not strictly a memory task. So anticipatory reading, anticipatory thinking, like what is it that means or likely to mean, builds your skills. And then you often just remember it on autopilot, but it's not strictly a memory thing, no.

1:46:13How are long-term and short-term memory different? Short-term memory is said to be three to 10 seconds or around that. There's some call to question that with memory competitors who do 52 cards in less than eight seconds. But let's just say short-term memory is also called working memory. And it's like the desktop of your brain. And there's only so much room for what's happening there. But long-term memory is what you can draw into your short-term memory onto the desktop to play around with that's there. It may be wrong or right, but nonetheless, it's long-term memory that is in you somehow. And short-term memories become long-term memories in different ways.

1:46:58And the best I heard it described that really struck an image in my mind, information comes in and then it just splatters all over the brain and it goes into these different locations. And I'm quite confident what Dr. Gary Small said is that they're going to different neighborhoods in your brain. And then they'll consolidate all over the brain. But it's like little family members who have their own homes and they can be cities away from each other or in neighborhoods away from each other. And then when you want to recall and bring it back into your working memory area so you can use it, they all have to come travel back and have Thanksgiving dinner.

1:47:33For most of the things that you've memorized, do you memorize them all long-term or are there any things that you memorize short-term? Oh yeah, unfortunately a lot of stuff is just short-term. And I try not to play into the fantasy too much of being able to get it all or anything like that. It's tempting and a lot of people say that that's their big dream. Yeah, there's a lot of things that I only remember them if I need them and I miss certain things and so forth. I pick my projects very, very carefully for the long-term retention. And the middle ground, the gray area, is that I'm also quite aware of the effects of focus.

1:48:14So by reading within certain categories, you can get the best of both worlds. So you can not deliberately memorize anything that you only need to track for a short term, but remember it anyway, because it's just going to have this connective webbing to the fact that Right now, you're reading about math topics or the reading is about writers writing about writing. And then that's going to build this connective webbing. So for long-term memorization, I pick projects and I work on them and make them long-term. Why do we naturally remember certain events or details from the past and others just disappear?

1:48:52Well, there's focused attention as part of it. So it's kind of back to that Kennedy effect that David Berglas talked about. Some things may not be that dramatic, but they're dramatic enough that we pay attention to them and they just kind of come along. There may also be pattern recognition that aids us. Pattern recognition is a huge thing. And it may be that we're actually just deluded and we haven't remembered them. But I think the main factor is, did we pay attention to it? Did we try to remember it? And that's what Harry Lorraine said at the beginning of a lot of his books. Memory starts with attention.

1:49:27So even without using memory techniques, you can often remember more just by deliberately paying attention. Do you get good at anything else as a result of building your memory? Potentially, I think so. I don't know that you would just naturally get better at these things, but you certainly can become a better thinker just because you'll have greater access to that working memory space and be able to work with more moving parts in real time. And then because you memorize information, you'll be able to have even more references, which makes you a better archiver of what's out there and connector and assistant to other people.

1:50:07Because the more you know, then the more you can give, basically. I'm always interested in what more we could do to find a way to get together and do something about the way that memory is not part of our education system so in terms of I don't know how to have the conversation I'm not a a person who feels like I can be an educational reformer and do all that nitty-gritty work in politicians worlds but I am working on the project and I tackled it in a couple of ways The long and short of it is I've written some books for kids that I have a hypothesis behind the series and also books for adults that echo or are part of this narrative world, the memory detective world.

1:50:56And I don't know how far that I'm going to get, but regardless of my project, what I would like to see happen is I would like to see every teacher that steps into a classroom by license have to be able to memorize 30 names in three minutes or less. And my hypothesis is that if that were to happen, they would naturally teach those kids the same techniques that they used to do that. So I'm actively trying to share this project with people. And I don't care if it's my project or not, but just that principle. Teachers, by virtue of the teaching license, that they can do this. Who first coined the term memory palace?

1:51:35I don't know that that's known, but it might come out of St. Augustine. because he talked about the great fields and the palaces of his memory. Because the Simonides of Chios story where he was at a banquet hall and it was destroyed and he was able to recall the names of where everybody was sitting. It was a banquet hall. So we don't call it the banquet hall technique, but it may have been a banquet hall in a palace. I don't know. But then it was in ancient Greek, so they wouldn't use that term. But the Latin in, I'm not sure if this is the Latin or Spanish, but it'd be something like Palazzo de Memoria, that sort of thing.

1:52:11And I don't know that that's actually in Augustine because I haven't looked at the Latin. It'd probably be something like that, these fields and the palaces of his memory. What's a memory wheel? They seem to first come from Ramon Lull, who was trying to get people to share his ideas, his conclusions about the nature of his relationship to God, et cetera, to evangelize. And so how would they remember the nuances of his system for meditating upon the nature of God? That's part of the puzzle. And so the wheels place individual letters to help you at a glance unfold many more details. So if you have to remember that beneficence is a huge skill that you want to not only practice yourself, but also teach, then the B at the top of the memory wheel is where you would begin.

