“I had always struggled with memory,” said Nelson Dellis, the two-time USA Memory Champion (2011 and 2012), and self-proclaimed mental athlete.
The man who struggled to remember a shopping list just over three years ago made a special appearance at Palantir Night Live Thursday night to discuss memory training and the non-profit he founded in 2009 to honor his late grandmother, Climb for Memory, devoted to raising funds and awareness for Alzheimer’s.
“I find it very important that people realize that their memories are actually stronger than they might think,” Nelson said.
Nelson treated his memory like a muscle, trained every day and “started to take value” in his brain. For him, each image correlates with numbers, and a set of two/three numbers is equivalent to an image.
The two-time memory champion wowed the attendees by having each audience member say a number between zero and ten; then Nelson combined the two numbers and told everyone what it meant to him, and continued on with the “journey.” (For example, the numbers “7” and “3” together equal Batman…!? ) He then recited all of the numbers back to the audience — forward and backward.
“It’s like a language, and once you know it, it is what it is.”
