Have We Been Wrong About Posture? & How Memory Champions Think

Take a look at your speedometer the next time you're driving. Chances are, it's lying to you. The speed you're actually traveling is probably different from what the dashboard says—and that's completely intentional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedometer?utm From the time we're children, we're constantly reminded to "sit up straight" and "don't slouch." We've been told that good posture prevents pain, improves health, and even makes us more confident. But how much of that is actually supported by science? According to Beth Linker, surprisingly little. In this conversation, she explores where our ideas about posture came from, why so many assumptions have gone unchallenged, and what the evidence really says about the way we sit, stand, and move. Beth is a former physical therapist, medical historian, and author of Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America (https://amzn.to/4480Hhk). Imagine remembering names almost instantly, recalling conversations in remarkable detail, or memorizing enormous amounts of information with ease. It may sound like a rare gift, but Nelson Dellis says it's a skill almost anyone can learn. As a six-time USA Memory Champion, a two-time Guinness World Record holder and Grandmaster of Memory. He has mastered techniques that dramatically improve recall—and they're far simpler than most people imagine. In our conversation, Nelson explains how memory really works, why we forget so much, and the practical strategies you can start using immediately to remember more of what matters. He is author of Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem-Solving, and Much More (https://amzn.to/3Rlxpc7). Tennis balls haven't always been bright yellow. For decades they were white, just as many people assume they always were. So why did manufacturers change one of the most recognizable pieces of sports equipment in the world? Interestingly, the answer has very little to do with tennis players—and everything to do with the people watching the match. https://www.itftennis.com/media/2280/balls-history-of-tennis-balls.pdf PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS WAYFAIR: Ready to upgrade your home for way less? Head to ⁠⁠⁠https://Wayfair.com⁠⁠⁠ right now to shop all things home and get your space ready for less. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 Sponsored Job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at ⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/PODCAST⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 0:30Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, your car's speedometer is probably not accurate, and there's a good reason for that. Then, we've all been told to sit up straight and have good posture. But why? The promise is a little fuzzy.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  If you can somehow maintain upright posture, and they never tell you for how long, right? Like, no one ever says, "Stand up straight for the rest of the day? For an hour? How long do you want me to stand up straight?"

• 0:58Mike Carruthers?

  Also, most tennis balls are green, but they didn't used to be, so what changed? And memory. You probably wish you could remember things better, while a six-time memory champion tells you how.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  A large part of the problem for people is not that they're forgetful, it's just that they never put the information in their mind in a clear, organized way, and they're having trouble finding it. And there's techniques to do that, different strategies.

• 1:24Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:29Mike Carruthers?

  Now, here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So, instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for,

• 2:14Mike Carruthers?

  and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with 1,000 chances to win $1,000...

• 2:29Mike Carruthers?

  I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:07Mike Carruthers?

  Even though I don't know what kind of car you drive, I can pretty much assure you that the speedometer in your car is not accurate. And there's a really interesting reason why. And that's why we're starting with this today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers and I'm glad you're here. So if you've ever compared your car's speedometer to a GPS app, you will likely notice that your speedometer on your dashboard says you're going a little faster than the GPS app says. That's not a defect. It's intentional. Automakers purposely calibrate most speedometers to read slightly higher than your actual speed. Why?

• 3:51Mike Carruthers?

  Because manufacturers never want a speedometer to tell you you're driving slower than you really are. Differences in tire wear, tire pressure, temperature, and manufacturing tolerances can all affect the true speed of a vehicle. By building in a small cushion, they reduce the chance that drivers accidentally exceed the speed limit because of instrument error. So if your speedometer says 70, your actual speed may be 67 or 68. It's one of those rare situations where engineers intentionally make an instrument a little inaccurate in order to make driving more accurate. And that is something you should know.

• 4:38Mike Carruthers?

  How many times have you been told to "sit up straight" or "stand up straight"? Probably hundreds, maybe thousands. Most of us grew up believing that good posture is essential for good health and that slouching is bad. It's bad for your back, your neck, and maybe it's even bad for your character. But is it? Where did all these rules about posture come from? Is there really one correct way to sit or stand? Or have we been worrying about posture far more than we should? It turns out, the history of posture is filled with surprising myths, changing science, and a lot of assumptions that don't hold up very well today.

