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- [00:02]
Anthony Metivier
Tetragrammaton. I often think of the David Lynch Lost highway movie, where Bill Pullman says, you know, I like to remember things the way I remember them, not necessarily the way they happened. And then that's naturally what happens when we tell these stories. But as I remember it anyway, I was dealing with a very bad clinical depression while I was doing my PhD and rather than do anything destructive, I wound up at the campus one day. David Blaine was all the rage. And in this deep, dark winter, there's a place at York University campus called York Lanes, where inside they kind of protect you from the Canadian winter with what looks like a street, a city street inside, and it's nice and warm. And these guys came and did street magic to me. And this revived an old interest that I had when I was a kid in magic. And so I went home and I was watching videos, and I stumbled across what's called the Holy Grail of magic, which is any card at any number where the spectator could name a card and name a number and it'll be there, but the deck has to be memorized. And I thought, there's no way I can do this. I can't even read a sentence of this dense philosophy that I'm responsible for. But I tried it anyway. And lo and behold, I memorized a deck of cards. And I thought instantly, if I can memorize a deck of cards, I can get back into this. It just gave me this weird light in my head, too. And later I found out there's research that actually people have done that confirms this. And it's throughout the tradition, the sense of light that comes from practicing with memory for quite a lot of people. Yeah. I just had the confidence to keep going, and I didn't drop up and I didn't do anything destructive to myself. And I passed. And then I just used memory techniques privately for a certain portion of my career. And after a research grant I had in, a teaching grant ended, I wound up back home in Canada. And I was working, doing curriculum for a sort of after school school where parents send their kids when they're concerned that the public school system isn't doing enough for them. And I wasn't even teaching. But a teacher didn't show up one day, and the person who owned the school asked me if I could stand in, and I taught the stuff to the kids. And I said, that's it. What do you guys want to do now? And they said, we don't know. You're the teacher. And I said, let's learn how to Say the Alphabet backwards. And then after that we got into some card memorization and I showed them how to memorize words and stuff and they said, could you write that down? And I did. And the Kindle Gold mine was going on at that time and I put it up on Amazon, not thinking a thing about it. But a friend of mine said, hey, have you seen your book? And I was like, no, there's like ranking in the. The best sellers in like one and one and really category three.
- [02:54]
Interviewer
That's amazing.
- [02:55]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, yeah, it was just luck of the draw, I guess. I mean, I. I was looking at different ideas of how I was going to become a business person, but I was way off in completely different ideas. And this memory thing just really hit and I, I saw that and then, oh, there's a lot of adventure. There was stubbornness of not really wanting to be an entrepreneur or anything like that, and not wanting to run an email list properly. And I was just emailing at some point, 700 people a day, co and pasting in like doses of 12 or whatever that wouldn't get flagged by these email systems at the time. And then finally I paid to get one of these systems to email people. Anyway, it just went from there. And I delayed getting a website, probably way too long because it wasn't anything I planned for.
- [03:33]
Interviewer
Yeah. When did YouTube start for you?
- [03:36]
Anthony Metivier
It had started when I learned memory techniques and that was part of what had enabled it. This would have been 2003, I guess, when I discovered the technique. So YouTube was a thing.
- [03:47]
Interviewer
When did you start posting videos?
- [03:49]
Anthony Metivier
Well, that was one of my other business ideas that I was originally working on. And that would have been around 2011ish, because I had been a film studies professor. And another sort of lucky weird thing that was happening to me is that there was a student who was a cinematographer and he was like, man, you got to get your stuff on YouTube. And I was not in a healthy space or I was just. I was not really enabled by anything to understand that that would have been the best thing I could have ever done is have him use a professional camera to put my stuff on YouTube. But I heard it later. And then when I was back in Canada, I'd written some books about screenwriting because he had gotten me a gig as a story consultant. And I actually worked on a couple of projects, one of which I even have my name in credits, which I never dreamed in my life was ever going to happen. And I was able to visit the set. It was just a weird thing. I was getting, like, a couple of gigs to consult on Stories. And then I was documenting, going to the set as the guy who was like, script doctor on this thing. And that was on my YouTube channel that still is. And then I was giving these lectures about really Nudely Deleuze, sort of analysis of film, and Berson analysis of film. And it's still there. It still sits there. And I look really awkward, and, I mean, it almost looks like a Twin Peaks episode because it was in outside of Vancouver, and there's this pine wall behind me, and some of them. I've got a Videodrome poster behind me, and I did a whole department of Cronenberg studies, you know, playlist or whatever it was. It was wild. And it. It was sort of working because people were buying these books about screenwriting that I wrote.
- [05:26]
Interviewer
How long did it take to learn the deck of cards?
- [05:29]
Anthony Metivier
I think it was about 15 minutes.
- [05:31]
Interviewer
15 minutes to memorize a deck of cards?
- [05:34]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, it's not that difficult. I'm not confident of anything in my memory per se, but my perception is that it was about 15 minutes. But I wasn't totally new to the exact ideas. I mean, it was just in this adventure. I had started to develop these, and then I saw on YouTube this idea of the Holy Grail. If it hadn't been magic, I probably would have looked at it and said, there's no way I'm going to memorize a deck of cards. But because I was blessed as a kid to have had a magic kid and did show and tell with magic and so forth, the soil was set for the great adventure that emerged. And so, you know, sometimes people ask me, like, if I have any special advantage that they don't have. And I said, I don't really think so, except for luck. And that's true, you know, and maybe that I learned with reading phonics. There's a guy named Richard Rubin who emailed me at one point, and he's a mnemonist and a mentalist and a magician. And we were on the podcast and we were talking about the problem of phonics, because sometimes people really struggle to understand these techniques.
- [06:34]
Interviewer
And.
- [06:34]
Anthony Metivier
And he said, well, there was a whole period of whole reading where people weren't taught to sound out words. And that's why a lot of people are starting to struggle with understanding these. These memory techniques.
- [06:45]
Interviewer
What would be a good memory technique to start with?
- [06:49]
Anthony Metivier
One of the most powerful and useful and probably the easiest memory techniques to learn is association. So you can absorb people's names and recall them and basically, there's different ways to think about this. But if you were to hear a name like William, then you could associate the new person, William, that you've just met with William Shakespeare. But one of the key strategies is to try to link the new person that you've named with a celebrity or a friend who is as familiar to you as possible. And the reason why is because, you know, if I meet a person named Eric, and I think about Eric bana, well, I seen Eric bana as the incredible Hulk. And this has massive amounts of associative power because he has turned green and gotten really big and snarly and growly. And then he's also shrunk down to normal size and looked rather dramatic in a pool of sweat after turning back to David Banner, I think is the character in the Hulk movies. So Eric bana, when I associate it with someone I meet named Eric, now, it's just loaded with all this familiarity. And so that's just basic association for names. And you can take it a step further by using those images as a kind of association that you place on a person's shoulder. So if it's someone named Graham, you could have a big, giant graham cracker on their shoulder, and then you have a place to look for the association. The problem with graham crackers is that they're not like Eric bana, the actor who can be associated with the Hulk. So you'd want to try to be careful about that because it can often lead you into errors. And that's one of the problems with memory techniques, is that they're not sure fire. And sometimes there are pronunciation errors. And often when I make mistakes, it's a pronunciation error, but you just want to go and do the best that you can. And then the cool thing is, is if you make a mistake because the image is too generic, that you place like a graham cracker isn't strong enough. You just elaborate it a little bit further, and then you might remember in that time. I think, if memory serves, in some of the Hannibal Lecter movies, there's a character named Will Graham, maybe. And so now you have that character, whoever it is, that you remember more closely to Graham eating this graham cracker. So you don't get rid of the weak association. You elaborate it. That's really the easiest way to start, is when you meet people, find some way to associate their name to something you already know. And then as you practice, you'll be able to do it with greater and greater associations of higher and higher familiarity.
- [09:39]
Interviewer
Is there a technique for memorizing something word for word, yes.
- [09:43]
Anthony Metivier
There's a beautiful technique. And word for word can be lyrics from a song or lines from Shakespeare or a story that you want to tell and really nail or give a speech. And the technique as I use it is all the same. So if it's a beautiful line from Shakespeare, for example, you would use a memory palace. And the way that I do it for memorizing verbatim is I look at the first letter of the passage and then I try and think of a location that also has that first letter. So in Australia they have Woolworths grocery stores. And there's a line in Shakespeare from Titus Andronicus that says, why I have not another tear to shed. And so because that starts with W, I choose the Woolworths grocery store. And then before I start to memorize the lines and I recommend people do this, I just make a quick sketch of the location, like a top down drawing. And I mean chicken scratch sketch. This isn't art. Nothing to frustrate yourself. Literally a square that sort of, you can draw an arrow or a line that shows how you're going to progress through the grocery store in this case. And then you look back at the source material and you look at the first sentence and you imagine the way that you're going to have the character move through the memory palace in a way that's going to help you remember the exact words. It's been a while since I recited this, but what I did is I used Anthony Hopkins because he played Titus Andronicus in the movie. So I had him standing in the Woolworths grocery store and then he's walking towards the fruit section, and then he goes to the vegetable section, and then he goes down an aisle, and then he goes up another aisle. And as he's walking, things are happening in my imagination that help me remember why I have not another tear to shed. Besides, this sorrow would be an enemy and would usurp upon my watery eyes and make them blind with tributary tears. Then which way shall I find revenge's cave? For these two heads do seem to speak to me and threat me. I shall never come to bliss until this mischief be returned again, even in the throats that committed them. I may have dropped a word or two, but basically on a line by line basis, the why I have not another tear to shed is at the first part that I've indicated in the memory palace, just ahead of the fruit section. And I have a big giant question mark floating above the fruit section. And I have not another tear to shed. Titus Andronicus is using that question mark to cut a shed in half in the real grocery store. There is no shed there, but to remember that it is a shed. And a tear is coming out of his eye while he's doing this. And the key to all of this is to not try to be creative, not try to rebuild any wheels, not try to do anything other than what is the word and what is the most likely association that I can place in the grocery store, in a line or maybe coming down from the ceiling to the floor that's going to remind me of those exact words? And so if it's, why have not another tear to shed? Besides, the sorrow is an enemy, then. Besides, there's a bee. And that bee, to make it as specifically as possible, is from the bee movie. And I think it was Jerry Seinfeld who did the voice of the bee in that movie. And so he's stinging Titus Andronicus or Anthony Hopkins, who played Titus Andronicus in the side. So, besides, the sorrow is an enemy. And so there's sometimes hard words like usurp and would usurp upon my watery eyes and make them blind with tributary tears. When I first remembered that, I didn't even know what the word them meant. And. But I don't worry about that. Like, I don't know what them was referring to because it's this, you know, now, archaic Shakespearean language. So as you memorize, the key is just, how are you going to memorize that? It's the word them in this position. And so what I do for this kind of tricky word that's abstract, don't even know what it's referring to. I look at th, and I have Thor mending a hem them, right? And if it was this, then I have Thor taking, you know, an activity I won't mention that rhymes with this. And then if it's that, I have Thor pulling down a hat. So that's the verbatim trick where you have associations for each and every word. Is. Is the goddess Isis. I think Isis is a goddess. If is Iphigenia. You know, your mileage may vary. You may not know who Iphigenia is, but your journey is to come up with what you could use for if. And what's cool about the memory palace is it lets you recite the material forward and backward. And so that's a little harder to demonstrate, but really, it's just a function of thinking back and going, you know, and then, which way shall I find revenge's?
