Nelson Dellis Memory

Nelson Dellis, 28, took top prize in the USA Memory Championship in New York City, March 2012. In the cometition they required them to use mnemonic skills to recall random information. That included memorizing an unpublished poem and a list of 500 words, and remembering rows of random numbers and also had to match 99 names with faces. During the contest, Dellis memorized 303 random numbers in five minutes. That bested the previous record of 248, which he himself set in 2011. His ability to memorize random facts does not come naturally. Dellis spent hours sharpening his recall skills. He always thought memory was static, but he learned he was wrong. After his grandmother began showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease he started to research the …show more content…
Dellis had a strong understanding of two types of memory storage, short term and long term memory. Short term lasts from 20 seconds. It holds up to five and nine items before the "storage space" fills up and the person begins to forget them. Scientists believe that long-term memory has unlimited storage capacity. To keep the information we have to work to move it into the long term memory storage area. For example, you meet a friend and they give you their phone number and you aren't able to write it down. So you repeat it to not forget it. But when you're around the seven digit you forget the last numbers. Then you realize that if you try to think about the information in a different way, you might be able to remember it for more than just a few seconds. Lets say your friend repeats the first six digits of the number. Hearing the last four numbers—1492—reminds you of the year that Christopher Columbus "sailed the ocean blue." These observations can help you to convert your friend's telephone number from meaningless random numbers to information that your brain can remember for a longer period of time. These are some type of techniques Nelson and Michael used to recall