• 5:21Mike Carruthers?

  My guest has dug deep into where our obsession with posture came from and what the evidence actually says. Beth Linker is a professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book "Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America." Hi Beth, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Hi Mike, thanks for having me.

• 5:47Mike Carruthers?

  So this is the first I've heard the phrase "posture panic." I've never heard that before. And I've never thought of or heard that posture was like a controversial topic. So, how is this a thing?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  Well, the takeaway point is that our belief in the benefits of good posture are not scientifically grounded. They're instead grounded in our cultural attitudes and historical artifacts. It actually comes out of the eugenic era and belief in eugenics.

• 6:27Mike Carruthers?

  And so, explain what eugenics are.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Eugenics is a very complicated history, but eugenics is the belief in human perfectibility and doing so through correct breeding, so through correct reproduction, but also through engaging in the best possible lifestyle. So it is a movement from the early 20th century that was about optimization of the human body.

• 7:01Mike Carruthers?

  And is there anything wrong with what your mother told you to stand up straight? Sit up straight? Is there, I mean, is anything wrong with it? Or is it just being oversold?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yes, I would say it's being oversold. Is there anything wrong with it? I talk about how upright posture is actually very morally loaded. In the mid 20th century, straightness became, meaning like word wise and meaning wise, became synonymous with heterosexuality, became synonymous with honesty. And then on top of that is this medicalized history of posture, of good posture, being essential for your health.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Good posture was talked about in terms of if you can have good posture now, you won't suffer lots of illnesses in the future, or you won't suffer back pain in the future. So I think, is it wrong? I don't know that it's wrong for someone to tell you to sit up straight. I just think it's really loaded. And I don't think it's as simple as people want to think it is.

• 8:20Mike Carruthers?

  But those claims of you won't have back pain, the claim, the other health claims of good posture, are they untrue or again, just oversold?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  They're just not rooted in scientific data. We have no good science telling us that good posture will prevent back pain.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  And the problem with this is, is that this kind of health belief, this pervasive health belief that good posture will prevent back pain, has been sold to us since the early 20th century through a bunch of stakeholders who benefit from this kind of health belief. Shoe manufacturers, chair manufacturers, a whole fitness industry, oh, and corsets, I shouldn't forget to mention corsets and back braces, that their whole market is, exists

• 9:20Speaker 02

  on creating fear and also a promise that if you can somehow maintain upright posture, and they never tell you for how long, right? Like, no one ever says, "Stand up straight for, for the rest of the day? For an hour? How long do you want me to stand up straight?" So they just kind of leave that out there as an unknown. For how long you're supposed to be straight? I mean, I guess in the fantasy, it's all day long. And that this, in the end, will translate into no back pain. But even current studies coming out of the US

• 10:00Speaker 02

  and Australia's have shown in recent years that teenagers looking at their phones with a slight slump, actually, there's no difference between them and teenagers who aren't, who are standing up straight. There's no evidence that one group has a higher chance of back pain than the other.

• 10:23Mike Carruthers?

  So you said there's no scientific evidence that good posture, sitting up straight, standing up straight for however long, is good for you. But is there any evidence that bad posture is bad for you?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  And no. And then I guess the question I would have back at you from that question is, how do we define it? How do we define good and bad posture? You know, if you think about the human body, there's a lot of variability in the human body, a lot of diversity. And then if you think of the spine, it's the same thing. There's a lot of diversity. The spine is very pliable. But yet, we walk around with these words, good and bad. And it's probably been culturally taught to us what is good and bad. So, good is upright, whatever that means or looks like.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And bad is slumped over or curved to one side or the other. But that's pretty imprecise. So what does that even mean to say, to do a study on bad posture? What would that look like? I don't even think we've agreed on a universal standard of what good and bad posture is. Now, in the past, there was this group called the American Posture League. They were founded in nineteen fourteen. They grew out of this eugenics movement of a belief in bodily perfectibility. And they were also, I should add, they were anti-surgery.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  So, they wanted to develop posture standards, human posture standards, so that there could be fewer, at that time, back surgery was very new. So, fewer back surgeries. But at the same time, they really targeted the whole general population in the US. And they tried to develop these tools to determine how to grade posture, literally grading posture with an A, B, C, or D. And they worked in universities and they worked in schools. And this was the start of the big research effort into posture.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  But I think by today's standards, we would see their measurements of human posture as pretty simplistic.