- [14:19]
Interviewer
Cave.
- [14:20]
Anthony Metivier
I know where that was in the grocery store. And I know what the associations are there, which then allows me to do the piece out of order. And it would be the same thing with song lyrics, the same thing with a speech. And if you want to get a little bit more advanced into it, spend some time thinking about different ways that you can take the Alphabet and turn it into associations.
- [14:41]
Interviewer
Are there any techniques for memorizing music?
- [14:44]
Anthony Metivier
Yes, absolutely. And we always have to start with what we mean by music because we might mean a matter of theory, like just the names of the modes, whether it's, you know, Phrygian or Mixolydian or Dorian. Like knowing that information is really just a kind of verbatim memorization because you want to know what those words are. But then there's the features of knowing what a certain mode does, like Lydian having a sharp fourth. So you would use memory techniques in a particular way. And then knowing where a note is located on an instrument would involve another kind of technique. So if you're on a guitar and you notice that I think it's an E on the A string is the seventh fret, then you could make an image that helps you remember that if it's a B on the second fret on the A string, you can make an image that will help you remember that if you don't even know the strings. You could have E for Ernie, A for Al Pacino, D for Dracula, G for Grover, B for the next B if it's a guitar. And then you have E again. And you might want to have baby Ernie to distinguish one from the other. And then from there you can work your way down the low E string. And on the first fret you have Ernie doing something with a candle because that's like number one. And then you want to remember that that's F. I believe you can incorporate an F shaped candle, for example. And he's putting it out with his fingers and he swears with an F sounding word, right? So now that helps you remember that F on the E string is on the first fret because the candle is like a one shape that you've turned into an F shape. And then if it's any note, any position, the 13th fret, I think is an F as well on the E string. Now you have an image for 13. These matters get a little bit complicated. And there's even easier ways to do that with a number based system called a 00-99-PAO. But you can translate it to the piano in certain ways. I don't play piano, but I think middle C is near the two black keys. And then you can think of the three black keys and what the notes are between them. Like, I think a G is trapped between one of the three black keys. And you could imagine a ghost being trapped in a cathedral, that sort of thing. And that can help you just get into navigating a keyboard by having, like, C and then a black key, and then a D. And a dog is trapped away from a cat with these two black keys. If that's how it works, a cde, then the two black keys, and then an elephant is on the other side. And then you make a little story. So the cat is being protected from the dog, and the elephant is trying to convince the dog and not to attack the cat. And there's only these two black keys that are somehow holding the dog back despite the elephant's efforts and the cat's fear. So now you have the cde, if I'm remembering the keyboard correctly. But that's the memory palace technique, using associations on the physical surface of the keyboard.
- [17:43]
Interviewer
How would we use these methods for dates and numbers?
- [17:47]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, dates and numbers are a wild and wonderful realm to get into because they are often confusing, because you have the day, the year, and then you might have the century. So, you know, something in the 1800s would be called the 19th century. And it's just like mind melting with numbers. But one of the simplest things that I try to do with numbers related to dates is I try to pick pivot points. So one of the great memory masters was burned at the stake on February 17, 1600. His name was Giordano Bruno. So I make him a point that that was 1600 and February 17th. And then whenever I'm needing to memorize any other information, I'll think, where is it in relation to that date? And then try to work out, well, what is the date? And then I'll try to think of these associations that I could make. So if it's the birth date of a philosopher or a historical figure or something like that, could I use always the right hand for the birth date and place images in the right hand of that figure that remind me of the date of the birth? And then can you use the left hand for the date of death or some other body part like the. Over the head and then under the feet? Actually, under the feet would make a great deal of sense for the date of death because of the time to go underground, that sort of thing. Up to you to how you want to do that. But the core principle would be to give the historical date more meat and more reasons, what is it? And then choose your strategy based on that. And if you wanted to add facts like the island of Corsica is involved, then you can add like an apple core to your historical figure. If that's where they were born and if they died in Longwood, they. Then you could have long pieces of wood involved underneath their feet with that date.
- [19:44]
Interviewer
What is the Magnetic Memory Method?
- [19:47]
Anthony Metivier
I chose that name because magnets have a dual purpose. At least a dual purpose. They can do more than two things. But the two main things we know is repelling things and attracting them. And so in my own practice, because I have a very noisy mind, the repelling part is just as important as the attracting part. So that I can really focus on the task at hand. And so when I teach the Magnetic Memory Method, it's not just about memory techniques. It's about using some breathing, using some progressive muscle relaxation, and other things that you could explore, like getting light exposure properly, getting enough exercise, focusing on your diet, maybe doing rotation diet stuff or elimination diet to really work out what the heck it is that makes this hard for you. So that when you are properly in your body, it's like Disneyland every day when you can just be with these techniques. If I don't take care of myself and focus on that repelling part of the technique, I'll be lost and in suffering. And it's an ongoing maintenance kind of thing. So that's the origin of that term.
- [20:53]
Interviewer
And what is the technique?
- [20:55]
Anthony Metivier
It's five mnemonic systems that come to work in tandem. So it's the memory palace. It's having an alphabetical association system. It's having at least one of these number systems. If you're going to do stuff like equations, then a symbol system so that you know what sigma is, or delta or beta or whatever comes up in there. And then that you have a recall rehearsal system, which is more commonly called spaced repetition. But the reason I call it recall rehearsal is because I encourage people to think of the memory palace not as a movie, but as a theater. And you're sort of the director. And you're calling those associations to rehearse for you in order to produce the effect that you want. So that's what the Magnetic Memory method is in a nutshell.
- [21:38]
Interviewer
And if somebody wants to learn it, how would they do that?
- [21:41]
Anthony Metivier
Well, I have an abundance, and the Internet is such that it's probably a confusing abundance of free material all over the place. And Then the consolidation of it is in a free course through my site, and there's a masterclass. But as things are changing, I'm doing more and more live boot camps on Zoom where we get together. And I've thought a lot about the different challenges that people have. And rather than lecturing so much about it and showing diagrams and stuff, we now I've just cooked up various exercises where we can develop memory palaces together in real time and work on developing some of these associations between numbers together. And that's been. It's just been an amazing adventure. Even more amazing than before since I started doing that. And that's what it's becoming, more and more live bootcamps, so people can get involved that way. And if I can pull it off, we're going to have a physical memory palace here. It's kind of challenging. It's outside of my circle of competence. But actually, strangely, just before I heard from you, I had read your book, and there's a sentence in there that says, you know, if you have a vision, don't make any sacrifices. And that's the hardest thing, actually. But I'm so glad I read that, because as I get into all these builders who have a very different speed than I do and attitude, it's been a great sentence to remember.
- [23:02]
Interviewer
So has your teaching changed since doing the boot camps?
- [23:08]
Anthony Metivier
Yes and no. I think that. I mean, even though the culture is changing, I still think there's value in being able to go through a video course maybe a month or so ago, just to push back on some of the AI hype. I released a short and just said, look, just because AI is here doesn't mean that you're going to be able to attend every boot camp and that now the replay has no value. There's still value to going through courses, through books and so forth. But the way that teaching has changed is to give people a place to practice, to ask questions while they're practicing, and kind of like a dojo. And so then in the dojo setting, it just makes me more highly attuned to what people are telling me. And because I have that access, it's changed because I have more data about where they are, and I'm able to see myself and where I have been and where I haven't been. And then what is the difference? Why is it that I wind up being able to chant for X number of minutes in Sanskrit and they're still working on the first sentence of whatever it is that they're doing? I mean, it's still early days, but I think that's been great. And I often the key change is I keep thinking how can I find other people who can demonstrate that they can do this, who can help me without getting into all these problems where technically if they had the skills that I have, they'd have their own business. And so the collaborating with other neminous is part of what's changing my teaching as we think and how that that's possible. But part of it has to do with this physical bookshop because I want to start a conte, like a new kind of memory competition that would be a non competition competition where really it would be something like five weeks before it happens. Whoever's going to be the, the competition judges, they would say a book. So we would have like five judges and five books five weeks before it happens. And then you know, you can use ChatGPT if you want to write your speech, but we, we still want handwriting and you know, maybe even let that go. You give it from memory, you tell us what you learned about the experience. I think that will be the ultimate change to my teaching, that it enables people to self reflect on what they memorized, why they memorized it in a way that we can record and share with the world.
- [25:22]
Interviewer
When you would teach before doing the boot camps, I imagine it's from a more theoretical place. And now when you have feedback, are there any things that you've noticed? Wow. I get a lot of questions about this and I wasn't really covering this when I was teaching it before.
- [25:38]
Anthony Metivier
I'm not often surprised by new questions as in a martial art or as in chess or as in music. There seems to be a core number of questions that come up over and over and over again. But what I do get that's often quite a surprise, more often is just interesting ideas that people have for how that they're going to proceed. And then they ask me, basically the way they frame their question is how likely do you think this idea is going to work? And I almost always say there are no memory palace police go experiment and then if it works, tell everybody about it. And I don't judge it, I don't prejudge it.
- [26:14]
Interviewer
Are all of the memory techniques rooted in a visual system?
