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  • there are ways to improve your memory.

  • In fact, memory athletes train their brains to compete in memory championships In a new study that compared, the brains of these athletes with people who'd never practiced memory techniques found no structural differences between the brains, researchers say.

  • It's just about how well trained they are.

  • Nelson Dellis, a four time USA memory champion, has memorized more than 200 names in 15 minutes and nine decks of playing cards in 30 minutes.

  • Let's jog his memory about how 5037953450 When I tell people about what I do, I get such a big shock.

  • Oh, you must be some savant or something like that.

  • That's not the case.

  • It's just a technique that's kind of died out because the need is not there.

  • One thing that kind of pushing me along this path is my grandmother, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, and that's part of the reason why I was so concerned for myself, and why I got into all of this memory training is because I didn't want that to happen to me.

  • One of the events that train is spoken numbers.

  • So I'm closing my eyes.

  • I'm hearing these numbers come at me one digit at a second, and what I do is I'm turning those into pictures.

  • I receive a few digits at a time, and I turned that into a picture and then receive another to kind of make a little story and store that along a place.

  • When I'm writing it down.

  • All I'm doing is walking back through that place, picturing who was there and then translating that back to the numbers that those pictures represent.

  • I can't help it any more.

  • I look at these numbers and they are people to meet.

  • When I see 30 it's Conan O'Brien.

  • Same with my grandmother.

  • She's 175.

  • That's her number.

  • So when she pops up, it's awesome.

  • Any distraction could be detrimental to, you know, an event that you're trying to get a good squad, so we try to minimize those distractions, you know, go to a public place and train or, you know, trained high altitude in the mountains.

  • My first kind of big fundraising project was to climb on Everest and I thought would be a great way to kind of bring House members to the top of the world for the competition.

  • I actually trained about 4 to 5 hours a day because I'm trying actively hard to win these competitions.

  • I trained my brain in the same sense that, you know, you go to the gym or to make your body stronger.

  • I do that for my mind to try and develop that memory and make it stronger.

  • What's scary to me the most about potentially losing memories is not, you know, forgetting.

  • You know, all the stuff I learned in college or, you know, the fact that I was the memory champion.

  • Whatever it's, it's, it's more the small moments, you know, with the people you love and care about that makes us who we are.

  • And if you lose those memories and those feelings that came along with it, who are you and how can you enjoy life?

there are ways to improve your memory.

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