You Can IMPROVE Memory | 3 Superfoods | Boost BRAIN

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's Believe Life is about Evan.

Evan, it's about, it's about the why and how of improving your memory. I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesiac who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our BlackBerrys, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply. I learned firsthand that there are incredible, memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. This is my friend Ben Pridmore, 3-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in 1 hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour. Yeah. And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, Everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding. And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker-Baker paradox, which goes like this. If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker. That's his name." and I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker," OK? And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was?" The person who was told his name is "baker" is less likely to remember the same word than the person who was told his job is that he is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering. That's weird. What's going on here? Well, the name "baker" doesn't actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull, but the common noun "baker"— we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it. That make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lowercase b bakers, to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all of the other things that you have in your mind.

Let's talk about what we know in terms of, of food and brain power and memory. And here we start with good news for people who like certain kinds of fish.

That's right. Fish is a superstar, and we're specifically talking about fish that are low in contaminants and high in omega-3 fats. Things like wild salmon, Atlantic mackerel, Pacific oysters, lake trout. These things are brimming with omega-3 fats, and not just any old omega-3 fats, the most potent form, EPA and DHA, which our body sops up and utilizes.

But do we have to eat like 20 servings of fish a week to make a significant, significant difference?

No. You know something, studies have shown that just by eating 1 serving of fish each week, it's better than nothing. But I'm gonna say at least 3 servings of fish each week, and the serving size should look like at least the size of the palm of your hand.

And raw or cooked? Is it, is it better if it's raw, like sushi and raw oysters?

You know, the omega-3s are in the raw and the cooked, but just for the safety issue, you go for the cooked. And again, 3 times a week, at least the size of the palm of your hand.

And real quickly, I know you're always a fan of the real thing over the supplements, but if you're not getting it, if you don't like fish, supplements okay?

Fish oil supplements are a great alternative. You want to stick with a reputable brand, and Matt, people always have to speak with their physician first because they're not for everyone.

Alright, let's talk about fruit now, and in particular when it comes to brain power and memory, what's the connection between berries and memory?

Berries, all berries, raspberries, blueberries, cranberries, blackberries, are loaded with two natural compounds, anthocyanins and flavonols, which protect you against brain cell degeneration. And what's particularly interesting nowadays are blueberries. We have encouraging research that are showing that blueberries Blueberries, just by eating about a cup a day, can really increase your memory capacity.

Well, actually, what I was reading is that there are studies that say it can actually reverse memory loss. That's, that's a whole different ballgame.

That's exactly right. So we've always known that blueberries are good for you. Now, in fact, they can be medicinal.

Alright, let's talk about leafy greens. You've got a display over here. What's the connection between leafy greens and memory?

Leafy greens are loaded with folate, which is also known as folic acid, and we're not quite clear what the connection is, but we do see this cause-effect relationship. People who eat a lot of leafy greens have slower declines in their memory, and it may be because folic acid protects blood vessels or it helps the neurons, those brain cells, communicate more efficiently. So at least 1 cup each day.

And raw or cooked there as well? Doesn't matter. It stays in even after you steam it or boil it or cook it?

Absolutely. You just don't want to boil it in a whole whole lot of water for prolonged periods of time.

Alright, now we had a segment on earlier this morning about caffeine, the health benefits and the health risks. When it comes to memory though, there is some scientific evidence that can help your memory.

That's exactly right. About 2 years ago, Austrian researchers took a group of people and they hooked them up to an MRI machine. They fed them the equivalent of about 2 cups of coffee, and what it showed is that the areas in the brain that are responsible for memory increased. And earlier this year, we looked at a large-scale study, and it reported that women in particular— I'm sorry, this didn't translate for men— were able to slow the memory decline just by drinking 2 to 3 cups of coffee each and every day.

Fish, leafy vegetables, berries, and coffee. Good things to know. Good things to remember, no pun intended.

So the first study we did, we recruited a bunch of people from the Boston area, and these were not monks or meditation teachers. These were just average Joes who on average practiced meditation about 30 or 40 minutes a day. And we put them in the scanner, and we compared them to a group of people who are demographically matched, but who don't meditate. And what we found is this: that there were indeed several regions of the brain that had more gray matter in the meditators compared to the controls. One of the regions I'm going to point out to you is here in the front of the brain. It's an area that's important for working memory and executive decision-making. And what was interesting about it was when we actually plotted the data versus their ages. So here in the red squares, that's the controls. And this is something you see actually, it's been well documented that as we get older, not just there, but across most of our cortex, it actually shrinks as we get older. And this is part of the reason why as we get older, it's harder to figure things out and to remember things. And what was interesting was that in this one region, the 50-year-old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25-year-olds. Suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent the natural age-related decline in cortical structure.

