26. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis Helps Steve Train His Brain

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**Steve Levitt** (0:59)
Usually on this podcast, I'm just happy if we have a great conversation. But today, I'm striving for something more. I want to learn how to remember things better. And I feel incredibly lucky to have the chance to sit down with four-time USA Memory Tournament Champion, Nelson Dellis, who's authored the books Memory Superpowers and Remember It.
I'm not sure there's anyone around who can better teach me and you how to improve our memories.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:28)
Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levitt.

**Steve Levitt** (1:34)
Since this episode is about memory, let's test our memories. I'm going to right now randomly generate an eight-digit number on my computer, and I'm going to read it out loud. And let's see if you and I can remember it after the ad break. Okay. I'm only going to read the numbers once. I'm randomly generating them. Okay. Here they are. You ready? Here they go.
Zero, three, one, six, three, three, one, two.
Okay. Think about those numbers. I'm doing the same, and let's try to put those in our memory.
Do you appreciate the irony of the fact that from an economist's perspective, the value of a good memory today is probably lower than almost any time in human history? Technology has dramatically lowered the cost of forgetting. Almost any answer is a Google search away, and note taking and list making and reminders have become easier and easier. Facebook tells me when my friends are having birthdays, it's interesting that you've picked an exploit that the economy is really saying isn't very important anymore.

**Nelson Dellis** (2:47)
You're totally right. I mean, why use our memories anymore, right? But the reason I started was from more of a health standpoint. My grandmother had Alzheimer's and watching her lose her memory and who she was in tandem with that. Was life changing for me and that's what motivated me to work on my memory. So it was never out of this need to remember things that are just a tap away or a click away, but rather to strengthen my memory and hopefully when I'm older, have more of a tool set that I can call on to help prolong my potentially failing mind.

**Steve Levitt** (3:27)
I always had the impression that the science wasn't completely inclusive on that issue of whether the brain is a muscle or whatever the kind of construct would be.

**Nelson Dellis** (3:41)
I don't go out there claiming these memory techniques can fix that kind of thing or prevent it, but if there's a version of myself that never discovered memory techniques and then my memory champion self, and we're both 80 years old, starting to forget things and maybe we're both destined to get Alzheimer's, you'd have to think the memory champion that has developed these habits and tools over the course of his life would have some crutches to help him remember just a little bit more for a little bit longer. I think that's worth something. If I can just squeeze out a few more years of cognitive life, why not?

**Steve Levitt** (4:17)
Yeah. This is a case where I think the skeptics say, oh, there's very few or no good randomized trial studies that prove this.
But the fact is there are a lot of settings in which it's really hard to do a randomized trial because we could try to randomize some people to work on their memory and others not. But the outcomes we're talking about are 10, 20, 30 years away. In the end, I think the literature that I've seen tends to be more observational. People are, with reason, skeptical about it. But I've done the same thing you did. I didn't try to become a memory champion, but I really felt like my brain was starting to fail me. And so my take on it was to try to do trivia. So I was really good at trivia as a kid, and then hadn't thought about trivia in 35 years. And I joined a trivia league, and I thought it would just be a thing where a few minutes a day, I would think about it, maybe it would make my brain a little more supple. Instead, I got completely and totally obsessed with it. And now I actually spend a lot of time trying to memorize things, which is what made me so interested in talking to you.