450: The Science of Memory Hacks: How to Study Smarter, Not Harder and Set Yourself Up for Success with Matt DiMaio

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It is my pleasure to welcome many Matt DeMaio to the show. I had the good fortune of discovering his YouTube channel and he has all kinds of tips and tricks on something we all want to know and that is how to be smarter, faster. If you want to learn something, if you want to take on a new skill set that is just such a critical skill set in and of itself. And Matt is here to give us some tips about that. How to improve our memory and do all sorts of things that we can just use every minute of every day. Matt, welcome. How are you?

Thank you, Jason. I'm delighted to be here. And let me tell you, I have got some really cool stuff for your audience today because not only am I going to teach them how to triple their memory power without using any fancy tricks about mnemonics and association and all that kind of stuff that you've heard about, but I've also got a free gift for them at the end.

Good stuff. Well, free gifts are nice. Would it be fair to say that you are a generalist? It seems like you do a lot of stuff and you have a broad variety of topic areas that you cover.

Well, that's what happens when you get to be as old as me.

In March I turned 72 years old. And most of my career, I spent building large sales forces. And I've used these techniques about how to learn things fast in building Salesforce, because selling is essentially the art of being able to transfer information. So if you're hiring a salesperson, you need to get them to learn the presentation and the product knowledge and the regulations regarding your industry. And then the salesperson has to learn it well enough that they can go and explain it to a prospect. And essentially the prospect has to learn it and understand it well enough that they're willing to cut loose a check or a credit card. And so the process of transference of information. But I got into this all the way back in the. In 1980. I'll tell that story in a moment. But I've been doing this a long time now. In my late 60s, I decided to reinvent myself once again and started a YouTube channel because I had a runaway hit video, but that I call how to Absorb textbooks like a Sponge. That video has now gotten over 10 million views. But the I teach what makes dealing with textbooks different than the way you deal with a novel. And I have a core premise, and that is school tells you what to learn. But I will show you how to learn it. Now, what I mean by that is. And I. And I can already hear those that are the former formal education people in the audience go, what? What. What do you mean, school doesn't teach you how to learn stuff? Well, ask yourself this. All your life, you've had either parents or teachers wag their finger at you and say things like, listen to me when I talk to you. Pay attention, stop daydreaming, take good notes, study for the test. Did you ever once take a class in how to be an excellent listener or how to focus and concentrate and pay attention better and stop daydreaming. And how do you take notes and how do your textbook and prepare for the test? And what are test strategies that you can use? Yes, a few people out there have done it, but the vast majority have never done anything like that. And so what I did is I actually went in and I studied what makes somebody a good student. Discovered there was just an amazing amount of strategies involved. And would it be okay if I told the story about how I got started with all this?

Yeah. And I really want to dive into these specifics of how to learn how to remember things. I mean, this is absolutely in so many areas.

Yeah. My intention is to be able to give you a little bit of background and then also teach so that the audience actually comes away being able to do stuff that they can't do right now. So the backstory is I got started in the computer school industry back in 1979 up in New Jersey, which is where I'm originally from. And in 1979 nobody had personal computers in their home. That wouldn't happen. IBM wouldn't come out with their first one until August of 81. And I was in a school that was teaching young people that were looking to change careers how to do computer programming for businesses. And I had a very high dropout rate at my schools and my income was affected because I was paid based on collected tuitions. I was looking to solve the problem of my dropout rate. I myself am a college dropout. I finished two years at Villanova University, decided I wanted to go become a rock star because I'm a keyboard player. And that didn't work out. And so here I am in business and realizing that I need to solve this dropout problem. And so I began, I couldn't use my own experience as an example, so I began to research the field. And I discovered that there was tons of information that taught people about how do you focus and pay attention, how do you remember stuff, how do you learn things faster? And I began to teach it in a 90 minute class. And not only did I reduce the dropout rate, but I greatly increased the job placement rate because when these young people went on an interview, they actually knew what they were talking about. That's when the magic happened because I began to get calls from the companies that hired my graduates asking what we were doing in our school that made such a difference, that these people were performing so much better on the job than students from competing schools or students that they had hired from my schools in the past. And I, so I began to get invitations to speak for industry associations, the Data Processing Managers association, the association of Systems Managers. And I began to do demonstrations of memory power as an after dinner entertainment at their, at their business functions.

