Competitive memory athlete Nelson Dellis has won multiple national championships, and he’s used AI to help him train for competitions. But as he turned to chatbots more and more, his thinking began to change. It fits into what Oakland University professor Barbara Oakley, an expert on how humans learn, calls the “Memory Paradox.” They’re among those making the case for requiring students from middle school to college to do more rote memorization — of poems, dates, capitals, and more.
A growing number of experts are making the case for requiring students from middle school to college to do more rote memorization — of poems, dates, capitals, and more — to respond to rise of generative AI.
"2024 USA Memory Championship (LIVE STREAM)," on YouTube.
"Everyday Genius," by Nelson Dellis.
"The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI," on ArXiv.
Jeff Young:
I recently learned there are people who call themselves memory athletes. There's a whole circuit of competitions where contestants compete at memory challenges.
Commentator:
They only have 60 seconds to go through 104 cards, so they have to go rather briskly.
Jeff Young:
You're hearing a clip from the 2024 USA memory championships. And as part of that, contestants were given decks of cards in a random order and tasked with memorizing that order as fast as possible. Then they sat on stage and dramatically read back that memorized order, card by card.
Commentator:
Riley, we will begin with you.
Memory Competition Contestants:
Ace of Clubs, four of clubs, 10 of diamonds.
Jeff Young:
One person on that stage, as you can see in YouTube footage of this competition, is Nelson Dellis, who is one of the world's top memory athletes. Just like
Nelson Dellis:
In any sport you know, you're chipping away at the records. We all saw the Olympics recently, and you see these records fall, and people hold them and lose them, and that's the same for memory sports.
And so, yeah, we were memorizing names, lists of words, poems, all sorts of things in a timed environment.
Yeah, and just who can memorize the most as accurately as possible gets crowned the champ.
Jeff Young:
Nelson admits that this sport isn't always the most exciting to watch, unlike the Olympics, it is not something that is on any major TV network, at least not yet.
Nelson Dellis:
Because, as you can imagine, it's memorizing. Watching somebody memorize is like watching paint dry, and it is exactly as you describe. It's just a bunch of us sitting at tables effectively studying. You know, that's why the cards event is usually kind of exciting, because you can literally see the cards flying through our fingers and a timer that, you know, is rushing by some, some seconds, you know, but, yeah, effectively, it's, it's a memory competition where you gotta memorize stuff.
Jeff Young:
Since he started his memory athlete career back in 2009 Nelson says he's noticed a change in his own thinking, even when he's not trying to memorize random card orders.
Nelson Dellis:
You know, some people make the assumption that as a memory champion that I just always have a record button and that's always on, and so I remember everything. And that's not the case. But what I will say that memory training has changed my mind into is just how it perceives the world and how it processes information. I'm always processing information through a lens that would allow it to be memorized much easier.
Jeff Young:
And he says that has benefits in his personal life.
Nelson Dellis:
I do remember a lot more of what has happened to me and what goes on. I have four little kids, so remembering all these little moments happens a little more easily. That isn't to say that I don't try to do anything again. It's just how I move through life, like I understand how memory works, so I live my life accordingly, so that things are more memorable. You know, I do things out of the ordinary more often. I, you know, position myself in different ways, like in actual space, like I'll do something with my kids where I usually wouldn't, so that I remember it better, because I know that when you shift locations to things that you do every day, mundane, you'll remember those instances more.
So there's little things that I've learned over the years of training my memory that I just do naturally with my life that help make it more memorable.
Jeff Young:
When ChatGPT came out a couple years ago, Nelson was an enthusiastic early adopter. He's even found ways to use it to help him in his memory training. But recently, he's also started to worry more about possible negative side effects.
Nelson Dellis:
I've stepped away from using it so much for a lot of the mundane tasks that I do, because I notice myself. I don't know the right word, but I feel dumber, you know, using Well, it's not that, it's I feel like I have less agency over my own cognitive abilities. And as a memory champion, I do not like that, right? That was part of the whole reason I got into memory techniques was because I saw my grandmother lose her memory to Alzheimer's. And the idea of losing your memory, your cognitive abilities, to something that you can't control terrified me, right? And still terrifies me. And this is kind of like that. Who knows what we don't even know.
Like it's new technology. Who knows the long term ramifications, but as a memory expert, I feel like I have a good idea of what it's going to do to our memories and our brain, and so now I'm a lot more conscious about making the efforts that might take longer, but again, through this lens of knowing how memory works off. In those processes that take longer, are the things that we remember.
