Nelson Dellis

I've read stacks of books about improving your memory or how to remember things. Initially it was a world of wonderment for me but now, I realise, that it is all (as the author of this book says) about story telling and association. Getting our brains to link up with the facts or scenes. But N Nelson Dellis does it extremely well. AND he gives is his lists of associated words etc. As one of his stocks in trade is remembering decks of cards, he couldn't help himself when it came to explaining how to do this. But dIt's not something that I thinkI'm going to need ...not even as a party trick. The other thing I realised was that my iphone has taken a lot of the drudge of memorisation. (And replaced both the telephone book and the need to memorise stacks of phone numbers ...or write them down on scraps of paper ....or carry little lists around in your diary.
I think he's done an excellent job and I'm tempted to try to learn off a list of two digit numbers with POA (Person Object Action) links. Just have to make some time available,,,and then practice practice practice......that's going to be the hard part. I've done this sort of thing before but then let it lapse. (So now I'll have to go back and re-learn the most common 1,250 characters of the kanji....and I never really was able to use them).
Here are a number of key tips that I picked up from the book:
"Chapter Two: Basic things you must remember before you start
There is a large body of scientific evidence, however, of something called “eidetic memory,” present in about 2 to 10 percent of preadolescent children yet virtually nonexistent among adults. An “eidetiker” can often look at an image for thirty seconds, look away, and recall astoundingly accurate details about that image. Nevertheless, eidetikers make some mistakes and occasionally invent new details. After a few minutes, eidetic recall ability fades to average human levels. No one knows why it works like that, or why it doesn’t last into adulthood,

THREE WORDS TO REMEMBER SEE—LINK—GO!
Throughout this book, you will find different strategies to first of all SEE, but then also to LINK......The basic idea of what LINK is will be clear in GO!, but it’s as easy as imagining your picture from SEE somehow interacting with a location. It will all make sense soon, don’t worry!
Simple Association Simple Association is where you use another fact, thought, idea, or mental image that you know very well
The Linking Method The Linking Method is a simple way to remember a short list of things in a specific order. The key to Linking is interaction: taking your mental picture for each item and causing it to interact with the next (imagine it as a chain of links, one connected to the next).
See—Link—Go!
The Peg Method The Peg Method is another basic technique that makes up for one of the Linking Method’s biggest weaknesses: the fact that youhave to access the sequence from start to finish without jumping around, otherwise you probably won’t be able to recall the list. The Peg Method works around this shortcoming by using “pegs” (basically, other images on a pre-learned list) to “anchor” each item you want to memorize, rather than linking everything together into a chain of images.
Like the Peg Method, the Journey Method works by associating the information you’re trying to remember with a list of things you already know—but this time the list is a series of stops along a path, or journey, through an actual place, a familiar place. Think of your home, or your office, or your favourite park—
Recently, neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania have found evidence of “geotags” in the hippocampus that allow us to remember where and when specific memories were initially formed.
Taking your imagined scene (your meshed picture and location) and incorporating three things I like to call Sensory Overload (SO), Grotesque Absurdity (GA), and Moveable Attributes (MA).
Moveable Attribute or MA. is giving your already wild and crazy image some type of movement, some type of action.
The more you give your memory a bad rap, the more it will actually mirror that fact (life tip #1: This applies to anything you do—if you feed the “negative beast,” it will reign).
There are only two reasons why you will ever forget things. Only two. * YOU WEREN’T PAYING ATTENTION. * YOUR SEE—LINK—GO! PROCESS WAS A BIT LEAKY AND/ OR WEAK.
Chapter Three: Brain farts, name-amnesia, and the everyday things that drive our memories mad
The true art of memory is the art of attention.—SAMUEL JOHNSON*
What Was I About to Do?! - When You Walk into a Room and Forget Why
When a person has a thought in one room and moves to another, the brain basically creates a file containing all the details about the first room, what you did there, and what you thought there, and stores it away. When you move to the second room, your brain creates a new file, making it harder to remember what was in the file for the previous room. This happens subconsciously......What’s the trick to remembering in these situations? It’s as simple as going back to the previous room or place you were in when you had the thought
Uh, What Was That, Honey? - How to Remember Things Someone Asked You to Do (Most Importantly Your Spouse) ...Commit to the conversation. It’s not that hard. Nine times out of ten, you’ll find that this will do the trick.
Anchoring is when you associate one new incoming piece of information with another, already grounded piece of information. In other words, it’s a form of linking,
I’m talking about things like forgetting where you parked your car, where you put your wallet, or if you took your daily medication or not.
“This would be fine if I parked my car once every so often. What about when I park my car multiple times a day? Won’t these images clash against each other and I’ll end up confused?” Yes, that’s possible. The point is to make it unique for every instance.
Where Did I Put My Keys? - How to Remember Where You Left Any Item
make sure you have a designated place to put an item every time you put it down.
That crutch is a designated placement spot. Buy a small bowl or tray and place it by the front door.
Before (or as) you put the item down, you literally make a move. Perform an action as you place it. By “action,” I mean any random movement that comes to mind—the stranger, the better (and the more memorable, of course)......best actions are going to be the random ones you come up with in that moment), but maybe I’d tug on my ear and scrunch my nose.
Must. Not. Forget. Tomorrow . . . ZzzzzZZZ - How to Remember Things When You Don’t Want to Get Up and Write Them Down
A quick thing to do is to cross your fingers, or cross your feet, or move some body part slightly. Something that’s maybe a bit uncomfortable or weird that will draw attention from your mind, even after the conversation is over.
3—Names and Faces
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
The attribute you pick as your anchor should be the first thing you notice about someone, since it will probably be the first thing you’ll notice the next few times you see that person.
DO NOT TELL A PERSON HIS OR HER ANCHOR ATTRIBUTE. From
The more often and more clearly you hear the name, the easier it will be to memorize.
take his/ her card, I like to use a little trick recommended by Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends & Influence People: On the back, write down a little bit of information—anything that came up
Chapter Four: For all the list-based things that your mind wishes it could remember forward and backward
What you need is a simple, well-marked filing system. And the way to file memories properly, the way to put the right information in the right location, is to create the right associations.
In short, all you need to remember about the method is that when you have a list of things to remember, start with the first thing, SEE it, then LINK it to the next. Repeat this process for each item on your list until you’ve gone through them all. Then, when you want to remember your list, simply start at the first item in your mind,
If you want to further your mastery of this list, one step you can take is to mark every fifth president in the list with a number
1. WASHINGTON = First president, on a one-dollar bill (easy)
5. MONROE = Imagine there are five oars attached to the rowboat
10. TYLER = Harrison Ford ties ten neckties around his neck
15. BUCHANAN = Imagine precisely fifteen book-shaped cannonballs being fired

