The Man Who Refused to Forget
Every other disease has the decency to just take you all at once.
Alzheimer’s doesn’t.
It kills the person, then just leaves the body there.
Like a house with all the furniture moved out. Lights flicking on and off. Kids come to visit and look like strangers on a bus.
Nelson Dellis watched it happen to his grandmother. And decided he wasn't going to let it happen to him.
Today he's a six-time USA Memory Champion.
And I had him on my podcast recently to talk about it.
He can memorize 405 digits in five minutes.
He once memorized 10,000 digits of pi so deeply that you could drop him anywhere inside those 10,000 digits and he'd tell you what came before and after.
The science is catching up to him: training your memory daily might be the closest thing we have to pushing Alzheimer's back.
Ancient Techniques Made New
Nelson thought—like most of us think—you're either born with a good memory or you're not.
What he found: there are techniques people use to have good memories. Ancient ones.
The trick is converting abstract information—numbers, names, facts—into vivid, emotional, sensory images your brain actually wants to hold onto.
Our brains aren’t dumb.
They choose to forget because most things you want to remember don’t feel crucial. The brain is a filter. And it’s very good at its job (because it has to be).
Emotion, says Nelson, is the secret currency of memory.
It's why you remember where you were on 9/11 but can't remember what you had for lunch last Tuesday.
Want to remember something?
Make it emotional. Make it weird. Make it visual. Make it stick.
Example: when Nelson looks at the number 7, he doesn't see 7. He sees a character. A scene. Something vivid his brain actually wants to hold onto. He can't not see it anymore. It's permanent.
Also…
You Have to Read
I've done 1,500 podcast episodes. Most of them with someone who wrote a book. I read every single one before the show.
Nelson talks about focused reading. It’s different from speed reading—speed without retention is just exercise for your eyeballs.
Here's why it matters:
When you read, you absorb someone else's entire life in a few days. Their hard lessons. Their failures. Their breakthroughs. Retain even one thing—you've incorporated a hard-won life into your consciousness.
Do that enough times and you have thousands of people inside your head.
That's where intuition comes from. All those lives, quietly pattern-matching in the background. Giving you the answer before you even know the question.
And all of it—every page, every book—is memory training in disguise.
The Weirdest Part
Nelson got recruited to remote view stock market movements against a $1.2 million portfolio.
The same techniques the US military used under the declassified Project Stargate, which ran from the 70s through the 90s.
He thought it was a scam.
Then he started getting things right.
One time, he tried to predict the Belmont Stakes—one of the biggest horse races in America.
In a flash, he knew the winner. Bet $50 instead of his usual $10 because he knew.
Won big.
His theory: the universe is information—past, present, future—and our brains are receivers.
Most of us have too much noise to pick up any signals.
But quiet the mind—through focus training, through the same visualization you use to memorize a deck of cards—and you start to tune in.
Even if you don't believe any of that, he said, there's still a reason to do it:
These techniques force you to focus. Force you to quiet the noise.
And in that quiet you find things about your own mind you can't find any other way.
Become an Everyday Genius
Nelson’s book is Everyday Genius.
The title sounds like cocktail party tricks—shortcuts to appear smart. And yes, some of it is that.
But the deeper thing is this: your brain is capable of far more than you've been told.
You just have to decide to train it.