Jeff Young:
Welcome to Learning Curve, where we look at how education is adapting to the generative AI era.
I'm Jeff Young.
On this episode, we are hearing the case for memorization. Why education from middle school to college should add more rote memorizing, you know, names, dates, world capitals, times tables, you get the idea, especially as AI tools rush in, promising to cut out the boring parts of learning. A growing number of experts on how the brain works are making this case that you should go memorize more things right now, even if you will never be one of these world's top memory athletes.
By the way, we are going to go back to Nelson later in the episode and see if he won that championship and learn some of his techniques.
But first I want to take a step back. I got interested in this topic recently when I came across a new academic paper titled memory paradox. Our brains need knowledge in an age of AI. The lead author is Barbara Oakley, and I was excited to see her name because I have interviewed her a couple times over the years. She is one of the world's leading experts on how people learn. She's a professor of engineering at Oakland University in Michigan, and she's one of the instructors on the free online course on Coursera, that's called learning how to learn that more than 4 million people have registered for. She travels the world, giving talks on what brain science tells us about the best ways to teach and learn. So I reached out to Barbara Oakley and had her walk me through the points in her latest paper. I started by asking about something she references, called the Flynn effect, which is a core part of her argument.
Barbara Oakley:
The Flynn Effect was James Flynn. I believe he was an American who ended up moving to New Zealand, and he hypothesized that people were in some sense, getting smarter, that their IQs had been going up between the 1930s in the 1970s
Jeff Young:
Like average IQ scores were going up, right?
Barbara Oakley:
And he kind of noticed that around the world, and you can argue and quibble about, Are people really getting smarter? What is that? But it was a discernible effect that people apparently seem to be getting smarter.
Jeff Young:
Basically, Flynn found that around the world, IQs were generally going up for decades.
Barbara Oakley:
Then around the 1970s, a number of studies began to show that in Western countries, IQ scores were declining, and this was really quite marked. And you might ask, Well, what happened in the 70s? That's when calculators came out, and that's when, you know, it's not like calculators were the problem. It's what spurred this sudden onslaught of people saying you don't need to look it up, you know, or you don't need to memorize it, you can always just look it up.
Jeff Young:
Some call this trend of global IQs going down as the reverse Flynn effect. There is some debate about why this is happening, but Barbara Oakley cites evidence for her theory.
Barbara Oakley:
Natalie Wexler gives an interesting example of how they didn't teach dates anymore in history, because that's, you know, that's just trivial rope facts. They need to just understand the flow of things. Well, what happened was students learned about the civil war in the 1800s with Abraham Lincoln, the the civil rights movement in the 1900s with Martin Luther King. But because they didn't memorize dates, they would just see these words, civil war, civil rights. They must have been kind of the same thing. So Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln must have been friends with each other. It's just, it's goofy stuff, because people thought that foundational knowledge really wasn't that important. But as it turns out, it's critically important in creating that underlying lying schema that connected Web of Knowledge that allows you to not only understand something, but transfer your your understanding so that you can apply it to new areas.
Jeff Young:
And this is what you describe as the memory paradox. Is that? Right? What is that?
Barbara Oakley:
The memory paradox is that. And everything is so easy now you can always just look it up, but when you do that, you are not internalizing information, and it's the internalized information that helps you to be able to become an expert.
Jeff Young:
Barbara worries that many education experts look down on memorization and on delivering basic information in favor of more exploratory teaching and discovery based learning techniques
Barbara Oakley:
And what can happen in education, there is this underlying assumption that inquiry based discovery based approaches are always that's the best. That is what we should aim for. Now maybe you should add in a little bit of explicit instruction to support, but the real creative learning actually takes place when you are doing inquiry and so forth. And the problem with this is that to become an expert in anything, you got to have a really solid knowledge foundation. And constructivism doesn't. It doesn't value and respect practice and repetition. In fact, it's, it's sort of denigrated as, oh, that's just rote learning. What happened was, in the late 1800s and 1900s, educators would emphasize a lot of practice and repetition, and so innovative new educators came out and said, hey, guess what? This is really killing people's desire to learn, their motivation.
It's important, but then what happened was they threw the baby out with the bath water, because it turns out the practice of repetition are really important for most people to learn, except for some really smart people. We often call people really smart who have excellent memories. And it turns out that some of the great leaders in education had excellent memories, so for them, it only took once over or something. Why would you waste time repeating things? Because, you know, that's just going to kill people's desire to learn.