Okay, so on your YouTube channel, I mean, you cover all sorts of interesting things. You know, how to remember lines word for word, how to study, how to memorize things like a sponge, how to absorb ideas, how to get in the mood to study. Take us specifically, if you would, through, you know, whichever technique you want to start with. But I think just generally how to learn, Matt, is so critical in today's world. Things are changing so fast.

Well, I've got something practical to cover. Rather than doing any kind of philosophy or doing any kind of fancy stuff, I've got something As I promised at the beginning, that'll allow you and the members of your audience to literally triple their memory power instantly. This is something that doesn't take any practice, doesn't take any special techniques. So I have something that I call the three causes of forgettery. Everybody wants to talk about memory. I want to talk about forgettery. What is it that causes you to forget stuff in the first place? And so the first cause of forgettery is that you don't get it. If you don't get it, you can't keep it. To forget is to not get. For example, a lot of times people are bad at recalling the names of the people they meet. Why? Well, one of the problems is you didn't get the name to begin with. You're at a barbecue, you're at a networking meeting or a business function at the Chamber of Commerce, and somebody says, hey, I'd like you to meet my friend Mr. And you go, yeah, right. Nice to see you, pal. How you doing? If you didn't get the name, there is no way to remember it. And so my belated little Italian grandmother taught me a two word mantra. To be able to learn everything and anything faster and better and remember it. Now, anytime you can teach something in two words, that's that big of a deal, how to learn everything and anything faster and better and remember it and do it in just two words, those are pretty important. Two words. So here's my belated little Italian grandmother's advice. I'll pay attention.

You've got to pay attention. So when you're meeting somebody, stop thinking about other stuff. Become aware of it and pay attention as that name is being said. Stop being distracted. So that's not. That's the first cause of forgetting. Number two is you don't care. Oh, well, you can say to me, well, but Matt, I care. I care if I remember somebody's name. I care if I remember the regulations regarding this kind of a real estate transaction or address of that house that I'm looking at, or the, the fundamentals of the, the. The deal that we structure. I care. Well, there's caring and then there's caring enough to do something about it. I know people who can recite the names and statistics of every member of their favorite sports team and can't remember their wedding anniversary.

So if your mother ever wagged her finger at you or your teacher said you can only remember what you want to remember, guess what? They were right. It is a function of your interest. And so you have to find a way to be Interested in stuff that's important regardless of how you feel about it.

Now, that's the getting part. Yeah, You've got to get it to not forget it.

Okay, well, you got to get it, but then you've also got to care whether or not you get it right. And so caring involves using a technique. Caring involves doing something a little extra. I teach it kind of a mental filing system where nobody ever taught you, but you're actually able to take information and put it away in your head in an orderly fashion. But you have to care enough to do it. Think about just manual filing. If you went into your office and you took all the records from all your real estate transactions and you took them in your file and you just threw them into a big empty room and all over the floor, you'd have a big pile of files. Well, the information is there, but good luck trying to find it when you need it. That's not what you do. What you do is you take those files and you put them either in your computer or in filing cabinets in an orderly fashion. Does it take a little extra effort to do that? Yes. Is it worth it? A big yes. Because now, ultimately it saves you time because you can find it when you need it. So we talk about mental filing. And the third cause of forgetter is really the big one. It makes the first two look small by comparison. And that is you don't believe you know what it is. You don't believe. You don't believe you have a superhuman, super powerful memory right now. Because I listen to what people say. They say, oh, I can always remember a face. I can never remember a name. Oh, I must be getting old, folks. I'm 72 years old. In March, I. At a presentation, I. One of the demonstrations that I do is after I do my formal remarks, I'll go around the room and call every member of my. My audience by name. On YouTube, I've got videos of me doing this with.

Surprisingly, I've seen memory experts do that before, and it always amazes me.

It's. It's actually a learned technique. It's kind of like riding a bicycle. Nobody's born knowing how to ride a bicycle. You learn some techniques and then you can do it. The difference between learning the basics and doing what I do is the difference between riding your bicycle around the neighborhood and competing in the Tour de France. So getting back to this idea of belief, a lot of times people will talk themselves down. They will tell themselves, I have a terrible memory. I must be getting old. I can't do it. And as a result, that is not a function of having a bad memory. That is the cause of your bad memory. Because if your attitude is, I can't do it anyway, I'm terrible at this anyway, then why would you bother to get it? Why would you bother to care? And so you're beating yourself before you start. So the flip side is also not true. You can't suddenly start telling yourself, oh, today I've got a fantastic memory. I'm going to remember everything. Or you meet somebody, go, oh, I got a perfect memory for names. That doesn't work either, because you won't believe it. So what do you say to yourself? You say, how can I remember you? How can I remember that person's name? And when you ask yourself, how can I do it? Then your natural creativity is going to kick and your. Your subconscious is going to find ways to be able to do it.