• 12:55Mike Carruthers?

  So let me ask you this, because you said this started in the early 20th century. But today, I would imagine that if you took people and put them in a room and had other people look at them, and some of them had really good posture and some of them did not, people would say that the good posture people are, whatever they would say, look healthier, look more confident, have a lot of characteristics. And I don't know if that's human nature to notice that in people, or is that a learned thing from this movement that you're talking about?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  I would say it is in large part a learned thing. I don't know that it's innate. You know, if you look at all of Western history, from Plato to Aristotle onward, philosophers since ancient history have been discussing, or pointing out at least, the uniqueness of the human body, of upright posture. There would be maybe etiquette manuals, so how to conduct oneself, how to hold oneself, would be found in etiquette manuals for polite society.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  It was more of a marker of status than anything particularly health-related.

• 14:20Mike Carruthers?

  You mentioned that this posture panic thing, this whole big deal about posture, started in the early 20th century. And I'm curious what people were thinking before that. Was this just a non-topic, or what? And I'll ask you about that in just a moment.

• 15:06Speaker 05

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• 15:35Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about good posture and how important that is or isn't. My guest is Beth Linker, author of the book Slouch: Posture Panic in America. And so Beth, if all of this started in the early 20th century, then what was the whole attitude about posture before that? Before this big furor about posture started, what were people saying and thinking?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  So as I indicated earlier, there were a lot of etiquette manuals. But interestingly, if you look at the etiquette manuals from even the early republic of this country of the United States, most etiquette manuals would advise well-bred people to have a slight lean in their stance when they stood, when they sat. The only people, according to certain etiquette manuals, who sit bolt straight up were lower class. And as you can tell, like fashion and cultural ideas, I think we can all get a sense that those change over time, right?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And it wasn't until the late 19th, early 20th century and after Darwin's discovery and the scientific community's embrace of Darwin's theory, that evolution happened not because the human brain developed first or that human speech developed first. Darwin actually posited that humans came about and were able to become more supreme beings because of upright posture. So their straight spine. So without a straight spine or upright posture, our human intellect and our speech would not have developed.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  So after Darwin, everybody gets very concerned about upright posture. And it is a real concern, as you said, especially in the United States. This is the, you know, we have the second great migration into the country. Suddenly, the huddled masses, maybe they're going to bring disease and disability with them. All of these people who are hunched over. And Darwin believed that upright posture occurred first. So a lot of researchers, physicians and anthropologists went around the world looking for fossils to prove Darwin right. They proved him right.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Then these same physicians started to apply this theory in their clinic, looking at patients who were slumped over. And these physicians feared that we were going into a decline, that the nation was going into decline, that there could be de-evolution. So suddenly, this link between poor posture and a de-evolution or degrading of a civilization became very real and a fear. And so they began this preventative health program that resulted in widespread surveillance of human posture

• 18:58Speaker 02

  that included things like buying the right shoes, buying, sitting in the right chair, wearing the right foundation garment, the right undergarment.

• 19:11Mike Carruthers?

  But you've said that there is no evidence in science that good posture is good because no one's looked? Or people have looked and found out that there's no evidence?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I would say that the early 20th century posture scientists did look, did research this. They found that 80% of the population slumped or slouched. They never did any follow-up studies, however, to see whether or not that actually mattered. It was just simply 80% of the population has poor posture, therefore.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  We need to be on guard against, in the early 20th century, they believed it was linked to respiratory diseases. They believed it was linked to tuberculosis. So they thought that if you had a slouched posture, you would develop tuberculosis. And then later in the century, it became more about back pain. But they never did any concrete studies. And at this time, we have to remember that, just as I said, cultural norms change and fashion changes, the dictates and demands of science change. If you look at today's science and the standards of today's science, there is no evidence that poor posture is going to,

• 20:38Speaker 02

  that it's going to necessarily lead to back pain, or that good posture is going to prevent back pain.

• 20:45Mike Carruthers?