Jeff Young:
So just to push back a little bit, student motivation is super important, and you want to bore everybody, as plenty of research shows. But I take her overall point, which is that she thinks that the scale has tipped way too far against memorization. She's been making some of these arguments for a while, but of course, what's new these days in education and society is generative.
Barbara Oakley:
AI, it has made it all the more imperative to talk about how the brain really learns, because what you have now is you have a lot of educators who are saying, Okay, well, let's, let's, they can always look it up so they don't need this information in their brain, and they don't just
Jeff Young:
Just ask ChatGPT.
Barbara Oakley:
Exactly.
Jeff Young:
By the way, you might think Barbara is against using AI at all when it comes to education, but it turns out, she is regularly turning to chatbots herself.
Barbara Oakley:
I personally, absolutely adore AI. I have a thing going with Claude. And, you know, ChatGPT is my friend.
And the thing is, though, that in education, we need to understand it is just completely overturned the table. As far as assessment goes, and we need to back off and just it's a lot simpler than you might think like right now, people are beginning to realize, you know what, social media is really bad for kids.
In fact, let's not give them cell phones and social media until they become like a little bit older in their teenager hood. You know, that's a pretty simple idea. And that idea of, hey, some things need to be developed, you know, in the old, traditional way before you start outsourcing it, just apply that same idea.
Somehow we have the idea that traditional approaches to teaching and learning are bad. We should never do them. It's all old and really terrible. And actually know a lot of the traditional approaches — they've worked, and so it's we don't really want to throw them all out. It's easy for teachers of foreign languages in the sense that foreign language learning, you got a bunch of vocabulary words you have to practice with them, you've got everything laid out, and you know what you need to learn.
But if you turn instead to something like math or engineering or physics, it's it is not so easy, just because for decades, all those educators have been hearing is you don't need to remember things. You just need to be able to do it. You can do it open book.
In fact, some teachers, or professors coming from foreign countries that still respect at least a modicum of rote learning, they can't believe it when they come to the States and they realize that you can have a cheat sheet. You don't need to memorize things. What? Because actually internalizing key ideas, like poets will say, memorize the poem, and you will understand it more deeply. It's that way with learning equations, you internalize key equations thinking about what they mean as you're doing it, not just, you know, flat memorizing, and you will actually have a better feel for how to use that equation.
So I think we just need to change our attitudes in teaching and learning in disciplines like math, in physics and chemistry, to say, Okay, some things you need to know by heart, and we're going to test you on that you know, away from generative AI and and we're going to see if you can use it, and we're also going to see if you can play with AI using it, because that's going to be important. But we need to change our attitudes to say some things must be internalized and we're going to check and see if that's the case.
Jeff Young:
After the break, how does that memory athlete hone his skills. It turns out, he does not consider himself some prodigy. Stay with us.
Promo Swap:
Hey, everybody. I wanted to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll enjoy. College matters, from the Chronicle. College matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. The host, Jack stripling is my former colleague at the Chronicle, who has covered and investigated higher ed for two decades. Jack really knows his stuff, and I think you'll get a kick out of his conversations with reporters and newsmakers. So check out college matters on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the episode.
Jeff Young:
Let's get back to Nelson, Dallas, that memory athlete that we talked to at the top of the episode. He has written some books about his memorization strategies. He has a new one coming out called everyday genius hacks to boost your memory focus problem solving and much more. Like Barbara Oakley, he's a fan of filling your mind with important context to help make sense of the world. So I was curious to ask for some suggestions of what we should all be memorizing to help our
Nelson Dellis:
brains, things like foreign languages or history, right, just knowing dates off the top your heads, or just not even specific dates, but just relative eras, right of time and history and when things happen, like
Jeff Young:
when civil war happened, versus Yeah, like the or even, like, going back to, like, ancient Greek, versus this versus that exactly, have a kind of a timeline in your mind, yeah.
Nelson Dellis:
And you know, it might not even be about being able to say those or recite those from memory, but having a general idea of a lot of things in the world, like in your own mind, helps you make decisions and think critically about the world around us better, you know. And so that's my, my real argument for, like, why it's important to memorize some of those things, because it just, I think, makes you more of an active participant in the world around us. And I think that's harder and harder to to do as tech gets more pressing into our lives.
Jeff Young:
Well, I definitely this is one where we're not going to get into all the tips and tricks, although now I'm, like, inspired to try to add this to my, like, daily routine, because it isn't, yeah, yeah. Thanks. Well, we can talk about So anyway, we can. We.