That little added thought process of coming up with some association between cholera and our image for President Taylor (tail) is all we need to remember his cause of death.

Remember, the key to Linking is that LINK part. In other words, association: taking your mental picture of each item and making that picture somehow interact with the next item

To turn it into something that is long-term and fluent to a point where you don’t even need to think about it, review, review, review!
Let’s use the word liberty, for example. What does liberty remind you of? And I don’t mean what does liberty mean,
If it doesn’t remind you of anything, what does it sound like?
If you strike out on those first two steps, don’t despair, you just need to break it down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Let’s use the word municipality.
money-sipping lady. (municipality).
Assuming you are already on 20th Street by the park, “heading west on 20th St.” isn’t actually too hard a direction to follow—just start walking. The directions really start at “turn right on Broadway.” Using my convention for lefts and rights from the previous example, I’ll start my Linking Method story by imagining I’m watching a very racy Broadway musical—nudity and sexual innuendo abound! As the musical progresses, one scene in particular showcases Michael Jordan (23 is his famous jersey number, so 23 reminds of me of 23rd St.) playing basketball against a team of Norwegians (N-o-R-wegians reminds me of the two train options I have: N or R)—he jumps UP (uptown) over them in a fantastic display of athletic ability! As MJ lands back on the ground he accidentally lands on an off switch (to help remind you to get off) that turns off 57 of the stage lights, leaving the entire audience in complete darkness.
Sure, you have all the items memorized in order, but you can’t really say the items out of order or jump around with a precise mastery of all the information. So how do you keep track of a list in a way that allows you to claim that mastery? Hello, Peg Method.
Basically, anything that is in the form of a list that you have already memorized and know well can be used as your peg list. Once you have a peg list ready, simply follow SEE–LINK–GO!, only this time for LINK you’re going to associate your image with an item on your peg list. The fixed order of your peg list is what will keep the order of your memorized list.
Your Royal Highness - How to Remember the Kings and Queens of England
Maybe our main Alphabet Peg List could be for types of animals, a second one could be for different foods, and yet a third one could be sports-related words, and so on.
What’s the Plan for Today? - How to Remember Daily Appointments and Meetings
For organizing your daily appointments, you can use the Days of the Week Peg List. We can use an approach similar to the Number-Rhyme System and come up with images that use the sounds of the days of the week.
Monday: Mountain, Moon, Monster
Likewise, you can keep track of specific times of your appointments by using a mental image of an analog clock and overlaying it on some spatial peg list you already know.
12: 00—Minneapolis 1: 00—Chicago 2: 00—New York 3: 00—Washington, D.C. 4: 00—Charleston
If I have dinner plans at 7: 00 and I can’t picture myself in Phoenix, I just think of being in the desert;
Your Body Is a Wonderland - How to Remember the Largest Countries in the World (by Population
there is another amazingly convenient peg list at your disposal: your body.
Our ten body parts will be:
1. TOP OF HEAD
2. EARS
3. EYES
4. NOSE
5. MOUTH
6. CHIN
7. ARMPIT
8. BELLY BUTTON
9. KNEES
10. FEET