- [26:19]
Anthony Metivier
No, that's a really hard thing. And I mean hard in terms that it's challenged a lot of people and blocked them out of using memory techniques. Because it seems in my view to have emerged in the 20th century with the memory competitions and some of the vaudeville showmen who would do various stunts and then people like Harry, Lorraine and so forth kept using Picture Visualize. But in the ancient books, it's not. It's not really that way at all. It's about deep sensory lived experience and thinking and image and imagination. For some of the Renaissance memory writers, imagination meant memory. It was not so clean division between imagination and memory. So it's not really a visual thing at all.
- [27:04]
Interviewer
Of all of the techniques that you are familiar with and that you use, what would you say is the oldest one?
- [27:11]
Anthony Metivier
I guess it's probably the memory palace. But the memory palace, I believe, is just a form of association. So association is probably the oldest.
- [27:22]
Interviewer
Do you always have a number associated with each location or is it more open than that?
- [27:29]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, you can have an open system without numbering, or you can make it a bit more closed. You can letter the different locations inside of a memory palace. It depends on what your goal is. But if you have particular goals, then numbering would make sense. If it's a different goal, then lettering them might make sense. And if you have another goal, keeping them open. I tend to keep them open for most of what I memorize because I don't invent memory palaces and I don't choose locations that I have to struggle to remember. So the journey that I just make a quick little drawing or a sketch and I just make sure that I don't have to think about it, but I don't have to have some work involved. It's just in that location, that room was there. It has four corners and four walls. I'm going to start right here and go around in a circle. And so labeling it is just an additional cognitive load that turns it into a kind of memorized palace as opposed to a memory palace, which, not to be dogmatic about it, but if we were going to be a memory palace is based on what's in your memory. And you don't enhance it, you don't elaborate it, you don't cause it to become a memory task. You just ground what you're doing on what you remember and how you would move through there so that the maximum mental effort can go on laying the associations so that you can remember sometimes very complex things. So the more you can place your mental energy on the imagery and not worry about the memory pals. It's like a canvas the painter doesn't want to be constantly thinking about. Okay, so it's not paint by number. It's like, okay, so there's 96 and, you know, there's 97. It's not like that. You want to be in command of that canvas because it's already you.
- [29:02]
Interviewer
We could say that the palace is a location.
- [29:06]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, you would even say that a memory palace is a location based mnemonic.
- [29:11]
Interviewer
And in terms of location, do you use the same location for all of your palaces?
- [29:18]
Anthony Metivier
No, no, far from it. I use as many as I can. And I've been lucky and fortunate to have been around the world, but I know some people don't have that luxury. But from a spatial memory perspective, you want to use as many different places as you possibly can.
- [29:32]
Interviewer
Do you have categories of. I know if I'm going to remember this kind of a list, I'll use this type of a palace.
- [29:39]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, you can do that. So if I'm going to do this kind of list, it depends on what is the list. And one thing that might be helpful is that I'm not aware of anything we would ever memorize that isn't a list.
- [29:50]
Interviewer
Is everything a list? It seems like in some ways a sentence is a list, essentially.
- [29:55]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. That's an example I often give because people use it as an objection to say, I can't do this and it would just be me ending up memorizing lists. And I say, no, that's the solution to all of this. And it may be overthinking it, but we live in the era of time. And so when I memorize a speech, which I've done, I'm actually just reciting a list of paragraphs. And in each of those paragraphs is a list of sentences, and in each of those is a list of words. And even then there's a list of letters that form the words. So whether it's the Dirac equation in physics or whatever it is, it's just a list. And that's very freeing to understand that.
- [30:31]
Interviewer
Yeah. If you memorize a speech, if you were to ad lib in the middle of the speech, could you still come back and continue the speech? Or once you break, it might be hard to come back.
- [30:44]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, you can. That happened to me, actually, when I was giving a speech, people laughed at a time and they didn't laugh when I planted a joke, and then they laughed when I wasn't expecting it. And I looked like a deer in headlights for a second. And I see it on the video sometimes. And I got back to it because I knew exactly where to go. In the memory palace, how do you
- [31:04]
Interviewer
think most people think about memory?
- [31:06]
Anthony Metivier
I wish I knew. I wish I knew how they experienced it. And I feel maybe there's a eternal present coming where we will know how others experience memory. And in a way we do. But I don't want to assume that I'm correct in that. But that's kind of what our books and our music and our art is, a way of experiencing how others experience memory. But I wish I just knew better. It'd be amazing.
- [31:35]
Interviewer
What are the different memory techniques that you're aware of?
- [31:39]
Anthony Metivier
Well, there's the memory palace. There's linking, which I think memory palaces are a form of linking or association. There's rhyming. Like one is a bun, two is a shoe, three is a bee. You could have in the corner of a room a bun. And then that's going to remind you that that's the first item.
- [31:56]
Interviewer
And.
- [31:56]
Anthony Metivier
And then the second item is two is a shoe. So that's rhyming. There's basically alphabetical peg words. So you're prepared in advance that for every letter A, you've instantly got Adam Sandler. For every letter Z, you've instantly got Billy Zane. You can even get more granular on that with what's called a double Alphabet. So you could have, like, Andre Agassi is your aa, and then someone named Albrecht Orenstein or whatever, just to make something up would be your A, B. And then you go A C, AD and you go all the way through the Alphabet and from ZA and zz so ZZ Top would be an easy one for zz, but you go all the way back through those. And some of the memory competitors who want to be really fast, that is indeed what they do. And then there's what's called a major system which allows you to link the Alphabet to the number 0 to 9. And then you can further develop that into what's called a 00 to 99 PAO, where you would have an image for every digit from 00 to 99.
- [32:56]
Interviewer
Do you have a symbol for numbers from 1 to 100?
- [33:00]
Anthony Metivier
Yes, yes. And I use them pretty much every day.
- [33:02]
Interviewer
Wow. Can you walk me through them?
- [33:04]
Anthony Metivier
Sure. So 00 is either Dr. Seuss or Thomas Zsasz. And the rationale for that is that zero is associated with a soft C, S, or Z. So when we have 00, Dr. Seuss is S and S. Then for 01, I have SAD, which is the tragedy mask. But to make it more alive and real, I just used William Shatner, who played Oedipus Rex in a production where he's wearing a sad tragedy mask. Then you go to 2 is son. I use the poster for Sunshine, the Danny Boyle movie, I think directed it for three. I use SAM because S& M. How
- [33:42]
Interviewer
did you come up with these associations?
- [33:45]
Anthony Metivier
Using the major system. So maybe better go back.
- [33:48]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [33:49]
Anthony Metivier
So the major is very old. It's premised in something called the Katapayadi, which is an ancient Indian system where you link numbers to consonants and then you form words out of the consonants. So 0 is associated with soft c, s or z. 1 is associated with t or d. 2 is with n, 3 is with m, 4 is with r, 5 is with l. 6 you get options, ch, j, sh and maybe some others. 7 is a k or hard g. 8 is an f or v. 9 is a b or p. So now back to 0. 0 being Dr. Seuss. S and s. And then sad 1 is d or t. So the 0 is the s and then the d is in sad is t or D. Now if we just skip to 99. The singer from Ghost sometimes refers to himself as the Pope. So nine is a B or P, and so nine, nine is pp. So I get Pope and that's who I think of. And I could hear some of Ghost music now as I do it, which is a pleasing effect of this.
- [34:55]
Interviewer
Isn't there also a version where there's a symbol with what the numbers look like?
- [34:59]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, yes, that's number, shape. And there's someone who made or shared a version. I think he calls it the Shaper system. I think he has two Guinness World Records named Dave Farrow. And he has a slightly more. At least in my mind, it's a slightly more elaborate shape system. And he applies that to playing cards as well. Often it's quite mysterious what the memory competitors, how that they're interpreting it. But there's a very interesting book called A Question of Memory by David Berglis, who was an astonishingly well accomplished mnemonist. And he said in A Question of Memory that everybody has to interpret the ancient tradition of memory in their own way. And in. In a way, how else could it be? It's just a. A sentence I've never forgotten.
- [35:44]
Interviewer
Wow. I'd love to hear more about that book. Sounds great. Yeah.
- [35:49]
Anthony Metivier
I don't. Have you heard of David Berglass? No, I think he was a kind of mentor or at least a. A strong influence on Darren Brown and that style of mentalism. And what he would do is he would just give very, very strong demonstrations of memory as part of what he's doing, but legitimate, real magic. And so in A Question of Memory, he's just teaching the mnemonics that he used, which we've Been covering now and he has some exercises there with faces so you can practice the memorizing the names of the faces that are pictured in the book. But what was most interesting to me about the book was the theory part at the end where he kind of describes what you're trying to get to. And he calls it the Kennedy effect. I think he says the Kennedy effect without the violence where you want to. When you're using memory palaces, or you're just using linking without memory palaces, you want to experience that as vividly as you can to the effect that it has that kind of feeling of having been a historical event that you will not right out of your memory. And then he goes from there into some intellectual noodling about, about what the nature of memory is and how different people need to learn it. I. I just love that book. It's fantastic.
- [37:02]
Interviewer
Can you explain the shapes and the numbers?
- [37:05]
Anthony Metivier
So the one that I built for myself is zero. I have a donut, and I usually have Homer Simpson doing something with the donut. So I remember that, that it's a zero association. One, I have a candle. Two, I have a swan. Three, I either have open handcuff or I have a mustache that's on its side to look like a three. Four is a sailboat, five is a seahorse, six is a fishing hook, seven is a boomerang, eight is a snowman, and nine is a golf club.
- [37:34]
Interviewer
And when you get past nine, do you use multiple images or.
- [37:38]
Anthony Metivier
No, that's where I go to the 00, because 10 is the. Don't tase me, bro. Because 1 is a T and 0 is an S. It's worth it to have the multiple systems and just switch between them. Because if you have a 00 to 99 you asked about, do I have it to 100? Technically I do, but it's actually two different systems. Because when I get to 100, rather than having images for three digit numbers, if I have to deal with the three digit number, I will use the Pope. Let's say it's 994. Rather than trying to have a three digit image, just have the pope on a sailboat. Because sailboats look like four. And it just makes it much more economical because some people do that. I think Florian delay called it the millennial system. And he had images all the way up to, I think, 999. Or maybe it was even higher than that.