  But back pain aside, I mean, when you Google or ask AI about posture, you know, Harvard, Brown University, all these people come up and say, you know, it's all about body alignment. It's good for balancing your weight. Chronic slouching causes muscle fatigue. There seems to be a consensus among academia that good posture is good for you.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  If you do look at those websites, I mean, I wouldn't trust AI.

• 21:14Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I'm looking at the Harvard website.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I know, the Harvard. And I've looked at that myself. I think because, I think that message is out there because we have to distinguish between preventative healthcare, right? So prevention, and actually, interventive or therapeutic healthcare. There isn't a lot of cutting-edge science in preventative healthcare. And I think this is just a safe message to send out there, yet also meaningless, because no person maintains the same posture all day long. I have ergonomic chairs. You know, I'm not like a denier. I'm not a posture

• 22:02Speaker 02

  denier. So I'm not denying that sometimes I feel better when I'm in my ergonomic chair.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  But I'm not sitting in my ergonomic chair so that I can hold an upright posture for three hours. Actually, I'm sitting in it and then I move places. You know, we all move. The spine is incredibly dynamic.

• 22:27Mike Carruthers?

  For whatever reason, a lot of people are on the good posture bandwagon because it's not just Harvard. When I look online, I see the Cleveland Clinic, Brown University, a lot of places, reputable places, have articles that talk about the benefits of good posture.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  No, it's not just Harvard, but I think they just all repeat. It's an echo chamber because no one has bothered to look into it. No one questions it. It is such a truism that no one questions it, except for, I think if you ask any physical therapist trained in the last 20 years, they would tell you that this is not valid, that this is something that people want to believe in, but it has not been scientifically proven.

• 23:15Mike Carruthers?

  But it seems to me that the pursuit of good posture is fairly benign. I mean, it's not going to do anybody any harm. And as we talked about, I think people perceive a person who stands up straight, who sits up straight, they perceive them in a positive way. They project confidence. In other words, there's no real harm in good posture.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  It's benign until it's not benign. It's benign until, as people come into a clinic, I'll never forget in the 90s, when I was in the clinic, it was the first, I don't know, I don't know if it was the first, but a real resurgence in general population doing Pilates. Pilates came out of the same eugenics movement, was primarily initially in the early 20th century and mid 20th century for dancers, people in prime physical shape. In the 90s, it kind of came out along with Jane Fonda and her aerobics, you know, as, oh, this is a great new fitness thing for people to do. And as a physical therapist,

• 24:24Speaker 02

  I was seeing so many people with back pain. Similarly, yoga can cause people a lot of injuries and back pain.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  So it's not always benign. Um, if somebody takes it to a great extreme, you know, if somebody becomes really self-obsessed about their posture and they don't understand their own body and body alignment, it can create problems. The other way that I do not think it's benign is I think going back to what you asked about in a lineup of people and you see people slouched over, it leads to this irrational bias against people who don't have perfect posture.

• 25:09Mike Carruthers?

  I guess what I meant by benign was like, so sometimes when I'm working and I may be a little hunched over and then my back will start to hurt and if I sit up, goes away. And so, you know, it seems like that's a good thing.

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Well, you changed your position.

• 25:26Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I sat up, I changed my posture, I'm not, I wasn't slumped over. It's happened to me several times.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  You could, yeah, yeah, that's good. I mean, I'm glad, and that's your body's way of telling you like, hey, change your position. Change your position. This position isn't good anymore. Change it. But I bet if you sat straight up like you did to, to correct it for a very long time, you would also start to feel pain. And so then slumping over would be like, okay, I'm, I got a little relief. So I think it can be the reverse. It's more about our bodies are flexible and 3D and it's about frequent movements and frequent change of movement rather than this ideal of ramrod, perfect, straight spine.

• 26:17Mike Carruthers?

  You know, what you said, which I haven't really thought about this before, when you're told to sit up straight, well, so for how long? Is sitting up straight for 30 seconds or even five minutes? I mean, what, what is that supposed to do? Nobody sits up straight all the time. And it certainly makes you wonder about just how important all this talk of good posture really is. I've been speaking with Beth Linker. She's author of the book Slouch: Posture Panic in America. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Hey, Beth, thank you for coming on and talking about this.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Low energy, unfocused, foggy? You might be dehydrated. Gatorade Zero Powders have been scientifically designed to help improve hydration balance in the body. With a clinically proven electrolyte blend and no artificial colors or flavors, great tasting hydration no matter where you're going. Shop now online or at retailers nationwide. Gatorade: Hydrates Better Than Water. Is it in you? Symptoms noted are signs of mild to moderate dehydration. Consult a healthcare professional if symptoms persist.