SEE the countries as images:

1. CHINA = CHOPSTICKS
2. INDIA = CURRY
3. UNITED STATES = HAMBURGER
4. INDONESIA = IN DOUGH

CHINA: CHOPSTICKS are resting on the top of your HEAD, drenched in soy sauce and wrapped in some remnants of noodles. 2 INDIA: Dripping out of your EARS is a spicy CURRY sauce.
There are two simple options for Number Pegs: the Number-Rhyme System (chapter 5, this page) or the Number-Shape System (chapter 5, this page). With the Number-Rhyme System you use images that come from words that rhyme with the numbers (one = bun, two = shoe, etc.), and with the Number-Shape System you use images that look like the shapes of the numbers (1 = stick, 2 = swan, etc.).
- Gooooooooal! - How to Remember World Cup History
STICK (looks like a stick) 2. SWAN (looks like a swan sitting on a lake) 3. HANDCUFFS (looks like a pair of open handcuffs)
1. GERMANY = BRATWURST SAUSAGE
2. SPAIN = BULLFIGHTER
3. ITALY = PIZZA
4. BRAZIL = SOCCER BALL
5. FRANCE = EIFFEL TOWER

THE JOURNEY METHOD
The method requires you to imagine a place you know very well (it can be a house you grew up in, an apartment you currently live in, the path you walk to get to your grocery store, whatever), then to anchor the images of the things you’re memorizing to locations along a path through that place.
if you anchor visuals to locations, you’re less likely to get things mixed up than by anchoring them to other visuals.
Simply put, our brains are hardwired for it!
That FOREVER Memory! - How to Manage Your Journeys and Remember Things Long-Term
I have journeys that fit in a room, while others span an entire city.
The important thing to remember is that the Journey Method works by combining visual memory with spatial memory, so it’s about the furniture’s location, not the furniture itself.
As long as you have a consistent pattern (e.g., clockwise, left to right, or some well-defined path), you can make tiny micro-journeys around the corners of a room.
There really is no limit to how far your journeys can go. Even if you’ve gone through every nook and cranny in your house, you can still extend a journey just by walking out the door.
In a case like that, it’s good to write down the whole journey point by point, so you can rehearse it in your head before adding the visuals to each point. You may also want to go to the actual place and walk through it just to make sure you remember it in enough detail (or use Google Street View if you can’t get there in person).
What if you can’t come up with a long journey? Should you combine a bunch of short ones? I wouldn’t recommend it, unless there’s a natural flow from each into the next.
Try not to double back to any spots—but if you do, make sure you view the space from a different angle
If you want to memorize something for good, such as every Best Picture winner from the Oscars, pick or create a journey that you can dedicate to that list and never tape over.
But as with most things our minds memorize, without review it will inevitably fade.
if you keep activating and firing that connection (i.e., reviewing that memory), that connection strengthens. It creates something of a neural shortcut—a secret backdoor entrance—between those neurons.
Chapter Five: Making sense of the gobbledygook number things and how to make them stick
I’ll be the first to tell you that most top memorizers don’t have a proclivity for numbers. It’s not rocket science; it’s not even math. It’s all storytelling.
How to Remember PIN, Bank Account, and Checking Numbers
Since pin numbers and other similar-size numbers (four to six digits in length) are so short, we can use one of the quickest and simplest systems for digits, famously known as the Number-Rhyme System. Here’s how it works: Each digit is given a preset image to associate with it based on a word that rhymes with the original number.
The Number-Rhyme System is probably the quickest and the least involved in terms of setup; but the images don’t offer much variety. If your sequence has a lot of repeat digits, it can become a nuisance to deal with the repeat images. With the Number-Shape System, the images stay flexible by leaning toward categories, which is ultimately why I prefer this system over the former.
How to Remember His or Her Phone Number
0 9 1 1 2 0 0 1 1 2 0 7 1 9 4 1 0 6 0 6 1 9 4 4
But what if I told you that it was actually three important dates from American history?
By now you may have noticed that taking a sequence of numbers and trying to find words within it using the Major System isn’t necessarily a quick process. It can get faster if you train, but in general you might be spending a lot of time trying out certain groups of numbers to see if they create a word or not.