But for now, could you just show listeners a quick example. I was really struck in this, like, thinking about how to memorize a bunch of dates to kind of get that timeline of history in your mind. You talk about, you know, how to memorize the Battle of Normandy, for instance. And you know, like that happened. I thanks to reading your book. Now I've got this the.
So I it's like, what is it? June 6, 1944. Yeah, so, but I did not know that exact date before. Like, getting this reminded in your book, but, but you have this little memory. Example of, like, a technique to use to come up with it. Could you just walk through quickly, like that example as a just to show people the kind of technique to be able to pull that up. Because obviously, like, it seems like, Oh, I just had this number, but I but you have these techniques that make it kind of vivid and, like, use tools, because otherwise I would just forget that date. You know, I know I learned it in high school, right? But, yeah, there's, I did not know it.
Nelson Dellis:
Yeah, yeah. You know, that's a great example, because it's obviously an historic date. So it's got some attachment to something that happened in the world that is in most people's minds, memorable. People mostly know about D-Day and the Normandy invasion, World War II. But then you have this other side of the equation, which is this date, this numeric thing, right? It's a month which could also be a number, right? A six, six month of the year. And then you then you have the day, right? The sixth also a number. And then you have the year 1944, now you know, is it important to know the exact date? Not necessarily. You know, if you knew that it was near the end of the war, and you roughly know when the end of the war was, you know, 1945 1944 we're close to it. Then you you know that might be helpful.
But let's say you want to really memorize that. So somebody says D Day. You say June 6, 1944 right? We're Normandy invasion, whatever. So a lot of information that we try to memorize. The reason why it's hard is because it's in a form that our brain doesn't like. So numbers is something very abstract. You know, some of us, we can look at a number and, you know, maybe that date is your birthday. You know, maybe you were born on June 6. It might have a personal connection. Yeah, then, yeah, right, that would be your Yeah.
But, you know, you can't rely on that, because with numbers, especially all different sorts of combos, you're not expected to just have an association at the ready. So with things more abstract, like numbers, US memory athletes will come up with systems to translate numbers or these abstract things into pictures. This is what memory techniques are all about. Is coming up with pictures in our mind that we can visualize, that have associations, and take advantage of our ability to visualize our senses very memorably. So something like a D-Day, you know? I'll convert that to the actual month. I'll convert them to numbers, right? So imagine, let's do American dates. So zero, well, it's the same either way, 0606, then 1944, or just 44 right? It depends. If you have some knowledge that you know this is from World War Two, and it was the 19th century, sorry, 20, 1900s 20th century, then maybe you don't need to memorize the 19 right? So maybe it's just six, 644, right? And so taking that date and coming up with something that you can visualize right, and then attaching it to the event right, which is the storming of the beach right in World War II.
So we have systems where we turn numbers into letters and then we construct words. So for me, and I use different examples in the book, but if I were to tell you just an example of how I would do it, 06 to me is Steve Jobs, and then I create kind of a there's a whole reason why, which I won't necessarily go into here, because it can kind of get in the weeds.
But I basically come up with a picture through a phonetic code that I've constructed for numbers, and I can create a sentence or word, right? So 60606 44 would be Steve Jobs typing on a computer looking up bras. So some of these are a bit lewd. Some of them tend to be weird over the top, but that's the whole point, right? And then, so I take that weird picture of Steve Jobs typing on a computer and looking up bras, and it's attach it to D-Day. So I can imagine, maybe in one of these boats that were storming the beach, there's Steve Jobs in the back, you know, like all these, these soldiers are storming out, bullets flying everywhere, chaos, disaster explosions, and there's Steve Jobs, just like writing on a little laptop, and he's searching for bras because it seemed like the most utmost important thing to do at that time. Now, this is to memorize, right? It has nothing to do with, like, what the actual battle was about, the meaning behind like, what was going on around the date. This is purely. To get the information in your head, and it happens in an instant, because now you have some really crazy memorable image that is hard to forget, impossible to forget. And if you know the encoding to go from the number to the picture and the picture to the number, then it's easy as can be. And this is how we memorize hundreds and 1000s of digits in competition.
Jeff Young:
So just again, not to get into exactly why Steve Jobs, but for you, you've built this system Yeah. For you, there's like, yeah, exactly so for you, anytime, for anything, you want to memorize the number six, then Steve Jobs would beat it. Is that kind of Yeah Or Yeah. And so for you, Steve Jobs, and then doing something, you have, like, a list of objects?
Nelson Dellis:
actions and actors that play on those objects with the actions. Yeah? And it's like a formula, you know, when I look at a six digit number, I can turn it into a person doing a thing, doing an action with a thing. And yeah, I just imagine that and attach it to whatever I'm trying to memorize.