• 27:57Mike Carruthers?

  Have you ever met someone who seems to remember everything? Names, faces, birthdays, conversations from years ago. They can pull it out of their head as if it's nothing. And meanwhile, the rest of us walk into a room and forget why we went in there. So are some people just born with an extraordinary memory? Or is memory actually a skill anyone can improve? My guest says that a great memory isn't a gift, it's a set of techniques that almost anyone can learn. Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion, a two-time Guinness World Record Holder, and one of only a handful of grandmasters of memory in the world. As a

• 28:40Mike Carruthers?

  demonstration of what's possible, he recently memorized every Taylor Swift song and can identify any one of them after hearing it for just a second, even though he's not an especially big Taylor Swift fan. He's here to explain how memory really works and the surprisingly simple ways you can make yours much better. His book is Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More. Hey Nelson, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Hey, nice to meet you. Thanks for having me.

• 29:12Mike Carruthers?

  After reading your list of accomplishments of all the memory-related things you can do, it just seems like your brain just works better than mine and better than a lot of people's.

• 29:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think it's so much about that mine works better than yours or anybody's out there. I think that's that's kind of the genesis of my whole journey is I thought I had an average memory, that I was just as gifted as the next person, nothing special. And I discovered memory techniques and I discovered memory competitions. I was inspired by my grandmother's passing from Alzheimer's and vowed to myself that I would never let that happen to me. Not that I knew what to do in order for that to happen, but getting roped into this world of mnemonics, kind of haphazardly flipped the script for me. I was able to do some pretty incredible things with my own mind that I never thought were

• 30:08Speaker 03

  possible, and it just opened the door.

• 30:11Mike Carruthers?

  That's a great story. And you know, I was thinking, when you said, you know, you learned about all the things that the mind can do, how, I'm old enough to remember, we're just talking about this, I'm old enough to remember when I had a lot of people's phone numbers in my head and could recall them at any moment because you needed to, you had to have them if you wanted to call people. There was no, you know, memory in your phone on the kitchen wall, kind of thing.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:40Mike Carruthers?

  But now you don't. Now, now the phone remembers everything for you. And that's kind of a shame. And, and in fact, it's hard for me to even imagine remembering all those phone numbers, but it wasn't burdensome at the time. You, it was just something you had to do.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  And I think that's a great example, because a lot of people, maybe not younger kids right now, but millennials and older, you can all relate to that, you know, where we had this capacity and it seemed so... Commonplace and dare I say easy to remember a large amount of numbers, phone numbers related to people. And there was a lot at play there. One was, what other choice did we have? The other thing is that we're, we were more intentful about the process, right? We were there, we're tapping these numbers and some of us even turning the rotary to get these numbers. And that physical process, doing it over and over again, blended itself to being burrowed in our memories.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Nowadays, we don't even have to think twice. We can ask an AI assistant to call somebody and we never even have to even touch our phone. It's wild, but hopefully that's, that's a good reminder to people that, you know, our brains are capable of things that nowadays might seem really difficult.

• 31:58Mike Carruthers?

  Is there like a principle underlying all of the ability that you have to remember things? Like there's a way, one way to do it? Or does it depend on what you're trying to remember? There are different ways for different kinds of things or how does it work?

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, great question. When I wrote my first book, this was almost 10 years ago, I really had to distill down what it takes to memorize anything, to broaden the techniques. Because, you know, when you dive into a memory competition, there's very specific things we have to memorize. So you train for that, right? We're memorizing numbers, we're memorizing playing cards, poems, lists of words, and then names and all sorts of other extra details about people. And that's kind of it, you know? So you train that and you're good at that. But then when you're trying to broaden the techniques to everything, what is at play here? And I've been able to boil it down to really three simple steps that I used to remember everything and I'll share them in a second.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  But, you know, each step has its, its depth to it, right? So really depending on what you're memorizing, you can. Modify the techniques appropriately for different things, but the the the basic fundamental steps are the same. And it starts with visualizing, right? You have information that's out there in the world that you'd like to bring into your brain and remember. So turning that information, which is often in an abstract form, our brain really, it's really just designed for pictures and responding to emotional triggers that we want to remember so that we can survive. That was what our brain was designed to do. But then in in modern day, you know, in the

