Memory Tricks
In The Invincible Brain, you will learn many practical memory tricks you can use in your day-to-day life.
Here are some examples:
How to Memorize Names
Before meeting someone new, one easy, quick trick is to use your imagination—tell yourself that you will get $10,000 if you memorize their name and its correct spelling. The more excited you are, the more your prefrontal cortex will get revved up. Remember, this part of your brain is the engine that energizes all other parts of your brain to be primed and function at their best, including your hippocampus.
Once you’ve got yourself motivated, try this four-step process for remembering names, using the acronym N.A.M.E.:
Notice: When you first meet a new person and want to remember their name, begin by noticing their face in detail. Look at their eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth. Listen to their tone of voice, observe how they speak, and guess their approximate age. Pick one feature of their face that stands out the most; do they have thick eyebrows, a small nose, or a charming smile? This allows your mind to focus on them and block out distractions. You want them to be at the center of your attention and be ready to discover their name. Get excited to earn that $10,000!
Ask: The next step is to ask their name. When you hear the name of the person you just met, repeat their name loud and clear. People tend to give their name quickly, but you want to ensure you hear it fully. Be ready to tell them: “Nice meeting you, Fredricka.” This is an important moment in the learning process. You need to grab their name with complete confidence, and say it outloud. People often feel shy to repeat the name of the person they just met, as they worry they may not be pronouncing it correctly. This is the moment to be bold. Ask them to repeat their name if you are not 100 percent sure how it is pronounced or spelled. You need to grasp the details of their name, especially if it is unfamiliar to you.
Memorize: Memorize their name by repeating it two to three times during your conversation. There is a good chance that despite your best effort to grab and register this person’s name, their name vanished in your mind. There is nothing to worry about. They don’t know your name either. I often make a joke and ask people if they remember my name (which they rarely do). Then, while smiling, I give them my name and ask them to repeat their name (and how to spell it, if necessary). You are on a mission to register this person’s name into your hippocampus. Repeat their name as you talk with them: “Fredricka, tell me, how do you know our host?” Listen with heightened attention. The more you connect with and learn about them (what they do, where they live, etc.), the more likely you’ll remember their name.
Ensure: Ensure you have their name fully memorized. As your conversation ends, be 1,000 percent confident you know how to pronounce and spell their name. Confirm that you know this person’s name without a doubt. Picture in your mind that you are about to receive your $10,000 reward, and pat yourself on the back for your victory, having accomplished memorizing their name. Remember, the more emotions are involved in an event, the more likely you will remember it later so remain upbeat and enthusiastic.
How to Memorize your Credit Card Number
This is a lot easier than you think. You can do this through a process called the memory palace. In ancient Greece, messengers had to carry news across the vast landscape of the Greek city-states. To ensure they remembered every detail accurately, they used a memory technique that transformed their minds into intricate maps of imaginary palaces. Each room in these mental palaces was associated with specific information, such as a leader’s decree, a treaty term, or a battle strategy. As they visualized walking through these palaces, they could “retrieve” the information from the rooms, step by step, as if reading from a scroll.
This method was beneficial in an era when written records were rare and unreliable during long journeys. The technique allowed messengers to travel for days or weeks, relaying complex messages with perfect accuracy. Memory champions still use this technique. Here’s how to build a memory palace to memorize your credit card numbers:
1. Get your credit card and look at or write down the number, expiration date, and code. Let’s say it is 5500 6602 8653 3362, Expiration: 04/48, Code: 629. We will place each of these groups of numbers on a familiar path you take every day, from when you wake up to when you leave the house.
2. Imagine a path you take every morning (for example) from your bedroom to your bathroom, kitchen, door, and garage.
3. Use your imagination and picture each of these groups of numbers in each of the locations. See them large and clear, as big blocks in vibrant and vivid colors.
For example, in your mind, place an image of 5500 on your nightstand. Close your eyes, and see these numbers as white blocks next to your lamp or your alarm clock. Picture these thick white blocks in your head and ask yourself a few times what the numbers are. Make sure you have 5500 firmly in your memory. This should take no more than three to five minutes when you try it for the first time. Once you are sure you have memorized this number, we can now move to the bathroom.
4. Picture 6602 written in large, red, bold letters below your shower (perhaps with dripping blood, if you want to make it extra dramatic). Seeing such a random number in your shower is ridiculous, but that’s the idea. The sillier, scarier, or funnier, the better you will remember it. Repeat this number and memorize it for three to five minutes.
5. Go back and picture seeing 5500 on your nightstand, then walking to the bathroom and seeing 6602 in your shower. This reinforces the memories and the order.
6. Picture walking into the kitchen and seeing 8653 in large black block numbers next to your coffeemaker (perhaps with some coffee spilled over the blocks). Close your eyes and repeat 8653 as you envision your kitchen counter with these numbers. Repeat for three to five minutes.
7. Repeat all the numbers, going back to the beginning of your route: 5500 on the nightstand, 6602 in the shower, and 8653 by the coffeemaker. Smile and have fun with this process. You are doing it for the fun of it, in addition to the convenience of knowing your credit card number wherever you are.
8. Repeat the same process for memorizing 3362—picture it in large brown blocks standing in your front doorway (with letters almost as tall as you are), blocking your way out of your home. Again, go back through the journey, starting at your nightstand, visualizing and repeating the numbers at each location.
9. Now you have stepped into the garage and see 4/48 written on your windshield. That’s weird; who did that? Imagine getting upset because you must clean 4 4 8 from your windshield glass. Repeat 4/48 as you are cleaning the glass! Now repeat the entire number: 5500 6602 8653 3362, Expiration: 04/48.