1:53:08And then if there's other things that you need to spend time in deliberation, the D would unpack all the things that allow you to do deliberation. That's part of it. And then there's the combinatoria or the combinations that come out of the wheels. So if you need to come up with mnemonics, for example, and you have an outer wheel that has only people and A is Adam Sandler, let's say, and then the next wheel is only objects and you take another A and that's an apple. And then the third wheel is only actions. Then you have accept. So Adam Sandler accepts an apple, but you can rotate it so that it's Adam Sandler breaks a cookie.

1:53:47the wheel rotates so that the A's aren't aligned, but it's A and then B and then C. I see. So that's the short story of the memory wheel. What is Rules Reborn? Rules Reborn is an adaptation I made of the writings of Jacobus Publicius. And he has a kind of memory wheel in his training. And he gets into the combinations and just these various rules. He's very rule-oriented. If you want to remember, remember in this way. Basically, it's a lot of what we talked about today. I just turned the ancient writings that are very, very hard to access and read into a readable ebook and audio book. And then I made some videos to talk about how that he was using these memory wheels to derive various images that you could use as associations.

1:54:39And I use the term reborn for the whole series because I'm adapting them. It's almost a theatrical project as much as it is a teaching one. In all three of the Reborn books, I perform the different characters. So I sound different when I do Peter of Ruena than I do Publicius. And then when I do Bruno, I really turn on the Bruno juice as I understand him. Are there any tricks to getting better at them over time? Yeah, I think the most useful thing is to realize that there are a lot of different ways that a lot of different people talk about these techniques. And it can be very confusing. And it can feel like there's a real big barrier to entry that is frustrating.

1:55:21And also, it can seem too good to be true because of how people talk about it. So I think one of the most useful things that you could do is just find somebody who you think you can learn from. And just take it step by step and progressively and pick a goal that you want to remember a certain thing. and then try to work out what are the best techniques in order to remember the information so that you can achieve that goal. So you're giving yourself some kind of win. But also when you hear these extraordinary stories and they might make you think like, oh, I could never do that. Also remember that the stories are told in context and sometimes they're exactly true, but they're in a particular context.

1:56:02So I remember speaking earlier about memorizing a deck of cards in 15 minutes at the first try. And you were a little skeptical about that. And I said, well, I didn't count. I think I said I didn't count the setup of the system. And that's the interesting thing about this is that there are many, many people who have indeed won memory competitions on the strength of reading half a book. And I don't doubt them. Like, that's what they say. They didn't even finish. I think it's Ben Pridmore. He said, I didn't even finish reading Dominic O 'Brien's book. And then I went to the next memory competition and I won.

1:56:33But I mentioned this because memory competitions are not necessarily the context in which you would want to memorize the information in Latin. Or if you're studying law, there's Latin phrases or whatever. That's not the same thing. So try to figure out who it is that could teach you to do that or where even a robot can teach you these days. But find out what it is that's going to help you get into these techniques. And don't ever convince yourself that you can't do them because we have impressions about what they are that often talk the people who are the best at them. And I've seen some very, very smart people talk themselves out of very simple activities because a variety of reasons, a variety of impressions have created the idea that it's other than it is, right?

1:57:21But really at the end of the day, what this is, is squares on a piece of paper that represent a home or a grocery store. And you don't even have to draw the squares if you don't want to. And then it's just the alphabet associated with people and things in the world that you already know. And you're just attaching it to the information that you do want to know, and then revisiting it in particular ways. So that's the biggest thing I can say. And I wish everybody that ever has felt locked out of this would know that because it's the most beautiful practice. I think it's a kind of qigong, a kind of martial art in the mind.

1:57:55And it's a thing that can just make you feel so great just to play around with information in your mind and just connect it. It's like Lego, mental Lego, just snapping things into place. Does everyone memorize the same way? That's to me is part of the question that I want to solve. And I think that probably the answer is yes, no, and something in between. And what I mean by that is there's almost certainly something so similar about our brains that we call ourselves a species. And so the difference is probably not as big as we might imagine it is. And the only reason why we would want to be so different from each other in our ways of memorizing may be a problem of ego, because it would be much more interesting to figure out all the ways that we're the same so that then the differences could be celebrated in a much clearer light.

1:58:46But there's a lot of battles over the differences. I can't quite figure out what those differences mean or how that they would work. And so I have a long-term response to problems like Aphantasia, where people say they can't see images in their mind. Well, I can't see images in my mind either. I mean, I've talked about, I've used that kind of language all throughout our conversation, but the fact of the matter is I don't know what that means. A picture is something I go to the art gallery and see on a wall, but what's happening in my imagination is just so indescribable. It's like trying to describe the entirety of the now.

1:59:19You know, so I don't know that we do memorize differently or at the end of the day. It's kind of a Yoda thing to me. Do it or don't. There's not really a try here.

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