Yeah, okay, so a big part of studying is remembering, but there's more to studying than just remembering. So talk to us about studying. I mean, we're all having to learn so much stuff all the time so quickly nowadays, and then you add AI to that layer and how to do prompts and so forth, and, you know, we're all going to have to become experts in that. So how do we study effectively?

All right, so in a nutshell, when you're learning something, to really learn, it is not the process of putting information into your head. So reading, watching videos, listening to lectures, listening to audio tapes, listening to podcasts, that is all input. Input is important. You got to have the input first. But that's not where you learn it. Where you learn it is when you out put it. So you. What you want to do is you want to find ways to get the information to come back out of you. That's why people take notes. Doing something like underlining or highlighting is worthless. I could teach a chimpanzee to use a yellow highlighter. It doesn't do anything to help them absorb the information. So there's something called the production effect. The production effect simply talks about that you have to produce a result. So what you want is, is you want to create a flow of information. So you're going to take the information from whatever your source is, your podcast, your video stream, your live lecture, your textbook. That's all of the input. But as soon as possible, you want to try and get that information about what you're learning to come out of you. The two easiest ways to do that are to take handwritten notes, handwriting notes, are far better if you really want to retain something than typing it up. You also want to talk out loud to yourself. Now, obviously it depends on where you are as far as talking out loud, but you want to be able to either teach somebody else what you learned or talk to somebody else what you think that you learned, or in absence of any of those opportunities, talk to yourself and tell yourself what you think you just learned. So study for 25 minutes or so, take a five minute break and talk to yourself about what you think you just absorbed. Now, I teach something called multisensory perception. You all know what ESP is. Extra Sensory perception. I teach MSP Multi sensory perception. The more senses you use when you're trying to absorb new information, the better it'll stay in your head because you're creating deeper and stronger neural connections. So watch this. When you're reading information, the information is coming in through your eye. That's one sense. If you talk about it and if you recite back a little bit about what you think you just Learned after a 15 or 25 minute little break. Now you have to use your, your power of touch. Literally your mouth is moving. You've got to use your muscular system and you're also producing a sound. So you've got to process the thought in your head and then move the muscles of your mouth to enunciate these ideas. And then the information is coming back in through your ears again. The same thing is true when you're handwriting notes. The information comes in through your eyes and then out through your hand. So you're moving your hand in a series of lines and squiggles and circles and then that information is coming back in through your eyes again. Now this is the kind of stuff that nobody ever tells you about.

Yeah, that's interesting because you're just involving a lot more of your brain and body in this process. And the production effect, I think is maybe the biggest thing we're going to learn today that is so critical, it is so important because I found when I became really expert at real estate investing is when I started teaching it. What I say that you didn't mention is that I, you know, it has to come back out, you have to produce it right. And that's super important. But it's also the pressure of being questioned and being put on the spot that makes you really dig deeper within yourself to understand the ideas better. And that's part of the production effect. And you don't always have an audience that you can produce to. So if you're producing to yourself. You don't have that pressure, but at least you're involving more of your. Your body. I'm curious though, by the way, what.

An excellent point you just made. There's an old expression, and I'll let you continue with your thought in a second, but the best way to learn is to teach.

Yeah, right, sure. But I'm curious, though, and I have heard this before, Matt, as to why it's so important to write versus type. That's an interesting thing. You know, I have heard that retention is better with writing than it is with typing. Many times I've heard that. And there's something about the idea of putting these fingers together that somehow cues something in your brain. Any thoughts on the writing versus typing?

Absolutely. It's. First of all, it's more effort to hand write something down. So it has to be. It's more deliberate. It's a little bit slower for most people to hand write something out than it is to type it. And you're more intimately connected with it. Every line, squiggle circle that you put on that piece of paper is a very deliberate thing. Whereas when you're on the keyboard and you're typing, your movements are almost always the same. Your fingers are just simply going up and down. Whereas handwriting something out is a much more elaborate process. So in truth, the scientific part of it, it's simply creating stronger synapses, it's creating deeper neural connections in your mind because the physical movement, the musculature that you're employing to do it is more heavily involved. Technical answer, but that's. That's the short form.