• 33:41Speaker 03

  the most recent thousands of years, our brain has now numbers in the mix and these things called names that represent these other humans in around us and philosophical ideas and and really abstract concepts. These are all relatively new things for our brains to process and it's not great at it because it isn't a clear, obvious thing that signifies, you know, that you'll survive or not, whether you remember this. So what I'm trying to get to is we need to trick our brains in a way. We need to encode the information in the form that it likes in the media format that it likes. And so what that means is basically you need to turn what you're memorizing into a memorable picture that has meaning to you. And you can do that

• 34:26Speaker 03

  by association. You can do that by instilling emotional color to it and and all the sensory data. That's the stuff that we remember. So that's the first step. And as I said before, you know, there's a lot of details to how you do that for different things. How do you turn a number into a picture? How do you turn a playing card into a picture? How do you turn a name into a picture? There are different strategies to do that, but essentially trying to turn it into a picture is the first step. The second step is storage. Like, what do you do with these pictures? Great that you have an image now for the thing that you want to remember, but what if you have a bunch of them? Where do they all go? And how do you remember them in sequence? How do you reliably store them in your mind so that you can retrieve

• 35:09Speaker 03

  them at will when you need them, right? Without fail? Because honestly, that's a a large part Problem for people is it's not that they're forgetful. It's just that they never put the information in their mind in a clear, organized way. And they're having trouble finding it. So that's the second step. And then, and there's techniques to do that, different strategies. And then the final step is review. We remember things for the long term if we tell our brains that it's important. And by, to make it important is we revisit it a lot, right? If our brain is constantly trying to access it and recall it and use it. That tells us our brain that it's, it's useful and it should stay there for much longer.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  So those three, three things together will make it very difficult to forget things.

• 35:57Mike Carruthers?

  All right, so let's go back and revisit those. And as you were saying, there are different techniques, like how do you turn? Numbers and words into pictures? I'd love to know that.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So let's start with kind of something that's probably the easiest to turn into a picture, which might be in your native tongue, a, a simple noun, right? Like a word that is like a very tangible thing, like let's say elephant. You know, maybe you're memorizing a list of words and the first word is elephant. That would be a pretty easy thing to visualize because, you know, in English language, I hear the word elephant and I know what that means. I can picture an elephant, right? I can, I've maybe never physically been in front of a, an elephant, but I've probably encountered an elephant, the concept of an elephant somewhere in my life. And so thinking about a picture for that isn't going to be too difficult, right? But it's all about making that picture really pop out.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  So again, using all of your senses, making it emotional, giving it some movement, some action in your mind, in your visual eye, uh, mind's eye. That's, that's where the sweet spot is. So if it's not just an elephant, right? It's this massive beast that I'm now standing in front of on a safari in, in Tanzania, let's say in Africa somewhere. And I'm imagining myself right in front of this elephant face to face. It's just me and this animal. And maybe it's starting to charge at me, right? And I can feel. How scared I am, I can hear the elephant start to make some noises and even his stomping

• 37:35Speaker 03

  as he runs toward me, the dust coming up from his feet, maybe even my terrified scream as I run away, right? All of that, as I paint that picture in my mind, is really what's now suddenly making this much more memorable than just that word on the page. All right. Now, if you go a bit more abstract, right? You can have words that are less tangible, right? And then are maybe something that are not in your vocabulary. So something like, I don't know, we can go simple, like just say extraordinary, right? Most people know that word, but like, how do you visualize that? Well, you'd probably have to think of something associated with that. So maybe someone who is extraordinary, and that might be different for different people,

• 38:20Speaker 03

  but it's not a direct image for that word, right? But that's, that's part of the process is trying to figure out how our brains can make associations that will link us to the information. And then when you get to even more complicated things, let's go all the way to numbers where you have these symbols now that represent things. How do you do that? Well, in memory competitions, memory athletes have developed systems where we translate preset groupings of numbers into preset images. So for example, for me, and again, this isn't necessarily something for everyday people to do unless they're competing, but a lot of memory athletes will have three digits representing one concept, and that's just pre-learned.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  So no matter what number I see, I can always divvy it up by three and have a picture that comes to mind, and then I memorize that sequence of pictures instead.