9. Picture opening your car door and seeing 629 etched on your seat with a knife. Vividly see how your seat is damaged with these letters. The more clearly you visualize it, the better you will remember it. What terrible vandalism! You can even get slightly upset about it—you will remember it more easily that way.
10. Finally, repeat the whole thing from the beginning to the end: 5500 6602 8653 3362, Expiration: 04/28, Code: 629.
10. Finally, repeat the whole thing from the beginning to the end: 5500 6602 8653 3362, Expiration: 04/28, Code: 629.
And voila! You have memorized your credit card number and can confidently rehearse it (and impress your family and friends!). For the fun it, try to rehearse all of these numbers backwards.
When you do this memorization drill for the first time, it may take thirty minutes, but as you get better at it, you can memorize a credit card in five to ten minutes. The point is that this is ultimately doable and requires no exceptional talent or skills.
How to Memorize a Deck of Cards (bonus, not mentioned in the book)
Are you ready to take your memory-boosting skills to the next level? This “trick” is a little more complicated because it requires some dedicated prep time, but once you do it, you’ll get it, and you can eventually learn to do it more and more quickly. I have practiced enough that I can do this in one hour, and you can too, if you are motivated enough.
But memorize a whole deck of cards? Sure! The key is to utilize the “palace” technique with something humans are very good at remembering: stories about people.
Here’s how to set it up:
Step One: The first thing you are going to do is make your plan. Create a table with rows for each card in the deck from Ace to 2, and columns for each suit: hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, like this (or make a copy of this one):
Step Two: Now, what you are going to do is choose a category of people for each suit, and then assign a person to each card within that suit. By the end of this part of the exercise, you will have 52 people filled in on your chart.
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Queen n |
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Heart
Diamond
Club
Spade
King
Queens
Jack
10
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Step Three: The next step is to memorize the person associated with each card. I like to do this one suit at a time, and I advise my students to take about a week to memorize each suit. That is just 13 cards to remember in one week. Write it down and refer to it throughout the week whenever you are waiting in line, riding the train, or doing something that doesn’t require your attention.
Go over it again and again in your mind: Ace of hearts: Your spouse or partner. King of hearts: Your dad. Queen of hearts: Your mom. Jack of hearts: Your brother. 10 of hearts: your best friend, and so on. You don’t have to use these examples—assign the cards in ways that make sense to you. As you associate each person with the card, make a visual in your mind.
See that person doing something. Maybe you see Michael Jordan shooting a basket, or you see your best friend dancing at her wedding.
Once you have the entire deck memorized with your people, you are ready to memorize the order.
Now for the memorization part:
Step Four: This is where the story comes in. Shuffle the deck, then start memorizing the cards three at a time. You will make a funny story with the three characters you had assigned to each card. With each card, think about the person you’ve associated with that card, and build your story of what happens next. The goal is to imagine a list of humorous episodes that happen to three characters at a time, in a series of step along a familiar path in your daily life. Here’s an example:
Lamar Jackson comes up to Bill Gates one day and says, “Hey Bill, do you want to buy my contract?” Bill Gates says, “Sure, I’m interested, Let’s go to Five Guys and have a hamburger and talk about it.” So in my mind, I picture big, tall Lamar Jackson walking up to Bill Gates and saying these things in his deep voice. I vividly envision it.
Then I deal out three more cards and make another little story. David Beckham meets Abraham Lincoln and says, “Oh Abraham, I’m in love with you!” And Abraham Lincoln says, “I’m sorry, I’m already in love with Queen Elizabeth.” Then I imagine Abraham Lincoln and Queen Elizabeth in a passionate embrace. The more ridiculous it is, the more likely you will be to remember it.
Here is the key step in this memorization process: as you go, you are going to locate each story in a familiar place, like you did when you memorized your credit card number. Think of a path you like to walk, or a sequence of places you visited on a memorable location, and set each story in order along the path of places.
For example, there is a path that I always walk to get to my class. I get out of my car in the parking garage and I pass a fountain, then I walk past a little plaza. Then I pass the library. Then I go through the gate onto the university campus. Then I walk two blocks, take a left, and I am at my office building. So I put my first story about Lamar Jackson and Bill Gates at Five Guys in the parking lot where I park my car. Then I place David Beckham, Abraham Lincoln, and Queen Victory next to the fountain, and so on.
Work on making this story a little bit every day, memorizing three cards each day. Every time you are about to memorize three new cards, start from the beginning to reinforce the memory in your brain before adding the next few steps. Before you know it, you will have the entire deck memorized, just by thinking of your stories and the visuals you created for them. Follow the path of places, look at the “scenes” of your stories, and just recite the associate cards. This is easier than it sounds. I do it in front of my classes and their jaws drop.
Now of course you will want to keep your deck of cards in the same order because if you shuffle it again, you’ll have to make up an entirely new set of stories. However, the people will be the same, and this can be done. The more you do it, the faster you will get, so at some point, if you keep working on it, you can look at a deck and create stories in your head on the spot. This takes some time of course, but it is possible. Remember the memory champion, Nelson Dellis? I’ve seen him memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds. You probably won’t take the time to be able to accomplish a feat like that—but just know that if you really wanted to, you could.
Memorizing the order of a deck that you keep in that order will amaze and impress your friends, but better yet, it will work the memory centers of your brain and build your confidence, so you will get better and better at remembering, and grow your hippocampus as well as your growth mindset in the process.
Every one of these memory tricks can help you gain confidence and a growth mindset about your ability to improve your memory. I also hope you will take to heart what I’ve explained about breaking bad habits and addictions, and forming new, healthier habits to support your brain. It’s very common to worry about memory, and so in the next chapter, we’re going to take a look at the biggest worry of all: Alzheimer’s disease, and how it happens, which may be quite different than what you thought.