Okay, what are some other tips we can use to, to study better and retain better?

Well, one of the things that I, that I want to talk about, especially where you're dealing with real estate deals and all of this, is there's another old expression, to be a success. It's not just what you know, it's who you know. And one of the skills that is a fundamental human communication skill that almost everybody says that they're bad at is remembering people's names. Now, you personally may be good at it, and I'm guessing that you might be because you haven't mentioned it. Is that, is that true?

I haven't mentioned you or. I haven't mentioned.

No, you haven't. You haven't mentioned the fact that, gee, you know, I struggle with remembering names.

I don't think I'm great at it or anything. Yeah.

Going back to the three causes of forgettery, when people really understand what the fundamentals are there, that this is really breakthrough stuff. Because by simply taking the time to get it, care and believe and change your attitude, what winds up happening is your entire mind shift towards learning. Everything suddenly changes. So when you're studying, one of the things you need to do in order to get it is to put aside all of your distractions. So one of the biggest problems that people have is that they get distracted too easily. As you pointed out, a lot of times people learn when they're sitting in front of their computer or, or they're using their smartphone these days, and that that's a minefield because there's a million distractions. You're looking at something, suddenly you get a text, or somebody calls you, or something pops up while you're on the computer, or you decide you're bored with this particular topic, it's not going as easy as you want, and you mentally want to get that little hit of dopamine, you take a break. And so one of the key things is to really discipline yourself, to study in short chunks. So there's something.

The Pomodoro method is popular. I mean, is a short chunk considered 25 minutes?

Well, that's what the Pomodoro considers. I think that people are going to find their own comfort level. Have you ever wondered why classes in School are 42 or 45 minutes long? And you'll see a lot of podcasts aim to be around 42 to 45 minutes long. And there's something that they've discovered and that is about the extent of somebody's ability to concentrate and focus on a topic for any period of time. And then at least after 45 minutes, you need a 15 minute break. Now, during that 15 minute break, what I recommend is that you do something completely unrelated to what you were studying. Don't continue to study, take a break and do something else. A lot of times people just go outside for a moment, get a little bit of exercise, do a couple of push ups, go get yourself a cup of coffee. But you want to take a clean break for just a few minutes and then come back fresh. Typically, people tend to remember beginnings and endings. Think about movies. Movie makers make a huge effort at putting heavy emphasis at the beginning and the ending of the big final climax. But they've got to hook your attention at the beginning. Beginnings and endings are what people remember the most of. It's the stuff in the middle that gets blurry. So what you want to do is give yourself more beginnings and endings.

Okay. Yeah, right. And you do that by breaking. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, all right. Any other ideas here?

Let's wrap up by talking simply about people's names. Because this is one of the most fundamental skills. Being able to remember people's names is such an important skill. You should, you would think that it would be taught the very first day of kindergarten, where the kindergarten teacher says, okay, children, welcome to school. Today's your first day of school. What we're going to do is we're going to learn the names of the other little boys and girls you're in class with. But you go through your entire career with nobody teaching you how to remember names. So let's just talk about a practical idea. If all you did was pay close attention when you're being introduced and use that person's name a few times. So instead of saying, hey, buddy, how you going? Say hello, Jason. Hello, Mary, hello, Bill, hello, Alice, hello, Anna, use the name and then during the conversation ask a question. Well, Anna, how long have you been on that job? And then when you're parting, instead of saying, okay, bye, bye, see you around, say, well, you know, Jason, it was really nice to meet you. I'll see you. See you next time. Use the name. Now you want to use the name three times. You don't want to go, hello, Jason, Jason, Jason. That doesn't work either. So getting it and caring if, if that's all you did, you will find that your ability to recall names without using any fancy techniques goes to another level.

Right.