• 39:14Mike Carruthers?

  Wait, wait, I'm sorry, you lost me. The three, can you give me an example of that?

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Give me a three-digit number.

• 39:23Mike Carruthers?

  472.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  That's crazy that you said that because that is exactly a number that somebody else in a previous podcast I did said, of all the numbers, he chose that one. Anyways, that's John Kerry for me. If you remember the former, he ran for president.

• 39:39Mike Carruthers?

  Right.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Against Bush. There's a whole reason why he is 472. It's somewhat in the weeds, not important for this right now, but just imagine that instead of seeing 472, if I have a massive number that, or it doesn't have to be massive, maybe a credit card number or a passport number and I have 472 in there, I don't see 472, I see John Kerry, right? And that's meaningful to me because I remember, you know, I was in college when he was running, I remember the debates, I can picture him, right? And everything that comes with it, which includes my experience at college, right? It's this whole thing. If I really dive down, dive deep into the sensory information that comes with this

• 40:19Speaker 03

  idea of John Kerry. And so I imagine picturing that or some equally well-known person or thing in your mind, instead of this abstract set of numbers, 472, makes it a lot easier.

• 40:32Mike Carruthers?

  So when you're remembering, say, a credit card number, are you seeing, I mean, you could see what various senators faces in your mind of, you know, there's John Kerry and there's John Glenn and there's, I mean, is that how you do it?

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically. I don't have many senators. He's an option. I do have presidents, but there's a lot of other things. I mean, there's characters from Star Wars, there's family members, there's pets that I used to have, there's teachers and cartoon characters.

• 41:02Mike Carruthers?

  And it's all broken down into three numbers that are three numbers long?

• 41:08Speaker 03

  Basically, yep. And then I weave it all into a narrative. And this goes back to the structure step of everything, right? Because it's fine for maybe a group of three, but what if I have my passport number, which might be, say, nine digits? So I have three groups of three. So what do I do? Well, I put each person that represents those triplets in a story together and that helps me remember the sequence.

• 41:31Mike Carruthers?

  So you're, let's go back to your example of the elephant. But in a competition, I get that you might need to memorize a list of words. But I wouldn't, I don't need to memorize words. I might need to memorize a story about an elephant. Or I might need to memorize a sentence or a paragraph.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Or a speech.

• 41:50Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, or a speech, not just a word. So is what you just went through with the elephant gonna be enough for me to remember my speech?

• 42:00Speaker 03

  Right, so, you know, the elephant was a one-off, just one thing to remember. And that's rarely the case that that's what the data is. It's usually gonna be a sequence of things or a collection of things. And so that's where that second step comes in again, that you need to have some kind of structure to house it all and to preserve some of the structure of the information, which oftentimes comes down to ordering. So there's this phenomenal technique called the memory palace. And this is what we use to memorize hundreds and hundreds of numbers, long lists of things, even very complicated speeches that, or poems that have many lines to them. And all it is, is breaking each kind of component down into pictures and then storing

• 42:45Speaker 03

  them in this memory palace concept, which is, if you give me a moment to explain it, it's where you imagine a place, I guess palaces back in the day. This is a technique from thousands of years ago. But you could use your house or your studio apartment, whatever you live in. And imagine yourself walking through the space, all right, in some order that makes sense. So I might start at the front door of my house and then navigate through the rooms till I get to the back door or upstairs bedroom or something. And along the way, you can place or imagine the images for the things you're trying to memorize. There in the space, interacting with it. And that ordering, that that pathway, which you know pretty well because it's your house.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  You don't have to memorize that. It's already encoded in your mind. Will hold that ordering. And when you want to go and retrieve the information, you just mentally navigate back through that same exact route. And the images, if memorable enough, will be there for you to pick back up.

• 43:46Mike Carruthers?