Big idea thinking. Big idea thinking is the supreme unleaded fuel for your brain. And big idea thinking is not a supercharged computer that can do big data storage and then retrieve it when you want it. No. Big idea thinking is when you take in ideas from disparate areas, you combine it with your rich knowledge that you already have, and you form some generalized higher-level way of thinking. So some of the ways that we do big idea thinking is if you synthesize. How do you extract the essence of talks that you hear? Or News stories that you hear, synthesize. Or interpret. How many times do we have books and books and books and we can't remember if we read them or not? Because we didn't interpret the message. Interpret. What does it mean? What's the bottom line meaning? And 3, powerhouse transformative communication. Think about emails that you write. What does your subject line say? Is it boring? Is it rote? Is it anyone can write? Meet me at 2? What if you came up with a transformative subject line that was so powerful everyone wanted to read it? And then what about the message? How often do you just do a deluge of information without really saying something that shows your deeper level of thinking? Big idea thinking is what makes your memory and thinking and learning the most robust. I've shown in randomized trials when you engage in big idea thinking, you increase your brain at all levels of health. Think about increasing your brain blood flow by 8 to 12%. That's really happy for a neuron to get more brain blood flow. We also showed 30% increase in the speed of neural connection across the central executive network, which is what's important for planning and reasoning and problem solving. Big Idea Thinking is for the brain what push-ups and pull-ups are to the body.

So what is a Mind Palace? Well, first of all, a few things. Number 1, it's not just the work of fiction. It's an actual real thing and it was not invented by Sherlock Holmes. Number 2, it actually dates back about 2,500 years to 477 BC. It was invented by a man named Simonides in Greece. A mind palace is essentially a room or a building that you have memorized, and you use the locations in that room to store data. Let me give you an example. You go to your friend's house. You take off your jacket when you walk in the door, and then you set your jacket down in a chair. You go throughout the party. You spend time at your friend's house that day. And then 3 or 4 hours when it comes time to leave, you know exactly you need to go back to that chair to get your coat. Why? Because the chair held that coat in your brain. And that is exactly what a Mind Palace is. If your friend had 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 pieces of furniture, one you could put a hat in, one you could put your keys in, you could, in theory, go back to each one of those locations and pick up the items that you left. The Mind Palace works the same way. You memorize locations in a room, and then you later go back to those locations to retrieve the data that you want to remember. The easiest way to build your very own Mind Palace is to stand in the doorway of every room of your house. Stand in the doorway, start at the left, go around the room clockwise, and pick 5 pieces of furniture. Number them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Then go to the next room, stand in the doorway of that room, and label them 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Go to the next room: 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. In every single room in your house, pick 5 pieces of furniture and number them going around the room clockwise. A few rules of thumb here: pick big items, don't pick small items, and number 2, spread them out around the room. Good items to pick will be things like desks, or beds or TVs or refrigerators or stoves or microwaves or sinks or bookshelves or computers. Pick lots of different items, but if you use a chair in one room, don't use a chair in the next. These locations are going to be places where you're going to mentally store data in your Mind Palace. Now, once you have these locations in your room numbered, then I want you to close your eyes and I want you to say all your files, 1 all the way up to 20 or 30, however many you have, and then backwards, 30 to 1. Say them forwards and backwards over and over again until you know them cold, or until somebody could say, "What was number 10?" and you could say what it was just like that. Next, a common objection to this is sometimes people will say, "Wow, Ron, this is too much work. You really want me to number all these pieces of furniture in my house and memorize all these pieces of furniture just to memorize a list of words or something else?" That's not really true. You already have these locations memorized. I'm not asking you to memorize your house. You already have it memorized. I'm just asking you to number it. And once you have it numbered, it's going to be a crazy cool skill that you're going to be able to use to memorize anything you want. Now, let me give you an example of how you would use this to memorize something. Let's say that you wanted to memorize a list of words, and on that list of words, number 8 was a dog. Well, you've already determined what your 8th file is. Maybe it was your bed or your dresser or a desk or a computer. Let's say it was a computer. If number 8 is your computer and I give you the word dog to memorize, you visualize a dog on your computer. The dog's biting the computer. The dog's barking at the computer. The dog's running around the computer. The more action, emotion you see, the better. Then I say number 9 is water. And let's say that your number 9 piece of furniture is a chair. Well, you see that chair in your brain and you imagine water pouring pouring out of the sky and the water goes all over that chair. Then later when you want to recall the data, you go back around your Mind Palace and on the number 8 spot, the computer, you see a dog, so you know the word was a dog. On the number 9 spot, a chair, you see water, so you know that number 9 was water. You always use every file in chronological order. And what I mean by that is this: if I say Number 8 is a dog and you think, "Oh, well, my number 13 piece of furniture is the mat where my dog sleeps, so I'm just going to imagine my dog there on number 13." You don't do that. You put the dog in the Mind Palace in the order that it falls. If it's the first word, you put it on the first piece of furniture. If it's the third word, you put it on the third piece of furniture. If it's the eighth word, you put it on the eighth piece of furniture. You put it in the order that it falls. Not where it makes sense in your house. And that's an important tip for the Mind Palace.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

Evan made this video because Rita Aljabaz asked him to on YouTube. If you have a topic that you'd like Evan to cover in his Believe Life series, leave a comment below and I'm sure he'll do that for you.

I'd also love to know which of the 5 points meant the most to you and if you have issues with memory or not. I'm really curious to find out, so leave it in the comments below and we're going to join in the discussion. Thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe and we'll see you soon. Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's Believe Life—

Sorry, there's a fly on my arm and an ant in my water.

Good morning, Believe Nation. Today's Believe Life is about Evan.

It's about the why and the how of memory loss.

Memory loss?

What is it?

I don't even remember. You know, the why and how.

Improving your memory.

Improving your memory.

Not memory loss. Why you should lose memory. We made this video because Reid—

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, you just literally— Are you rolling that? Did you see the stuff come out of his nose? Onto the iPad.