- [38:25]
Interviewer
That sounds great, though. Combining the two seems like a simple and smart way of doing it.
- [38:31]
Anthony Metivier
It's a principle of chunking. Also the easier you can make the chunking, probably for most learning tasks, the easier it's going to be and the more successful. But there's another thing that I teach people that I use quite a bit called a bridging figure. So when I'm memorizing something, whenever I can to reduce the cognitive load and increase the association in a line, I will have a figure carry more information that sometimes has to do with how I craft the list. So if there's a bunch of words that start with ab, then I'll have Abraham Lincoln going across as many stations in that memory palace as possible. If I'm memorizing key points from a book, and that book's by Aristotle, then I'll try to imagine Aristotle going through as much of it as I can. And if I need to change the figure, I'll sometimes even imagine him passing the baton to the next person as if it's a relay race. But it's always alphabetically guided. And often what I do, and this is one question I get all the time. It's like, why do you focus so much on the Alphabet? It's because it's there. I mean, if I wanted to use a house across the street and it's 32. Well, 3 is M, 2 is N. 32 makes the word man. And I always use Johnny Cash because he was the man in black. So even though it's a number on that house, I have a name for it. I have a word. And then if I wanted to memorize an ancient mantra in Sanskrit, which is the, you know, manobu jahen kara. Well, it starts with man, so I can start right there. So that's bringing together. The Alphabet starts with M, and the first word starts with m, even though it's based on a number.
- [40:07]
Interviewer
And the Alphabet is a list of 26 shapes.
- [40:10]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah.
- [40:11]
Interviewer
That we all already have memorized.
- [40:13]
Anthony Metivier
Exactly.
- [40:14]
Interviewer
It's probably the longest list that most people have memorized.
- [40:18]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. Other than the productive ability to count in the thousands quite readily. But there. You've memorized a combinatory system.
- [40:27]
Interviewer
Yeah. I was told at one point that the reason that phone numbers were seven digits was because that's the most that people could remember.
- [40:34]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. That's the chunking principle. So it's even not that it's seven digits. It's that it's three plus four, because we have a limit of three and four. And even our visual memory apparently has that limit of three to five items or something like that. So we have a perception that we see the world the way that we see it. But apparently our brain is actually just seizing on three to five items and then from there anticipating what we expect to see, which is kind of a wild thing.
- [41:02]
Interviewer
That's really interesting. I feel like in some ways, knowing that would make sense of why two people can experience the same thing yet come back with a different list of what they saw. Because there are so many things to look at. And we each get our three to five, and they might not match.
- [41:16]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. And it may even be part of why we so easily change our own memories and why we need external documentation so much to remind ourselves. Because that external documentation can help us see the picture that we incorrectly saw and then recorrect it, so to speak.
- [41:35]
Interviewer
What do we know about memories of things that didn't actually happen?
- [41:40]
Anthony Metivier
So there's confabulation, which is when you just make stuff up, or it's based on a variation of something that never happened. And so there's court case things that they've had to get into in terms of false witness testimonies where that person will feel legitimately that they do remember that, but it's either confabulated out of something that happened that's become totally transformed or just sort of invented. But another thing that just recently came out, the researcher's name is Paul Garrett, and he is doing stuff about what's called fuzzy memories. So we tend to think that our fuzzy memories can't help us in any way. But the research suggests that actually, if you leave it to chance, you have a better than chance way of getting accurate answers based on fuzzy memories. But in terms of memories that don't exist, or past life memories, I kind of have to refer to what it is that we know or what scientists are working on to try to think about that. But it kind of comes back also to that idea. Is memory nested in consciousness, or is consciousness nested in memory? Or is that the wrong question? Are they somehow intertwined? And there's spooky action at a distance going on all the time, Stuff like that.
- [42:51]
Interviewer
So would you say there's a creative side to memory?
- [42:55]
Anthony Metivier
Certainly there is. The immediate gut response, though, is that if you're memorizing something, you want to be generative or combinatorial so that you can memorize the material. And I mean, I shouldn't say you want to. I don't mean to say anybody should do it in any particular way. But in terms of the kinds of effects that myself and other mnemonists have achieved, a lot of it has to do with Constraint. So is Shakespeare being creative when he writes a sonnet? Yes, but also he's being generative because he's accepting these rules like iambic pentameter. So it's kind of a little bit of both, actually. It's not that it's not creative, but by setting up your systems in advance, you can forego the energy of creation in the moment and just use more or less pure combination.
- [43:43]
Interviewer
How does memory change our understanding of the world?
- [43:47]
Anthony Metivier
Well, that's an ongoing process. There's a guy named Florian Neukart I saw in New Scientists some months ago, and I haven't been able to interview him yet. But he thinks that maybe like dark matter or whatever is memory. And if that proves true, then that would help me answer my question about whether consciousness is nested in memory or vice versa. People either don't think about their memory at all, they just are just going about their lives. And in a way we are just deeply, intimately involved in memory, regardless of what we think about it. And then there's the implications of computer memory and how that maybe you could train an AI to use memory palaces to better. I don't even know what memory is still. I'm still trying to figure out just what that word even means.
- [44:30]
Interviewer
What are the hardest things to forget and what are the hardest things to remember?
- [44:36]
Anthony Metivier
Well, for me, the hardest things to forget are when I get on some kind of loop where due to the way my brain ticks, either from bad LSD experiences when I was a kid or whatever, I. I live in a kind of Philip K. Dick world sometimes, or maybe I shouldn't attribute it to him, but kind of like a paranoia sometimes, so that if that gets switched on, it can be very difficult. But luckily I have these mantras that I've memorized that really help a lot with that. And then in terms of what's difficult to memorize, I deliberately try to find the most difficult things. And right now I'm working. I've only just started, but working to memorize Dao Te Ching in Mandarin. And I have to coach myself because it's like, why am I even trying this? It's rather vast, but I've done it before with Sanskrit to quite a volume. And so, so far so good. Just going at a bit of a slower pace, but it's very difficult. And the Sanskrit that I've memorized, I also went through this thing of like, why are you doing this? This is so much stuff. But I just am able to use that repelling through relaxation and then just get on with it.
- [45:41]
Interviewer
Do you speak those languages or are you learning them phonetically?
- [45:45]
Anthony Metivier
No, I don't speak them as such. I have done some study in Mandarin, so passing level three in Mandarin doesn't mean anything really. But I speak a little bit of Mandarin every day at home with my wife, and I don't speak Sanskrit. I don't know who I would speak Sanskrit with. That doesn't mean I can't memorize the sound of it. And the gist of what I'm memorizing with Atmaboda, I get the gist of the individual pieces, but also the gist of the whole thing. And in fact, I don't think I ever would have understood what was going on in these texts if I hadn't memorized them, because I'm just. I'm just not that sharp and. But by memorizing it, it's like a fine wine that just rolls around in your head a little bit and then you go, oh, that's what they're talking about. So my strongest language is German, and I just learn these texts in these languages and make sure I get the gist of what I'm doing.
- [46:37]
Interviewer
I haven't tried it yet, but I'm told that you could have a conversation in any language with AI and that would be a good way to do your conversational testing.
- [46:46]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, that's interesting. There's a technique that precedes the AI called laddering. And that was one of the first things that I did is I asked ChatGPT to teach me Latin or tutor me in Latin in German. And when I first started with Mandarin, we didn't have chatgpt, but I was in Berlin and I deliberately went and purchased all my Chinese instructions in German so that I was able to improve German while I was learning Mandarin. And that. That's called laddering. And that's a person named Benny Lewis. I heard that from him. He wrote a book called Fluent in Three Months and. Really interesting guy.
- [47:21]
Interviewer
Does laddering work for anything beyond language?
- [47:25]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, probably. Is it Victor Wooten, who's the bassist, who often talks about martial arts, applying martial arts? I don't know that he's actually a martial artist, but it seems that he has enough chops in that world to sort of think through how you could ladder those two together. And I'm sure there's many examples of artists who put various disciplines together that are diverse enough that they're not quite necessarily art, but they become art when they're put together. And that's kind of the question of Polymathy, I guess, being skilled in multiple areas, and then if you have a unifying vision, do you bring them to the service of that? Or is it just like a chaotic polymathy where he's just racking and stacking without putting them together? But no, I think you can ladder for sure. Well, beyond language learning,
- [48:13]
Interviewer
Is it easier to learn something you're interested in? For example, if there's a poem that you love and you want to memorize that, versus a list of the same number of words that you have no connection to?
- [48:25]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. This scientist I was just talking with two days ago, Paul Garrett, I asked him, why don't they put mnemonists who love language learning into brain scans so that we could answer that question. You know, they get people to use mnemonics to learn vocabulary, and they have a higher rate of retention. But whether the enjoyment factor actually changes things, I don't know. But for myself, it's that kind of repelling principle. I try to not really care whether I'm having fun or not. It's do I want to do this? And then there's going to be days when I'm having fun with it. There's going to be days when I'm not. And does it in the long run, does it make it better or faster or easier or more effective? If I'm having fun, I have to say, in the grand scheme of things, I've memorized a whole lot of stuff that I have no interest in. But, man, do I ever have a lot of fun that. That I have the outcome. I kind of save the whether it's easy or not for later, and I just enjoy the swimming pool of accomplishment.
- [49:19]
Interviewer
Tell me about the mantras that you use when your brain makes too much noise.
- [49:24]
Anthony Metivier
There's four key ones and a fifth that I kind of stopped using because it just started not feeling quite right. But they are the atma bota, which I don't have the entirety of the atma bota, but just enough to work. Then there's a piece called Ribhugita, which is an extract that Gary Weber put together in a book called Evolving Beyond Thought. There's Upadesa Shiram and the song Celestial. Well, the song Celestial is the one that I put aside. The other one that I'm looking for is the Nirvana Shatakam. I think it's sometimes called Atma Shatakam. And that's the one I mentioned earlier with the Johnny Cash across the street, Manobu Jahan Kara. And I rotate between them depending on, you know, what exact remedy I think I need.
- [50:08]
Interviewer
Are you focusing on the sound or on the meaning?