  Can you use your house like that a lot of times? Or once you've used it, you can't use it for another thing because you might start to confuse the things you've used it for.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Right, no, that's a great question. And the strategy behind it is, yes, when you use a memory palace, it is, especially for the first time, if you've never done this before, it is so sticky. And such an experience for people who have never gone through that before and saw, seen how amazing their memories can be. So it's really hard to shake some of the first things you put in a memory palace. But as you practice, you get better ironically at forgetting what you put there when you want to. But what I recommend is, you know, having multiple memory palaces. And, you know, depending on whether it's information that you plan to hold for just, you know, a few hours until you can spew it back out or a couple of days.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  Maybe there's information that you just want to know forever, right? Like, maybe you're learning the periodic table and you would just love to know that information for as long as you live. In that case, I might choose a specific new memory palace that will always and solely just hold that information. And so I'd never kind of tamper with it with anything else.

• 45:00Mike Carruthers?

  Do you have to deliberately decide this is something I need to remember? Or do you just remember things better because you're that guy that remembers things better?

• 45:12Speaker 03

  It's a bit of both, but it is still a very involved. Active process of me saying like deliberately that I need to remember this. But that's again, going back to my mind being primed for it. I'm always thinking like that. So it's really just, I know it's to the listener, it might sound like, oh, and now he has to remember to remember. But I'm always thinking about remembering.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  I don't know how else to put it, but, and this isn't something that I can share a technique for. But this is from years of, of training my mind and applying memory techniques and giving memory such an importance in my life, which I don't think a lot of people do anymore because we don't have to. And, and it's a shame because there's so much more to what our memories can do.

• 45:56Mike Carruthers?

  And when you look back on your life, you remember more of your life, but are there like holes in that story? Are there, are there bright points that have real spotlights on them and others that you really don't see very well?

• 46:11Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah. You know, my memory isn't perfect. You know, but what I find often is, of course, there's going to be memories that I can quickly jump to and that are so vivid. And I have so much more detail about them than others. And then there's ones that I have to really dig for, but once they, I dig for them, I spend time with them. A lot comes out, you know, I used to play this game where I would just, between me and my wife, I would ask her to, well, we'd do it together, but I'd ask her to tell me any year in my history, you know, like 2005, right? And then I'd be like, okay, give me a season and she'd say summer, what'd you do summer 2005 on the spot? And I, I don't know that, right? I'd have to think about it.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  And at first I'd be like, wow, I don't, I don't know. I don't really remember much of that. But then if you really give it some time, and I encourage people out there to try this, uh, cause you might be surprised with what you dig up. I can start to piece things together by kind of context clues, right? So I'll start to think, okay, where was I in 2005? I was living in Miami. I was still in college. I graduated in 2006. Okay. So this was the summer before I graduated. Oh, I was dating this girl Natalia. Okay. That was the summer. And now suddenly I remember this cruise that I was on with my family because I missed my girlfriend so much as I was going through this cruise. We went to the Baltic. It was phenomenal. And now suddenly I have this whole door that just opened and now I'm in on this cruise.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  And I'm thinking exactly of all these memories that I had a moment ago. I didn't even know what I did that summer, right? And I think memory works a lot like that. Sometimes you might even hear people say that memories, our memories are all in there. It's just the noise and the connections that get lost. And it just takes a matter of kind of jolting yourself back to getting those or finding the right cues to connect you back to them.

• 48:03Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it seems, I guess the message is you can make your memory better. You just have to be really intentional about wanting to make it better and doing the things you're talking about. I've been speaking with Nelson Dellis. He is a six-time USA Memory Champion, a two-time Guinness World Record holder. He's author of the book Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Nelson, great. This was real interesting. Thanks.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Awesome. Well, thank you, Mike. Great questions.

• 48:38Mike Carruthers?

  If I asked you what color tennis balls are, you'd probably say yellow. But until the 1970s, they weren't yellow. They were white. And the reason they changed had nothing to do with tennis. It was all because of television. Researchers discovered that the fuzzy fluorescent yellow-green balls were much easier for viewers to follow on color TVs than white balls, especially against the changing backgrounds on grass or clay courts. In 1972, the International Tennis Federation officially approved the new color. And within a few years, yellow had all but replaced white. So one of the most recognizable objects in sports isn't that color because it's better for the game.

• 49:23Mike Carruthers?

  It's because it's better for the audience. And that is something you should know. This podcast is produced by Jennifer Brennan, Jeff Havison, and the executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 49:40Speaker 00

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• 50:07Speaker 06

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