Award-winning memory coach shares techniques to help SC State freshmen learn faster, remember more

Nelson Dellis speaks to SC State students about steps to retain knowledge at a lyceum at the university's Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium.

Six-time USA Memory Championship winner shows students how visualization, healthy habits can strengthen learning and recall

Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Championship winner who holds multiple U.S. memory records, including records for memorizing hundreds of numbers, names and words in short periods.

He was the featured speaker at a lyceum event for freshmen held Oct. 1 in SC State's Martin Luther King Jr. Auditorium.

'You'd be surprised how strong it is'

"You have this ability within you in your mind, and I think it's important to challenge it from time to time," Dellis said.

"I'm not saying you drop everything and try to memorize everything. You can use the tools around you, of course, but I think from time to time, try to actually use your memory. You'd be surprised how strong it is when you put your attention fully into it," he said.

Dellis is also an author, mountaineer and Alzheimer's disease advocate who lost his paternal grandmother to the disease in 2009. His grandmother's experience with Alzheimer's disease motivated him to work to improve his own memory and share his knowledge with others.

"I want to help others to learn about this and think about their brain health in a different way," said Dellis, who eventually started Climb for Memory, a nonprofit organization aimed at raising awareness and funds for Alzheimer's disease by organizing mountain climbs around the world.

In addition to sharing memory techniques with the freshmen, Dellis emphasized how eating right, staying socially active and exercising could help improve brain health.

Encoding, or visualizing information in a fun way, was the first step in improving memory.

"Our first step to memorizing anything is to find a way to turn the complicated stuff, whether it's your studies, a name, a set of directions or whatever, into a very memorable picture that you can see in your mind," Dellis said.

"If you forget something, it's not because you have a bad memory, it's because your image maybe wasn't memorable enough," he said, noting that creating a memory palace was the second step in the process.

What is a memory palace?

Dellis explained that a memory palace is a mental structure you build from a place you know well, such as your home, school or a daily route, where you put vivid images representing the information you want to remember at specific spots along a set route.

When you recall the information, you mentally walk through the place, and each location triggers the associated memory, he said.

"It's been around for thousands of years, believe it or not. This is something the ancient Greeks used to remember large speeches, large lines of text. This is how ancient civilizations passed down information," Dellis said.

"They used their memory. They didn't have a phone. They didn't have computers. They didn't have ChatGPT. They didn't even have a mass printing press, where they could just keep information in books," he said.

Why not just study something repeatedly instead of spending time creating a memory palace?

"That real repetition is not efficient. It's boring, it's hard, it takes a long time," Dellis said. "And even when you've studied something that way for a long time, you often don't feel you fully know it. Stress can come in on a test or something and you forget it all.

"With a memory palace, that doesn't happen because you know exactly where you're putting information, and you put it there in a very memorable way," he said.

The third step was to keep revisiting the information in your head because it won't stay in your memory palace forever.

"The only way to keep something in your brain for the long term is to study it, review it, to repeat it. The nice thing about the memory palace is that you can put the information in your head really quick, and then you just study it in your mind," Dellis said.

"I can look at a fact sheet or parts of a textbook, encode it and put it in my memory palace and then never have to look at that book again.

"I can still remember that stuff for as long as I want because all I have to do is think about my memory palace, go through it, interact with it and the more I do that, the longer it's going to stay," he said.

Building healthier brains

Dellis said foods that are good for brain health include those rich in DHA omega-3 fatty acids, such as salmon; foods rich in vitamin E and lutein, such as dark, leafy greens and eggs; and foods high in antioxidants, such as small red beans, blueberries and beets.

For freshmen Marchaela Brown and Deja Wood, Dellis' techniques offered practical ways to think differently about memory and learning.

"Just because you say you have a bad memory doesn't mean that you have one. All you have to do is train your brain to remember those things," Brown said.

"One example that Mr. Nelson taught us was to use your body to help remember certain things, or close your eyes and think about certain characters or things that remind you of things that will help you remember," she said.

While Brown focused on the techniques Dellis demonstrated, Wood took away a broader message about habits that can strengthen memory.

"I got out of the lyceum ways in which we could unlock our memory to the best of our ability," Wood said. "Nelson Dellis talked about eating healthy, exercising and trying to enrich our minds with puzzles, reading, etc., as a way to tap into your memory."

"My favorite part was when he listed out countries to match a word on a specific body part for us to try to remember," she said.

SC State President Alexander Conyers said he wanted the students to apply what they learned in their everyday lives.

"It's all about memory and unlocking your memory so you can be a better student," he said.

For more information about Nelson Dellis, visit nelsondellis.com.