Dr. Wendy Suzuki

But one of my favorite books is Moonwalking with Einstein, which is a book about a US memory champion and all the techniques that he and all the other memory champions use to do those feats to get them the memory championship.

And yes, you could get better at names.

Everybody says, oh, I'm terrible at doing names.

You can get better at remembering random lists of things.

And some of these techniques are ancient.

So and they're based on how the hippocampus works.

So the hippocampus is this amazing structure that pulls the who, what, where, when of events like this one together.

So my hippocampus is now encoding

your face, your beautiful jacket, the sound of your voice, the beautiful set here.

And when I think back on it, I'm going to remember all of these things together and where the camera was and all these things.

And so that's what it does automatically.

I don't even think of all those things, like all those things you just named, the visual, the sound, the everything.

Yes.

And so the technique, which is called the memory palace technique, it's very famous.

They talk about it in Moonwalking with Einstein.

is let's say you have a list of 10 grocery items.

The trick is to picture a spatial location that's very familiar with you.

Usually people use their childhood home because it's so familiar.

You walk in and on the front stoop, you put the first item that you need to remember, grapes.

And you picture the grapes on your front mat.