- [50:11]
Anthony Metivier
It depends, because I don't always do it out loud. So it has a different effect if you do it quietly than if you do it out loud. I was just telling somebody the other day, I was like, I do it at the beach when I also do qigong moves. Or sometimes I'll have to do it before I even start any kind of qigong because I won't be quiet enough yet. So it's like an inner gong to sing out loud. And then after it's done, there's this vibration that allows you to focus on the vibration so that the mind isn't there as much or even sometimes it feels like it's not there at all. But there's a different effect when you do it quietly. And the meaning? Yes, sometimes, like, if I have to use it, I will. In the ripugita, the first lines basically mean that your mind is like a little untrained boy. And it's kind of a funny image when you think about it that way. And then further down the track, it's like a real thought is as rare as a rabbit with horns. And that can just lighten the mood immediately, but not necessarily. If I do it in the Sanskrit, I have to remind myself that that's what I'm saying. And then I can see the levity and the humor and the tragicomedy and some of the things in life that get the engine started.
- [51:26]
Interviewer
Do you use it silently as well?
- [51:29]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, frequently. Often when I'm walking. I really don't want to be thinking all the time, except for when it's productive. I work on various books and so forth, and so then that I think is good thinking or planning thinking, et cetera, is good thinking. But I will ruminate. I would much rather be thinking through these things that I've thought through hundreds of times than these thoughts that are never going to be productive of anything because they're. I mean, Eckhart totally talks about this sort of madness of the insanity of it all. Yeah, I keep working at it because some of the other techniques that he talks about just don't quite work for me. The idea of sitting like a cat, waiting for what mouse is going to come out, I love that as a concept, but I have to be more proactive about that.
- [52:12]
Interviewer
Do you tend to say the mantras at the same speed?
- [52:17]
Anthony Metivier
No, actually, there's different variations that have emerged. I don't know if that's a. A regional thing or if the a tactical thing. But I will use them tactically quite differently. So to give you an example, that Manobu jahan kara chaitaninaham. It can be Manobu jahankara chittani naham. I'm just imitating the singing that I've heard on different videos. But sometimes I will get that more cadenced one. If I'm really not pushing through the noise, then I'll switch how that I do it either out loud or even in my mind. And that's just a cool thing to know that different people have produced videos where they chanted in different ways. And you can have more than one version in your toolkit to draw upon.
- [52:59]
Interviewer
What's memory's relationship to magic?
- [53:02]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, it's so huge. Because I mean, if we're talking about magic in terms of illusions, you have to learn a variety of processes, the actual mechanisms that make illusions work. You have to think about where you're gonna the blocking. Either blocking in terms of your body in front of an audience or on a stage. Many, many dimensions to be remembered. There you have your patter, whatever you're going to say. You have audience management. And then if you're using a memorized deck as part of your routine. Lots and lots of relationships to magic. For sure. I probably haven't even gotten started in performance of magic.
- [53:43]
Interviewer
There's the relationship between magic and memory, like someone like Harry Loraine or Darren Brown.
- [53:49]
Anthony Metivier
That may be a deep historical relationship that has to do with the role of images on cards in how that whole thing emerged. So I don't know the whole history of how the tarot may have become the standard set of playing cards that we have here today. But let's just say that that relationship is there. Those people who were using those cards were using them for magical purposes in the. In the sense of transformation personally or some sort of inner alchemy and whatnot. And then if they really were doing cups and balls back in ancient Egypt or whatever, I mean they would, they would have needed to remember those moves as much as we need to remember them today.
- [54:28]
Interviewer
The choreography aspect of it is what you're describing.
- [54:31]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah. And multiple levels of it. Because it's not just your choreography. It's the choreography of the gaze of the spectator or the multiple spectators. And then it's also memory management. So most of my magic performance history is the after show parties when I was on tour with a band and just hearing from people say, do that thing again where you make the watermelon come out of the tiny cup and it's never happened. Now I know why that they have that memory because it was a rather large orange that came out of a. A small cup. But I was later telling them, you know, if you really want to see something, you should see Gatso when he takes a melon. Right? But it was never a watermelon. It was more like a cantaloupe that I told them, but in their memory. So now I did that just inadvertently, but many magicians will do that on purpose and they will have sleight of mouth in order to manipulate future recall of what happened.
- [55:30]
Interviewer
Do you think memory has gotten more or less important in today's world?
- [55:34]
Anthony Metivier
I feel it's gotten significantly more important. The exact ratio that it plays out in our lives relative to its importance to corporate storage systems and so forth, I think is one of the key things that we constantly need to be asking, or at least it's on my mind quite a bit. And I have a feeling it's going to get even more and more important. And I'm sort of looking to when exactly schools will return to complete oral testing just because writing will have a different relationship altogether. And in that case, then I imagine memory training may. May come into a kind of guild format as part of schools or be more essential to schools. If not central to schools, it'll have more memory training schools. And there are. When I've been in Spain, there's these sort of little centers I see that teach memory. But that's also where Juan Tamarese lives, which is the king of the memorized deck, if ever there was one.
- [56:33]
Interviewer
What do we lose when we offload our memory to a device like using GPS or Rolodex instead of memorization?
- [56:41]
Anthony Metivier
We have to kind of think about what did we ever have, you know, like, how many of us were so skilled with using the sun to figure out the directions and so forth. And what do we remember of those people? I often think of that because I think about my dad and so forth, and I remember using maps and whatnot, but I don't remember my dad ever, like telling the time of day by the sun or so forth. I think part of the problem is that we don't really, in our time have an awareness of what we've lost. So then what is it that we lost? So I think part of what we're losing is a bigger question. We may be losing archives, we may be losing people whose stories and experiences needed to be recorded but weren't, and. And then we can't. So we're losing all those Sorts of things. But in terms of gps, yes, we may be losing spatial orientation in a way that could deeply harm us. And then that could harm our ability to use memory techniques. And that might be part of why, when I started teaching this, people didn't have the exact struggles they have now. They were much more readily able to adapt it. But, you know, we're also losing our attention and our focus. You know, it's such a pleasure to go around the world and be in the car or be on the street walking and be attendant to it, as opposed to in this screen world where you're not now engaged in the world. So we may lose the world, basically. That's a huge risk.
- [58:02]
Interviewer
Krishnamurti said, once you teach a child the word bird, they'll never truly see a bird again. It's the idea that when we label things, we make them smaller. Does memorizing undermine our ability to know things?
- [58:20]
Anthony Metivier
Quite possibly. In some circumstances. I totally can see that. One dimension of that is studying for the exam. And this whole series of even entire countries that are just devoted to, if you can pass this exam, then you've written your ticket in life. And it just kind of degrades itself in so many ways. Because now you have all these workers and bureaucrats and stuff that are there by virtue of having memorized something once upon a time, and they didn't care about it, you know, so it can be that information just becomes a meaningless weapon, basically. So that's even less than the meaning being degraded now. It's supercharged in some very negative ways.
- [59:06]
Interviewer
Tell me about memorizing faces.
- [59:09]
Anthony Metivier
Well, the best that I've come up with to help myself with that was in some research I read many years ago. And it was to look very closely at faces. And they found that people who would relate the eyes to a kind of infinity symbol, like an 8 on its side and a nose to an upside down 7, they would tend to have better facial recall. So I've played around with that since I don't really have a hard time remembering faces per se. But that has been interesting to experiment with and share. For people with face blindness, that's maybe something to think about and try. I had a professor, now that you mentioned it, named Dawn Summerhays, who passed away, and he was going blind. And his strategy for navigating this is he insisted each year or each semester on taking photographs of the students exactly where they were sitting, and then that they would sit exactly where they were sitting, and then he would have the photograph so that he would be able to map out who was where. And that memory always stuck with me. That's another way of doing it.
- [60:14]
Interviewer
Can you tell me more about the 8 and the 7?
- [60:17]
Anthony Metivier
I may be just turning the science in my memory into what I wanted it to be rather than what they were saying. The way I applied it was literally, if you're looking at a person, you would maybe put like a raccoon mask on them, on their eyes, or just really focus on the distribution of their eyes relative to the idea of an 8 on its side or an infinity symbol. And then the seven would be. If a seven is very, very sharp and it's upside down and it curves onto that nose, what is the relationship there? So that if you wanted to recall it later and really work out the contours of that nose, you would have something to compare it against so that your memory wasn't just your memory of what you perceived, but perceived in association with something else.
- [61:04]
Interviewer
For example, you could see three faces next to each other, and you would visually place the same infinity sign over three sets of eyes. And then see, are the eyes smaller? Are they bigger? How do they fit in that picture?
- [61:20]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, that's how they did it in the study. I don't exactly understand properly, probably, but that's how I did it. And then I would go back and think, okay, so what was that relationship between the eight and the seven with the eyes? And then I've shared that with others, and they've said that that has given them a little bit of a boost for their desire to remember faces better. But it might just be that the act of doing that just gets you to pay more attention to the face in a way that you wouldn't have fade at all. Right, so you could then extend it. What else could I do? Could I imagine, you know, doing a little. Little thing like this to try to figure out with your fingers how. How much space is between the chin and the head. Or maybe you go and study some da Vinci formulas and figure out what the box would be that da Vinci might impose over there. And, you know, there's lots of different things that you could do.
- [62:12]
Interviewer
How would someone like Harry Lorraine or Kreskin memorize 500 names based on people's faces?
- [62:19]
Anthony Metivier
I never got to talk to Kreskin, but I did talk with Harry Lorraine. He insisted that he didn't use a memory palace, which I found quite bizarre, because what he would do is he would place an image on the person's face. So if it was Charles Cabbage, he would have, like a big Cabbage hanging on that person's face. Or he would try to find, let's say it's a boxer who just has those sort of cabbage ears. He would use that and hang it on their face. And he would do that at the clip of 500 in some of these demonstrations, if not more. I think 500 was one of the big demonstrations I saw. And I said, but, Harry, how is that not the memory palace technique? You know, he would. He would do his thing. He just. He was so against the idea that that had anything to do with it. But it has to do with it in at least two regards. He's naming the people where they stand, which is where that he memorized them, and he's placing images in a very specific location on their face. I don't know if he had other techniques or strategies, but that's how he teaches what he did. And that is how a lot of people do it. And when I do demonstrations and I memorize everybody's names, the only thing I change is I don't use their face because I want to be really focused on them. And I'll place my associations above their heads or on their shoulders.