Jeff Young:
And so when you're doing the card competition and you're going to win the memory championship, you basically are, as you said, like quickly flipping through them, but you're converting the numbers the raw you're turning those into the data of the number and suit and or, you know, and card and suit into matching it to this system, and then coming up with some way for you then to turn it into a visual, or turn into something kind of zany or crazy. And then when they ask you a few minutes later to say, Okay, what is the card order? You're going through that zany thing and then re translating it into jack of spades, whatever.
Nelson Dellis:
Yeah, yeah. And at this point, you know, I've trained so much that I look at the card or numbers and it is the picture that I've designated for it. I've studied
Jeff Young:
it so much. Let's go back to some more footage from that 2024 USA memory championship as Nelson Dallas was competing in the final round against two other competitors. Note the color commentary here.
Commentator:
But Riley, I don't I have no since he's a first time competitor, I'm not sure how fast he can memorize a deck of cards. It looks like he's summing through more methodically. I'm not sure if he can do 104 It looks like he has all the cards in his hands, though all 104 so it looks like he may be attempting to do all of that. But if you look over Avi and Nelson, who are more experienced, they're flipping through, they're reviewing 234, maybe even five times, if they have time.
Nelson Dellis:
And at this point, you know, I've trained so much that I look at the card or numbers and it is the picture that I've designated for it. I've studied it so much. It's like, you know, becoming fluent in the language. You don't do this step of translation anymore. You just know the word for what it is, and that's target language. So when I'm ripping through the deck of cards, I'm literally seeing a movie of characters doing odd things with odd objects. And it's, you know, just the sequence of a story that unfolds in my mind, a movie. And when I go back to remember it, I'm just playing the movie back in my head and decoding it back to what the card's values are.
Jeff Young:
And again, like Barbara Oakley, he is not totally anti AI,
Nelson Dellis:
Yeah, you know, at first it was exciting, because you're like, oh, wow, this is going to cut down a lot of my time spent doing this and that. And, you know, for training, even alone, like, it's very helpful to have aI generate sets of data that I can try to memorize, right? It can even collect all my training data and notice patterns that I might not or it might take me a long time to do that. You know, even coming up with some of these systems or images for things that I want to memorize, it can help, kind of cut down on that time. And I think, you know, even to this day, I'm not saying, Never use AI. I use it a lot in my workflow, because it helps me get a lot done, and I can work on other things that are more important to me. But I think you also and this is something as AI gets better and better. I remember back in 2023 even when it was doing a terrible job at making a video of Will Smith eating food. And now you can't even tell the difference. But back then, you know, it was like, fun. It was like, Okay, we still got some time before this is a real problem. Right now, it's just like, it's kind of helpful, kind of cool. But now it's at a point where i i worry. I worry for my kids. I worry for Humanity's sake, in relation to our cognitive abilities.
Jeff Young:
As I watched video of Nelson competing in memory competitions, I kept thinking that it seemed kind of like what I imagined that the big AI companies do when they train large language models, encoding massive amounts of data in a format that can be easily retrieved later. I. I was curious to see whether Nelson saw it this way. Yeah.
Nelson Dellis:
I mean, there's, you know, there's some similarity there, because I'm thinking about the process of me creating my system and my mnemonics like I'm building them off of everything that is the experience of Nelson Dellis, right? Everything I've seen, learned, felt, is all coming into play when I search for my brain is in this mode of finding a mnemonic that is memorable enough for whatever I'm memorizing. Right?
This happens in the blink of an eye as I'm speeding through a deck of cards, but it's happening nevertheless, right? But then you have an LLM, which is using all the information on the web or whatever set it's trained on to, in a way, come up with its own image. So there is a similarity there.
But I think there's a certain quality that's not there. I don't know how to say that exactly, or what that is exactly, but that human element, I think will always feel like off this uncanny valley thing. I don't know if it'll ever get to a point where it's just like a human, or feels it's just like a human. I could be wrong. I hope not. I hope there will always be something that makes humans be different than just a machine that has been coded with electronics and wires. I mean, some might even argue that's what our brains is. But I think ours, our intellect and brain is more than that.