But the secret to having a superhuman memory really comes down to two techniques. Number one is imagination. Being able to make images out of what you want to learn using names. As an example, lots and lots of names carry built in images. We'll talk about that in a second. The second skill is connection. A lot of people call it association, but association is not a good word. If it was, people would use it more. An easier word to understand is connection. So if you hear little children learning something and they say, uncle, auntie, grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, you mean it's like, you mean it's like. Yes, this is like that. The human mind has to connect things together. Kind of like a Lego set where you want to connect what you already know to what you are learning. So making an image for the name. Matt, what is a mat? Well, you have a welcome mat. And I got to tell you, I am usually a very welcome mat. There's a wrestling mat. In high school I was a wrestling mat. I got a buddy of mine from Quebec that calls me Matador. And when I was single, I said, yes, matador. Matador is the girls and the girls.

But everybody's saying Matt is easy.

Okay.

Yeah. You have some other examples. I mean, everybody's thinking, that's an easy one.

All right, well, you can do this. So there's. There's essentially a lot of different ways of remembering people's names. So I'm just giving you one right now. You already know somebody with that name, like Jason. Think of some other famous Jason's. Who are some famous Jason's that you could think of.

Well, when I was a kid, I always heard Jason and the Argonauts.

I'm. I'm delighted to hear you say that because that's my first connection. I didn't think that I was going to have people that were. That would remember that old movie. It was great. But you've got Jason Alexander, who played George on the side.

Seinfeld.

Yeah, you've got Jason.

I don't want to be associated with that guy, though.

Oh, it's all right. You got Jason Momoa.

Anyway.

Okay. Jason Aldean, Jason Kidd.

Okay, so the answer is, though, any name has someone famous attached to it pretty much. I mean, and that's. It's a very unique name. So associated with a famous person or.

Well, so that's. That's one way. So you already know somebody with an email. Might be somebody from a fictional. Might be somebody from a cartoon series. So if I meet Marge or Homer or Maggie or Bart or Lisa, I might think of the Simpsons. So it doesn't have to be somebody in real life. So that's the first way, number two, you can rhyme the name. So, you know, we know Dennis the Menace, you know, or something. You meet somebody named Keith, and they have a nice smile. Keith has nice teeth. Another technique is that the name has a physical manifestation. So, like, I gave you a Matt. So when. Sometimes when I introduce myself and take a matt. Like Mac. No, Matthew. Like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And so a lot of times people go, okay, so sometimes the name itself, we either know somebody or the name means something. What is a mat? What is a bill? What is a rose? What is a pearl or a sapphire? And so a lot of times people's names translate out into the real world. There's a series of children's jokes. What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in a pot on your stove? Stu. What? What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs stuffed in your mailbox?

Very politically incorrect jokes.

But, yeah, nothing Incorrect about him. What's incorrect about that?

Okay, so. So some association, physical, celebrity, fictional character, rhyming. Right.

There's one more and that is for names that you've never encountered before. For example, when I did a presentation for the Indo US Chamber of Commerce, many of the attendees had these long multi syllable Indian names. Nobody in my audience was named Bill or Fred and so the name sounds like something else. And that's the most complicated technique where you're simply playing with the sound of the name in your head. Now you mentioned something and I want to really get back to this. This is not politically incorrect or incorrect in any sense at all because we are not making fun of a person. We're not making fun. We're having fun. And there's a difference. Look at little kids on a schoolyard playground. They will goof on on another kid's name. They'll go, oh, Matt. Fat Matt ate a rat, then he sat on a cat. Now who taught the kids to do that? Nobody. It's built into the way we learn stuff. We are looking for whatever way we can to take this new information and connect it to something that we're already aware of and a way that we can hold on to it.

Okay, good stuff. Well, Matt, this is very enlightening. You have a gift for our audience, right?

I do. If your folks go to a very easy Gmail account, if they go to make more money with Matt, make more money with Matt at Gmail. I have a free video that will help them learn everything faster. But more importantly, how you can train somebody one time and have them stay trained permanently. So if any of you have employees or if you're just dealing with your kids and you want to teach somebody a new skill or a new, a new employee, you want to teach them something new, how would you like to be able to teach them through a four step process once and have them stay trained? Unfortunately, that's a big problem for a lot of people.

Fantastic. Well, that's great, Matt. Thank you so much for joining us today. Matt DeMaio and also we should say check out your YouTube channel as well.

My YouTube channel is YouTube.com forward/be smarter faster. So if you want to be smarter faster, come and join me. And Jason, in closing, everything I teach takes a little bit of work and effort, but it's worth it. Always remember that the fastest way to get to the top is to get off your bottom.

Yeah, good stuff. Matt, thanks so much for joining us.

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