- [63:29]
Interviewer
Tell me about that. That's really fascinating.
- [63:31]
Anthony Metivier
Well, the 87 experiment aside, normally when I meet people, I want to be just undivided from them. Even if I'm memorizing little things that they mention or whatnot. I'd rather use their body, but not their face. I don't want to create some sort of interstitial screen between myself and another human. It quote, unquote, never worked for me to do it in the first place. To me, it's a kind of connection thing. So I've always used or worked out very early on to use the space above the head or the shoulders.
- [64:04]
Interviewer
Also, I could imagine it putting the person in a setting. Like if you meet someone on the street, but you picture them in a particular coffee shop because you know the name of the coffee shop.
- [64:15]
Anthony Metivier
It's very direct. But I used to do something similar to what you're talking about. When I was first using these techniques as a professor. I would memorize the names of the people where they were sitting, but then later I would index them into different memory palaces. So if there was a Bobby, I would put her in a bakery, because B is for bakery. And if it was that sort of thing. But then as I got better with the skills, I just didn't need to go to that extra step. I could just use the place where I met them.
- [64:43]
Interviewer
With these techniques. Do you get better over time to where shorthand develops, or is it always every step needed?
- [64:52]
Anthony Metivier
It's not always every step needed, but best practices are advised. Because there's a weird thing I've noticed that I can't anticipate what information is more difficult than something else. So some things will seem like, oh, I'll get that, no problem. Well, that's the time you gotta really pay attention because, you know, don't be too sure. Right. And so I try to encourage others and myself to always go through the ropes, because what seems like it's a sure win is probably gonna be the thing that slips. And then sometimes the really difficult thing is the thing that turns out easier or. Or vice versa. And in terms of it getting easier, I don't know. I mean, I try to think of, like, what would Bruce Lee say? And Bruce Lee would say, you know, just. Just be trained. I don't know if he would say that, but that's sort of in my imagination. He would say, you know, be trained, be prepared to execute one last move even with your head cut off. That kind of thing. I think that's from Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, that quote, the way of the samurai is just being prepared. So, yeah, I don't find that it really gets easier, per se. It gets that I just have the tools, and then if I fail to use them, then it's on me. It doesn't have anything to do with the tools.
- [66:04]
Interviewer
So if one is always a candle, and if two is always a swan, and you remember a list, and you have a particularly colorful candle for the list that day, and then later that night, you're memorizing another list. Does the candle ever get confused with the candle from earlier in the day?
- [66:26]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, yeah. Yeah, those things can happen. This is part of the argument for memory palaces, because if candle one is in memory palace one and candle two is down the street in memory palace two, well, then they're much less likely to interfere. And there's even more insidious problems you can have that some of the memory competitors. I'm not sure where the term originates from, but it's called ghosting. So if you're reusing a memory palace, then the previous images can interfere. And that's also sometimes called the ugly sister effect, because Prince Charming is looking for Cinderella, but everything but Cinderella is showing up at the door.
- [67:05]
Interviewer
Since you started using memory palaces, do you pay more attention to the world around you to be able to call on those places that you go to now for future memory palaces?
- [67:17]
Anthony Metivier
Yes, and no, I prefer to use memory palaces just based on what I remember. I mean, sometimes I'll go, this is such an amazing place. I definitely have to use this. And then I may pay extra attention. But on the main, at least as I enjoy the practice and as I think it works best, if I just use what I remember and I don't start cooking up any special additional memory tasks around it, then everything is just smooth sailing. And that is actually to contradict myself a little bit. That is a way that things get easier. You don't get in your own way. You don't start turning the technique into something other than it is. That's just my. My quirk maybe. And others may feel differently, but there I. There are people who use Matterport and like real estate websites to mass memorize all these locations. And my only criticism of it is a kind of Morpheus move. Show me. It's like a lot of activity that doesn't have accomplishment behind it. There's exceptions, but overall it has this feeling to it. In all the forums and all the questions, it's just like there's gotta be another way to do this. Which seems to me a procrastination tactic rather than genshi genbutsu. Go to the real place and do the real thing. There's a whole realm of activity that just won't hear what I think. Also, the ancient and the Renaissance and the medieval teachers of this were saying, there's a real way to do this. It's pretty simple, but you have to do that actual thing if you want this result in as seamless a way as possible and with duration of the content.
- [68:49]
Interviewer
Tell me about the types of places that you regularly use. Because I think of the house I live in would be an easy one for me to remember the details of, but I don't know how many places I could know in detail from memory.
- [69:05]
Anthony Metivier
So there's elementary schools, there's high schools, there's universities, there's various studios you may have been in. There's parties, there's even cars. The 2019 Canadian memory champion used my suggestion of memorizing his cards inside of cars. So there's an abundance of car memory palaces that we could have in our own personal lives depending on how many vehicles we've had. There's airplanes you could use, there's airports, there's concert halls, there's art galleries, there's churches, there's museums, bookstores, you name it. I mean, if it's a location and you remember it, then you can use it.
- [69:39]
Interviewer
How is Memorizing a list different than memorizing a poem or a Bible verse.
- [69:44]
Anthony Metivier
I don't distinguish the two. I see it, as we discussed before, the idea that every sentence in a paragraph is a list of sentences in the paragraph. The way it might be different, though, is if you wanted to memorize the verse number, then you might want to set up your practice, if it's scripture a little bit differently, to track those verse numbers, or, you know, if you want to memorize the numbers of the lines in the poem so that, you know, specifically this is the 11th line, then you might set up your practice a little bit differently. But other than that, it's pretty much the same.
- [70:15]
Interviewer
Are there practical accepted ways of memorizing the Bible?
- [70:19]
Anthony Metivier
That's an interesting question, because some people are concerned that they would bring all of these horrible images I sometimes share and associate them with what they find to be sacred. So rote is sometimes preferred so that they're not associating what they consider to be sacred with me. Like Proverbs, 18:13. I've got J. Edgar Hoover in there, and what he's doing ain't nice, you know, but they might not want to do that. So, yeah, there's a lot of those issues. Also the issue of having your associations be quite aggressive with each other. Many people won't want that, regardless of what they're memorizing, even if it's French vocabulary. And that's why some of the Renaissance memory teachers are so fascinating. I don't know if they anticipated that or not, but they would go deeper and deeper into layers where you could just use logic in various ways, or you can use breaking things down into little parts. So, for example, Giordano Bruno, he has this thing, he'd say, instead of using the entire bull, just use the horns. And if you had to have Satan for some reason in your memory palace, if you really were not feeling great about that, well, could you still have that basic idea and have cloven hooves or something of that nature? Can you break it down so you're unbothered in the way that you need to change the techniques to work? And that's very clearly spelled out in some of those older books.
- [71:45]
Interviewer
Are there other things you can do in life that support memory outside of the memory techniques?
- [71:52]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, yes. I'm a big advocate of journaling and journaling of different kinds. So there's the discursive journaling where you talk to yourself. I use a snapshot journal, which is a particular product by a company called Paperblinks, and it Lets you see five years at a glance. So I'm in the third year now of my current snapshot journal. And as I go through, I'm just making notes of the major events of the day, just in five lines or less. And that's very, very helpful as a kind of archive. And sometimes I will use a spreadsheet to document certain things that happened just on a day by day basis, especially if I have to reconstruct something from my snapshot journal to create a quote, unquote, chain of evidence of what I'm trying to work out that I missed, or something like that. And that's a powerful memory strategy to be keeping your own archive. Another thing I do is I use a lot of index cards. And I use index cards in quite a variety of ways. It depends, like, if I'm writing a book, I'll use them in a particular way. If I'm memorizing, I'll use them in a particular way to set the stage for using the memory palace later. So the idea is, if I'm reading a book and I never want to look at it again, or I never can because it's in an archive somewhere, I take a stack of index cards and then I will read the book. The first card will be the bibliographical information, the title, the date of publication, author, all that sort of stuff. Then every card after that will be the page number as I proceed through the book. So let's say It's a Marshall McLuhan book, McLuhan 35. And then whatever that key point is, and then McLuhan, 48, and that sort of thing. And then later, if I never get to see that McLuhan book again, I have two possible outcomes. I can reconstruct the book from my notes for writing purposes, or if McLuhan says some crazy Latin phrase and I want to remember what that is, boom. I just. That's 38. Max Maven is my 38. And I can just associate the card as a little mini memory palace with Max Maven with the page number. Or I can put it into another standard memory palace so I can mix it up with other information. And that's what I did a lot in university, and it helped me a lot. Just keep pushing forward because I wasn't feeling so well, and I don't know how I would have done it otherwise if I didn't have those techniques.
- [74:09]
Interviewer
And what do you do if you forget or get something wrong?