One way around this (and a way to get faster at the encoding process) is to create a fixed Major System. Decide on a fixed grouping of digits and then pre-learn all the words for all possible combinations of those groupings. It’s a bit of work, but it’s worth the effort. Most people will start with a two-digit Major System, deciding on a fixed image for 00 and working through all the two-digit pairs up to 99. For example, 76 is always CASH; 89 is always FIB—you get the idea.
How to Remember Your Passport, Social Security, and Credit Card
You can always make the extra effort to really picture one image happening before the other, but I’ll tell you right now that this is one of the most common mistakes made in memory competition—flipping two or three words around. It’s a killer.
Enter the Person-Action-Object System (or PAO, for short), my personal favourite.
These kinds of systems take a little more time to master because you’ll need to learn all the images. But trust me, the investment of time in learning this system will benefit you for the rest of your life.
With PAO, rather than using three distinct images and linking them together, we are going to stick to a formula of Person first, Action second, Object third.
the advantages to using this system are:
1. Chunking—
2. Fixed structure—
3. Familiar images—
People tend to be a lot more memorable than random words
With the PAO phonetic code, we won’t be creating words with consonants and vowels. Instead, we’ll use the two letters as initials, representing the name of the person (most of the time).
it’s key to come up with people first, not things.
Remember, the way PAO works is that each two-digit number represents a person, an action, and an object.
“What do I automatically think of this person doing?” Then ask yourself, “What object comes to mind when I think of this person doing that action?”
Then we have the number 16 representing three things: Arnold, weightlifting, and a barbell—person, action, object.
if 16 shows up as the first two digits, it’s Arnie (the person). If it shows up as the middle
two digits, it’s someone else (whoever the person is represented by the first two digits) performing the action of lifting something (Arnie’s action). Then finally, if it shows up as the last two digits, it’s someone doing some action with . . . a barbell (Arnie’s object).
PRO TIP I would suggest creating a journey dedicated solely to all of your personal numerical data: social security number, passport numbers, policy numbers, credit card numbers.
Never Get Locked Out of Your Online Accounts
But someone using a regular desktop computer could crack a six-character password in about a minute, a seven-character password in about an hour, an eight-character password in about five days, and a nine-character password in about five years (which is to say never, since I don’t believe there’s a computer out there that can run for five years
How to Remember Numbers as Large as You Want!
My approach for jumping from one hundred people to 1,000 is to use a category system. I take the original two-digit number and give it a unique category so that I can assign related images to each of the nine other numbers that include the original two digits in the three-digit number. For instance, since 15 (or 015) is Albert Einstein, every three-digit number that ends in 15 fits into the category of Albert Einstein, which I’ve decided is famous scientists. With the first digit providing a letter-based clue using either the PAO System or the Major System phonetic code, when I see the number 815, I know it’s a famous scientist whose name starts with either H (PAO System) or F or V (Major System)—both options for representing the number
Chapter Six: Tips for memorizing some of the other things your bumfuzzled brain has to deal with
How to Remember Your Favorite Quotes and Sayings
EXAMPLE 2—“ Here’s to those who’ve seen us at our best and seen us at our worst and can’t tell the difference.” Read it over a couple of times to yourself, then once out loud. Then break it down: H t t w s u a o b a s u a o w a c t t d. Read it a few more times. Now put the book down and say it completely from memory. MAGIC.
However, note that once you’ve memorized a set speech or poem, making it verbally fluid isn’t always a given. Remember, these techniques get information into your memory fast but don’t necessarily make you quick on the draw, so to speak . . . at least not at first. Once you have it in your brain, though, you can then review it as often as you want, anywhere you are by just accessing your journey.¶
