Have our iPhones Eaten our Brains? Nelson Dellis on Hacks to Restore our Focus and Boost our Memory
Keen On America
Outro
Andrew thanks Nelson, reminds listeners to subscribe, and invites comments and suggestions for future episodes.
“I don’t like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I’m losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion
Most of us can’t remember our spouse’s phone number. We barely know our own. We haven’t read a physical map in years. Some of us don’t even know what a map is. Such is the impoverishment of mental life in our digital age.
Nelson Dellis, unlike most of us, is a rich man — at least mentally. He can memorise a shuffled deck of 52 cards in under a minute. He stores every stranger’s phone number in his head for 24 hours before putting it in his phone — on principle. He’s a six-time USA Memory Champion, a computer science professor at Skidmore, and the author of a new book, Everyday Genius, which suggests we can all be a lot smarter than our smart phones.
Dellis got into memory after watching his grandmother get lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s. And as a computer science professor, he’s equally terrified by what he now sees in the classroom. His students can’t craft an email without ChatGPT. They can’t focus. They can’t solve a problem without asking a machine. He warns that we’re outsourcing our cognitive agency to devices and mislabelling it as human productivity.
For Dellis, it’s the same mental atrophy that destroyed his grandmother. AI-generated mnemonics, he warns, feel “dead inside.” Our brains, like our language, are degenerating into slop. Thus the value of his hacks to restore our focus and boost our memories.
Five Takeaways
• I Can’t Remember My Wife’s Phone Number: Neither can you. Neither can anyone under 50. We’ve outsourced our memories to devices and the consequences are only beginning to show. Nelson Dellis memorises every new phone number for 24 hours before putting it in his phone. Not because he needs to — because his brain needs him to.
• His Grandmother Disappeared into Alzheimer’s and It Changed His Life: Dellis watched the woman who raised him become a shell of herself — unable to recognise her own grandson. He went down a rabbit hole into memory science, discovered a former champion’s audiobook, tried the techniques, and was hooked. He won his first US Memory Championship within two years. He’s won six.
• If Everyone’s a Genius, Nobody Is: I pushed back on the book’s premise. Dellis conceded the point but held his ground: the techniques are learnable, the results are real, and the distinction between “genius” and “trained” matters less than the distinction between a brain that’s exercised and one that’s atrophying. The London cab driver study is his best evidence — hippocampi that grow with use and shrink without it.
• AI Slop Is by Definition Forgettable: Dellis teaches computer science, so he’s no Luddite. But AI-generated mnemonics, he says, feel “dead inside.” The vivid, absurd, grotesque images that make memory techniques work are products of individual human imagination. A machine can’t generate weirdness. Not yet. Maybe not ever. His students can’t write an email without ChatGPT. That should terrify us more than it does.
• Eat Your Blueberries: Four pillars of brain health: mental exercise, physical fitness, diet, and — the one that surprises people — social interaction. Dellis trains a 90-year-old and a five-year-old using the same techniques. Both can do things their peers cannot. The brain doesn’t expire at 70. But it does atrophy if you let your iPhone do the thinking.
About the Guest
Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion (2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2021, 2024), certified mountaineer and Everest summiteer, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Skidmore College. His new book is Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem-Solving, and Much More. He has taught memory techniques to audiences ranging from five-year-olds to nonagenarians.
References:
• Everyday Genius by Nelson Dellis — the book under discussion, currently the number one new release in memory improvement on Amazon.
• Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer — the bestselling account of competitive memory that Dellis discusses and Foer, a friend of his, promoted at the same event where Dellis won his first title.
• Episode 2835: Why Dario Amodei Might Be the 21st Century’s First Real Leader — this week’s TWTW, where Keith Teare covered AI disruption from the tech side.
• USA Memory Championship — the annual competition Dellis has won six times.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,800 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
Chapters:
- (00:00) - Introduction: we've never had a memory champion
- (01:23) - Is everyone a genius? The soccer medal problem
- (03:25) - Controlling the thing inside our skull
- (05:07) - The brain as the most complicated object in the universe
- (06:40) - Grandmother’s Alzheimer’s: the origin story
- (08:26) - Can brain training delay Alzheimer’s?
- (11:53) - Mental longevity vs. the iPhone warranty
- (13:46) - Inside the USA Memory Championship
- (15:52) - Numbers, cards, names, poems: the events
- (18:13) - Joshua Foer and Moonwalking with Einstein
- (21:28) - Social genius: loneliness as cognitive decline
- (24:43) - Blueberries, omega-3s, and pre-competition doping
- (27:24) - Freaks or trained humans?
- (31:01) - Your iPhone is atrophying your brain
- (37:51) - AI slop: why machines can’t make memories
- (39:23) - Hack: how to remember any name you hear
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