- [74:13]
Anthony Metivier
Well, I think the first thing that you need to do is some ego management. Because you will get it wrong, or at least unless you're really extraordinary. I mean, I don't think any of us are free from making mistakes. And information comes in so fast. And often certain words are spelled differently than you would expect. They are pronounced. So you might make pronunciation errors and also pronunciation changes over time and people use it different, so sometimes it's not even an error. But you might get your ego in your way because someone called it an error when technically it isn't, and they're turning pronunciation into a shibboleth. So ego management, I think, is one of the first things you have to do is just accept that mistakes happen and that you will make them. And then the number one strategy when you do make a mistake is either just ask, I'm sorry, you just said your name. And I don't remember if you said Christine or Christina, or maybe I'm totally off. And then they will pretty kindly tell you what their name was again. Or if it's the name of a place or whatever it is that you might have mispronounced, just ask and get it corrected. The other strategy, I think, and it's my favorite because it kind of keeps you bulletproof, is if you really know, you want to remember something, the number one thing is just to write it down. So if someone tells you a name and it's really not that important, or you want to remember it, but you know it's not the end of the world if you don't remember what it was, then you know, by all means, don't write it down and just ask for a correction. But if they tell you like the name of a band or something and you want to look it up, I have no shame in just writing it down. Because writing down the name of albums or bands that you want to look up later, writing down is a technique. And then it's a little bit. It's not totally error free, but at least then you could do both. You can use a memory technique and go, oh, they mentioned Bark Market or something like this. And you get a dog barking at a market that you're familiar with. And then you can go look up what that band is. But if you really want to memorize it, there's no shame in having a journal with you at all times that you write with. And I do that frequently. This is strategy that I did when I learned Mandarin. I made lots of mistakes because I was trying to read the anglicization of Mandarin, which is called pinyin, and it never made sense to me why they're Using a C when it has like an S or a Z sound sometimes, or why they're putting vowels together. So in order to help my own pronunciation have less mistakes, I just invented my own opinion. And because I wrote it down, I could then practice my understanding of how better to pronounce these things. And then in terms of forgetting. Well, I mean, that's a kind of puzzle, because sometimes you. I have these experiences where it's just like, did I even ever remember this in the first place? Because sometimes this inkling comes and you think that something happened, and then you realize that it was a dream. I swear there's a quote where Nietzsche wrote somewhere that the problem with power is that it makes you want more power. And I can't tell you the amount of time that I've tried to spend finding this quote to verify that it actually exists. And I have finally concluded that I fell asleep while I was reading Nietzsche and I dreamed it. Now, it may be the gist of what Nietzsche was saying, but I want to find those exact words. And so I've just forgotten it. And so the strategy for dealing with this is. Well, I think that there's something in Nietzsche that equates to power. The problem with power is that it makes you want to have more power. And then I just say, but I don't know if those are the exact words. And it seems like you're prevaricating or you're dodgy or shifty or whatever, but I think it's just honest. And I mean, you can't be on radar all the time, and it makes you seem kind of weird. And maybe that is what people who get into memory techniques are, is weird. But at the end of the day, I feel that it's just better when you've forgotten something and you can't verify it and you haven't memorized it verbatim, like Shakespeare. And even then, if you make a mistake with Shakespeare and the director says in the stage play, that's wrong. Did you just fix it? You know, so. But you can fix things in advance by just being honest. And I think that's just a great strategy for peace of mind. When it comes to forgetting, is there
- [78:17]
Interviewer
any benefit to physicality as it relates to memory?
- [78:22]
Anthony Metivier
Yes, I'm exploring this a lot more these days. I have dabbled with it, so to speak, for some years. But the idea of using your hands as a memory technique just for simple things, using the body a lot more, I think there's so much more to be explored right now. I'm thinking of learning some anatomy myself at a deeper level than I have, just to give examples for people. And one thing I've done recently, I probably don't have the whole of it, but just the muscles are named in a particular way and there's like seven groups of names. So the first one in the list was direction. So I just think Dracula and I used the Count from Sesame street rather than Bea Lugosi. That's just the way it came out. But so now I put a direction sign over his head and then the next in the list was the location of the muscle. So on his nose I put the idea of location and then the next was the size of the muscle. Anyway, there's different ways by which muscles are named and then that that sets the stage for, let's say it's zygomaticus, I think major and minor, or you know, something like this. Then as I'm learning anatomy I can then link out of his body. So extensor pollicus brevis I think is more of a correct one. I can think of, you know, what is the name of that muscle once I've finished learning why is it named that way? And then who can I use? Like Hugh Jackman because he's an X Men and then use his body to then stack on more related information. So now it's like a kind of a non memory palace. Memory palace that's distributed across multiple figures but limited to their bodies.
- [79:58]
Interviewer
Is there any downside to memorizing?
- [80:01]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, certainly there is. I don't know for other people but personally I think and it may be a downside other people see projected is that I just take it all way too seriously.
- [80:15]
Interviewer
But you would probably do that about anything.
- [80:17]
Anthony Metivier
Well, yeah, theoretically and maybe that is the human condition. But I feel like I have a, a self awareness of my own seriousness of it that I can't quite contend with. I do know how to resolve it in my own spiritual practice and so forth. But it makes me a little bit ocd. And that may be related to the fact that there may be a little bit of willful OCD involved in paying attention to things to such a degree that you're linking it together with all these celebrities and pop culture figures and so forth to such a granular detail. But I see it as a gift. At the end of the day it's not an ego thing. I don't think I want to be proof of concept and that requires putting a burden on myself. And I think it's maybe what other people intuit when they kind of go, ah, this is too difficult because it's the Spider man problem. I sometimes say with great power comes great responsibility. And in this case if you're going to go around saying yeah, I memorize stuff and then you can't get through whatever you say you've memorized, like whatever it is, declaration of independence or something that people want to do, it harms you because failure is inevitable. Anyway, my solution has just been to play it straight and say, you know, I, I make mistakes and I stumble over my own words and I share that as openly as I share everything else.
- [81:32]
Interviewer
Tell me about your spiritual practice.
- [81:35]
Anthony Metivier
I don't know what it is, I don't feel that it belongs to anything. So I, I, I often tell people who ask that I wish I could find a religion so I could just be done with knowing what it is that I'm doing. But it's, it's this smattering of having memorized some Sanskrit and concepts from there, doing qigong, doing nagong, poking around with Neidan, which I'm not even sure I really get what that is yet, and just informing myself with all of this and you know, basically back to Sanskrit, just neti, neti, not this, not that. It's just trying to always be here. And so I guess my spiritual practice is the goal of can I just be here and can I get it that a flavor of just being here is that I'm not here, there is no me and it's just this. And even this goes away, the whole idea of consciousness goes away. And I think that's what my spiritual practice is, is to get rid of the idea of spiritual practice and just, you know, be nirvikalpa samadhi I guess you would call it. Just like no particular thought and just bliss. And so far so good. I have to say I never would have thought that I would have this much peace that I have accomplished. Even when things go pear shaped, it's still miles better than it used to be for me.
- [82:46]
Interviewer
Would you describe yourself as a seeker?
- [82:49]
Anthony Metivier
I'm wanting to end the search more than wanting to be a seeker, I guess. But that's the magic of it. You do end it when you switch on to what's really happening, you know.
- [83:03]
Interviewer
Can you walk me through the greatest hits of the literature of memory from the beginning until now?
- [83:09]
Anthony Metivier
So Aristotle might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I think there's really good stuff in there. Hugh of St. Victor has a book called Dascalicon that I think is really Required reading just for study purposes alone. But the book that you want that has his writing about memory compiled is called the Medieval Craft of Memory. Mary Carruthers is the head editor of that book. And that book has many, many other texts that are the greatest hits. Then I would suggest reading Jacobus Publicius and reading Peter of Rowena's the Phoenix and Giordano Bruno if you can. If you can find your way into Bruno. There are many, many wonderful mental adventures. And also Robert Flood is fantastic. And then beyond that, the greatest hits in the 20th century. I think Lynne Kelly's work, the Memory Code, is kind of more of an archeological anthropological book. But she has another book called Memory Craft. And Nelson Dulles produces really interesting books that are a cut above the rest memory superpowers and remember it. And his latest one is called Everyday Genius. He just does it different and that's cool. And other than that, I mean, it's kind of like carpe diem, but caveat emptor. There's just so much stuff out there and I. I'm a proponent of just reading, Just read.
- [84:32]
Interviewer
Are all of the techniques ancient?
- [84:35]
Anthony Metivier
I suppose technique itself is very, very ancient. And that's worth meditating on.
- [84:42]
Interviewer
When is the first time we know of there being talk of improving memory?
- [84:48]
Anthony Metivier
Talk is the operative word. I think a lot of people attribute it to the Greek tradition where you have some writing there, but the very earliest book is lost or there's just a small fragment. And Aristotle refers to it in his Deme Moria. But I don't know what talk went on in the ancient aboriginal cultures. For example, like, I don't know that they recorded in any sort of writing or marks because they had the song lines and they would use oral transmission and apparently they had custodians that would pass on the memory techniques to the people that needed to learn them to become the next custodians. And then there's the Luba people who used lucasa. Lucasa, I think, means like claw. So it's like a wooden representation of your hands, so to speak. And then you put various bees and shells and then that would help you remember things you wanted to remember. Lynn Kelly is really the person to read about that. Her book, the Memory Code, goes deep into the prehistorical stuff with the aboriginal tradition and all around the world. But yeah, in terms of quote unquote, standard writing, I think Aristotle is referring to a book that we only have a fragment of if that. And then that book may have referred to previous writings about memory techniques and how to Improve it.
- [86:03]
Interviewer
I would imagine before there was writing, memory would have even more value.
- [86:09]
Anthony Metivier
Well, to me, that's the question of our time. As people talk about the Internet challenging our memory now and then. I think often of some of the stuff Lynne Kelly talks about in the Memory Code, where in a drought, the aboriginal people had to use these songlines in order to help them not only find where food and medicine would be, but to remember to make sure that the food and medicine that they found wouldn't poison them, that it would be the food and medicine. So in our time, if we think about the Internet as this giant pharmacy, then, you know, there's beautiful things everywhere that can heal us. But if you put the wrong medicine on a certain part of your body, it's going to be a toxin.
- [86:49]
Interviewer
So the earliest we know is Aristotle. Did Aristotle talk about memory beyond that?
- [86:54]
Anthony Metivier
I don't. I'm not an Aristotelian scholar, but Richard Sarabji has a really good book called Aristotle on Memory that. That goes deep in the weeds on that. But, yeah, in a roundabout way, like in his Metaphysics, the only time I ever read an Aristotle, he seems to be making a joke and it seems to have a kind of memory twist to it. Like he's referring to ways that other people think they know something about the moon or whatever. And so, I mean, end of logic, he creates these puzzles and so forth. And they seem very aware of the fact that you have to use your memory to think through the various processes that he's challenging you in order to come to your own metaphysical understandings.
- [87:33]
Interviewer
Do you know if there were any breakthroughs historically in the world of memory where, like, everything changed on this day when this was discovered?
- [87:42]
Anthony Metivier
Maybe when Herman Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve.
- [87:47]
Interviewer
Tell me about that.
- [87:48]
Anthony Metivier
I believe it's 1895. He writes a book in German. It's called Uber des Gedeschnesis, or About Memory. And what he is doing is he's memorizing these nonsense syllables. They're usually like three letters, like Z, U, K or something like that, like zuk, zik, clack. It was stuff like this, right? And then he's tracking what's the rate of decay in memory. And he does these charts and diagrams and so forth. He calls it the forgetting curve. And then these other principles emerge, which are called primacy effect, recency effect, and serial positioning. And so what emerges is a feeling or a sense and that it reproduces in the studies that what you encounter first you tend to have a greater recall of, hence the primacy effect. And what you encounter last in the list, you have greater recall of, hence the recency effect. And then serial positioning. If you can rotate so that everything has equal doses of primacy and recency, then you start to combat the forgetting curve. And so that's the thing that changed memory science. And to this day is still referred to and is more or less rock solid as far as I know. But I believe Aristotle was describing something very similar in Dema Moria, just not quite as scientifically grounded or charting out all the words he memorized and tracking their rate of decay.