How to Remember Foreign Words and Their Meanings
To master a language you do need to know a good chunk of words—and if you can memorize the first few thousand most-common words in your target language, you’ll be well ahead of the game. In French, learning just the first two thousand most common words will allow you to read and understand about 80 percent of books!
Maybe all your female-gendered foods (fraise/ strawberry and framboise/ raspberry) get placed inside the barn at a farm you knew when you were growing up. Maybe all the male-gendered foods (chou/ cabbage and pamplemousse/ grapefruit) get placed outside the barn.
How to Remember Historic dates
Here’s another useful strategy for SEEing four-digit years. Choose a real or fictional location to represent the centuries. The 1800s could be a saloon in the Wild Wild West. The 1100s could be a medieval castle. The 1900s could be the Eiffel Tower. Whatever comes to mind when you think of a century, find a related location. Then, when you have a date you need to memorize, just dump all the images in the same location.
Chapter Seven: The last few things to make your memory an absolute memorizing monster
Tips for Improving Memory by Eating Right
Check that you’re getting around 900 mg of DHA. EPA and ALA are two other omega-3 fatty acids that are commonly found in supplements, but be aware that these fatty acids eventually convert to DHA and it takes a lot of each to equal a very small amount of DHA. So in short, make sure you’re going straight for the good stuff and getting that DHA omega-3 specifically. Try taking algal DHA (i.e., DHA capsules that are in algae form). The algae is the stuff that has the DHA, not the fish. The fish eats the algae, which is why fish oil also has DHA. Make sense?
Tips for Improving Memory by Sleeping Right
Pulling an all-nighter could lower your memory performance by up to 40 percent. Sleeplessness also seems to make our memories more susceptible to interference,
Tips for Improving Memory by Staying Active and Exercising
It’s practically a fact that exercise benefits your brain. Aerobic exercise has been demonstrated to increase the size of the hippocampus, which is one of the primary brain regions for memory. It also improves spatial memory and cognitive function,
Tips for Improving Memory by Being Socially Active
Elderly women with larger social networks have been found to be less susceptible to dementia than their less-connected peers.
Tips for Improving Memory by Using Your Brain
the biggest booster of all is keeping your brain active.
It can be as simple as trying a new language, reading something new and difficult, learning a new skill, doing puzzles, or (my personal favourite, of course) memorizing.
Anyone can do it, provided he has the drive to do
Don’t worry—you don’t need ten thousand hours of practice (as Malcolm Gladwell posits in his book Outliers) to master your memory. In many ways, you’ve already spent far more than ten thousand hours working on your memory before you even picked up this book.
Farewell and Good Luck!
If you only walk away with one concept from this book, I hope it is SEE–LINK–GO! Whenever you’re faced with a memory-related task, breathe, take a moment, and go through those three familiar steps. SEE the thing you’re trying to memorize as an image; give it life, give it colour. LINK that image (or sequence of images) to something you already know; anchor it to that thought, that peg, that location on your memory journey. And finally, make sure that you really GO! and mesh all those pieces together into one memorable image that is totally, unequivocally impossible to forget".
I think it's a really useful book. Five stars from me.… (más)

This book, if you will use it and practice it consistently, will guarantee to improve your reading speed and learning comprehension. I've read a number of speed reading books (3 to be exact) and I've also bought their Udemy course and in my opinion this book is great for those who find watching the lectures a little boring like for me since the internet in my country is slower as compared in the US. The book, like the course also contains exercises you need to do in order to improve, so you will not just be browsing through this book but you will continually refer to it. The book, based on the copy that I have, has links in it so you might want to also have the kindle version.… (más)