Jeff Young:
Yeah, no, I think it's back, back to that example of not wanting to, you know, like to see a loved one, kind of losing, like their ability to remember as a motivation. It's, it's clear that that is not just a, I don't know. It's, it seemed, and you mentioned your kids and wanting to remember these moments with them, like, that's, that's maybe the different, the difference, I guess, in a way of like, you're, you're basically saying that, like these memories, are you and so having more of them is maybe, maybe worth, worth spending some time on,
Nelson Dellis:
yeah, and you know the idea that of the experience of what it's like to love my children or love my grandmother and be inspired by something that happened between us. You know that that could be described and encoded in a way, but there'll always be something missing in the computer's version of that.
Nelson Dellis:
So I don't know. Yeah, yeah, this is getting very philosophical, but, yeah, I think I'm trying to preserve the human element of cognition here, which will largely be mapped out through AI and other models that come in the future. But I'm not ready to kind of acquiesce fully to the to the machine.
Jeff Young:
You know, one thing that I have not mentioned yet about Nelson Dallas is that he's actually a college professor. He teaches computer science courses at Skidmore College as an instructor. So he is also wrestling with how to use AI in his own classroom. As an educator, do you has has all this memory work changed your approach at all? Or do you are you more likely to have students memorize things or not, or really try to convince them not to take shortcuts?
Nelson Dellis:
I do. I don't tell them straight up. Hey, this is what's happening, and this is who I am, and this is why I'm telling you to do this, but I try to instill it in just kind of casually, without them really getting to see what the reasoning why instill that in my, my my teaching and the assignments that I give. You know, I want them to do things sometimes the old school way, which, I don't know if they fully appreciate that, but that's what I'm doing there. Is trying to, you know, avoid them just purely relying on some of the tools there that make them think less.
Jeff Young:
Again, he's been doing memory competitions on and off since 2009 he says he's seeing more interest these days from the general public about his memorization techniques.
Nelson Dellis:
You know, I have a whole memory coaching business. People come to me with their problems, and I help them figure them out, help train them become better at memorizing whatever it is that they need. And I definitely, over the years, had more and more requests like, I think people recognize that they want to kind of preserve this human element and that memory. Being able to have that control over their own memory and their own mind is such a powerful thing now and in higher demand, and even more so as the years pass, I would assume anybody can look something up on the internet. And use some kind of AI to get done what they want. But who can do that with just this, right? I'm pointing to my brain.
Jeff Young:
Those listening, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. So you definitely feel, you feel people coming to you more and kind of saying, like, I want to make sure I'm honing my brain. I'm keeping this memory alive and active.
Nelson Dellis:
Yeah, and there's I feel like, if I had to kind of plot this, there's a general feeling of unease I'm getting from the amount of requests I get and the kind of people who approach me. They may not be saying it outright, but I can see this uptick of people concerned for how they're performing around in this world that's rapidly developing around them in a way that maybe they don't fully feel is right? You know, that's my take on it. I think there's tons of people who will say, like Nelson, you're crazy, like you, if you use this tool better, everything you do would just amplify, and you're looking at it the wrong way, that, you know, it'll just make us smarter, and if we use it the right way, and you know, it's still in its infancy, so maybe people are still kind of adjusting to it, but we will adjust.
But I don't know.
I don't know Honestly, I think, more scared than the average person about this movement, this AI movement, but um, I could be wrong.
Jeff Young:
So back to that 2024, competition, jack of clubs, queen of spades.
Competition Footage:
Three of hearts.
That is incorrect.
So I have to say that card, right?
Yes, sir. Do you know the last the preceding card
To me again, queen of spades, six of hearts, four diamonds.
That is incorrect. Ladies and gentlemen, we now have a six time winner.
Jeff Young:
Nelson emerges as the winner, successfully outlasting his opponents as they memorize the order of 104 cards in just a few minutes.
One of Nelson's big points is that he is not someone who just naturally has some photographic memory. He stresses that it's a matter of training, and most anyone could do it. There's a lot of excitement about AI these days and whether it can bring new inventions and kind of make us all smarter. So one big question is whether new AI tools could take us back to an era where IQs are generally increasing. Can we get that Flynn Effect going again? Maybe a push toward memorization is one part of the answer.
Jeff Young:
I'm curious to hear what you think about all this. Send me your thoughts in an email or voice memo to Jeff at learning curve.fm. We might share excerpts of what you send in an upcoming episode. This episode was written and put together by me, Jeff Young. You can find me online at Jeffyoung.net. The music for the episode was by Komiku, and our show art was generated by Midjourney. If you haven't already, please subscribe to learning curve, wherever you get your pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter and find show notes so you can see footage of that 2024 memory championship at learning curve.fm.
We'll be back soon with another episode. Got something brewing for next week, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for listening.