- [89:15]
Interviewer
Is memorizing numbers different than memorizing objects or faces?
- [89:20]
Anthony Metivier
I think it is. And that's why we turn them into words in order to make the numbers not so abstract and wild to our imagination. When you think about it, like it's not just that you see a number, but the number refers to a number sometimes that you cannot see. Like if you have a nine that represents nine, it may be referring to nine objects, but at a glance you couldn't tell that it was nine. It might be six, that is nine, but appears like a six. So I think that's, that's part of our history with numbers. That makes numbers so much different to memorize than words. And that's why ultimately the long time ago with the Catapyati, they came up with a system to be able to memorize numbers with words.
- [90:00]
Interviewer
What is photographic memory?
- [90:02]
Anthony Metivier
As far as I know, and sometimes I get in little debates about this. As far as I know, it doesn't exist. And with Artemis 2, I don't. And the cameras that those people have and the kinds of telescopes that we have floating around, I don't know why they even use that metaphor anymore. It seems like a weird metaphor for memory. Memory is so much more dynamic and vibrant than, than a photograph. Although I do know why people use it, but as far as I know, it just is not a real thing.
- [90:29]
Interviewer
Tell me about the relationship between memory and space.
- [90:33]
Anthony Metivier
Well, there's a lot to say about that. Giordano Bruno was quite obsessed with that in his Renaissance writings. And then there's a guy named Steven Koslan, thinks that there's a one to one correspondence somehow between how the brain maps space and then remembers it, the location in the brain, and that's called might come to me the title A case for Memory or something like that. And Bruno thought that we are somehow like the universe and memory is part of the universe. And infinity operates in particular ways. If we're able to somehow become like the Universe. Our memory needs to be like the universe in order to encapsulate the thing that it's memorizing. The whole Bruno schtick is it's not pantheism, as far as I understand it. It's totally resolving yourself into space as such and being like the way space operates. I don't think he would divide the objects from space from the space itself. So it may not be a pure non duality in his case, because he accounts for coming into being and then falling out of being. But then the idea is you could have infinite memory palaces because whenever you could imagine something in space, you could then use that space as a canvas upon which to paint. So you never need to run out of locations to use. And that's what a lot of his diagrams are in his books are like, working out how you can apply those concepts infinitely. And also a principle of recursion where they refer back to themselves in greater and greater forms of density. And that's what he calls a seal. And so the seal, as you lay it out in space, how you use the space, has various mnemonic outcomes that will be better or worse.
- [92:27]
Interviewer
What I'm hearing you say is, has less to do with the location and more to do with the relationship in space.
- [92:35]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, I think it's a relationship thing at the end of the day. And then what you're going to do out of the relationships that are available to you and how you're either going to make them diffuse or make them more and more dense, and then other sorts of tools. All of the memory books have some kind of talk about space, the distance between the stations that you use, the quality of the light in the space. Peter Varwenna in the Phoenix, he says, don't use any location higher than you can reach and touch with your hand, which I think is super fascinating. Bruno apparently just goes against that. It's just like, okay, that planet over there, you can't touch it, but you can use it.
- [93:14]
Interviewer
Can memory be used to change habits?
- [93:17]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, well, I guess the question is, what is the habit? And then how is that habit linked to memory? And I certainly changed habits in a way that was related to memory. I used to bite nails quite badly, and it was hypnosis. That was what made the difference. So I guess I wouldn't say I used memory, but what happened was that I remembered a change in the hypnotic session. And because of the memory of the change, I think I haven't bit my nails since this happened in university. And that's 20 years ago. But I think that part of it is that I remembered the effectiveness of that particular session.
- [94:00]
Interviewer
What is active recall?
- [94:02]
Anthony Metivier
Active recall is a fairly big topic, but part of it is when you're recalling something from memory, you specifically recall it first, then you write it down. And following that process is meant to be activating the recall at some level. And then it just seems to have better outcomes in some of the studies that I've read. But another element of it is related to how you actively read and so forth. And in some of the studies of active recall that I've read, you know, you want to have variety, maybe use interleaving so that you're not reading the same book in a cramming sort of way, but you're maybe rotating between three to five books and so forth. The ways that I use it are that term is very actively working to make sure that you are following some kind of process. So you're bringing it to mind first, then writing it down. And also not judging if you get it wrong, just analyzing what this sort of process is so that you're not labeling anything per se. If you get it right. Also, what was it that made that a success? So you're actively recalling and actively analyzing.
- [95:13]
Interviewer
How does learning another language change you?
- [95:15]
Anthony Metivier
It certainly opens up the avenue to have conversations that are inflected with flavors that you just wouldn't imagine. And then people make metaphors that are not in your own culture or anything you would even imagine. I remember reading an Einstrissen and Neubaten interview and he said, I have my champagne for the end of the world already in the fridge. And you know, you might hear that in English expressed in a certain way. We are. We're prepared for the party or whatever. But this is just exactly the way it sounds in German has this particular, particular flavor to it that just wouldn't. Wouldn't translate. Or you can translate it, but. And you just feel more connected to people in that culture. I never felt so at home after I got decent skills in Germany. It was like I really belonged there because I could talk to anyone. Pretty much the warmth of having a conversation totally in German in a taxi or at a bar. And you just appreciate somehow language so much more.
- [96:19]
Interviewer
Is learning language a memory task or is it something different than that?
- [96:24]
Anthony Metivier
I certainly treated it as a memory task due to my fascination. Even in my own experience, it was a lot more than memory. Its absorption. And it's also anticipatory thinking. Because when you don't know what exactly it's saying, your mind starts to think, well, what is it likely to mean? And then you get better and better and better at guessing. Now, you may remember your guesses, but it's not strictly a memory task. So anticipatory reading, anticipatory thinking, like what is it that means or likely to mean? Builds your skills. And then you often just remember it on, on autopilot. But it's not strictly a memory thing. No.
- [97:03]
Interviewer
How are long term and short term memory different?
- [97:06]
Anthony Metivier
Short term memory is said to be 3 to 10 seconds or around that. There's some call to question that with memory competitors who do 52 cards in less than eight seconds. But let's just say short term memory is also called working memory. And it's like the desktop of your brain and there's only so much room for what's happening there. But long term memory is what you can draw into your short term memory onto the desktop to play around with that's there. It may be wrong or right, but nonetheless, it's long term memory that is in you somehow. And short term memories become long term memories in different ways. And the best I heard it described, that really struck an image in my mind. Information comes in and then it just splatters all over the brain and it goes into these different locations. And I'm quite confident what Dr. Gary Small said is that they're going to different neighborhoods in your brain and then they'll consolidate all over the brain. But it's like little family members who have their own homes and they can be cities away from each other or in neighborhoods away from each other. And then when you want to recall and bring it back into your working memory area so you can use it, they all have to come travel back and have Thanksgiving dinner.
- [98:22]
Interviewer
For most of the things that you've memorized. Do you memorize them all long term or there are any things that you memorize short term?
- [98:31]
Anthony Metivier
Oh, yeah, Unfortunately, a lot of stuff is just short term. And I try not to play into the fantasy too much of being able to get it all or anything like that. It's tempting. And a lot of people say that that's their big dream. Yeah, there's a lot of things that I only remember them if I need them and I miss certain things and so forth. I pick my projects very, very carefully for the long term retention. And the middle ground, the gray area, is that I'm also quite aware of the effects of focus. So by reading within certain categories, you can get the best of both worlds. So you can not deliberately memorize anything that you Only need to track for a short term, but remember it anyway because it's just going to have this connective webbing to the fact that right now you're reading about math topics or the reading is about writers writing about writing. And then that's going to build this connective webbing. So for long term memorization, I pick projects and I work on them and make them long term.
- [99:35]
Interviewer
Why do we naturally remember certain events or details from the past and others just disappear?
- [99:41]
Anthony Metivier
Well, there's focused attention is part of it. So it's kind of back to that Kennedy effect that David Berglis talked about. Some things may not be that dramatic, but they're dramatic enough that we pay attention to them and they just kind of come along. There may also be pattern recognition that aids us. Pattern recognition is a huge thing. And it may be that we're actually just deluded and we haven't remembered them. But I think the main factor is did we pay attention to it, did we try to remember it? And that's what Harry Lorain said at the beginning of a lot of his books. Memory starts with attention. So you can, even without using memory techniques, you can often remember more just by deliberately paying attention.
- [100:21]
Interviewer
Do you get good at anything else as a result of building your memory?
- [100:27]
Anthony Metivier
Potentially, I think so. I don't know that you would just naturally get better at these things, but you certainly can become a better thinker just because you'll have greater access to that working memory space and be able to work with more moving parts in real time. And then because you memorize information, you'll be able to have even more references, which makes you a better archiver of what's out there and connector and assistant to other people. Because the more you know, then the more you can give. Basically, I'm always interested in what more we could do to find a way to get together and do something about the way that memory is not part of our education system. So in terms of I don't know how to have the conversation. I'm not a person who feels like I can be an educational reformer and do all that nitty gritty work in politicians worlds. But I am working on the project and I tackled it in a couple of ways. The long and short of it is I've written some books for kids that I have a hypothesis behind the series and also books for adults that echo or are part of this narrative world, the memory detective world. And I don't know how far that I'm going to get. But regardless of my project, what I would like to see happen is I would like to see every teacher that steps into a classroom by license have to be able to memorize 30 names in three minutes or less. And my hypothesis is that if that were to happen, they would naturally teach those kids the same techniques that they used to do that. So I'm actively trying to share this project with people, and I don't care if it's my project or not, but just that principle teachers, by virtue of the teaching license, that they can do this.
- [102:22]
Interviewer
Who first coined the term memory palace?
- [102:25]
Anthony Metivier
I don't know that that's known, but it might come out of St. Augustine because he talked about the great fields and the palaces of his memory. Because the Simonides of Chios story where he was at a banquet hall and it was destroyed and he was able to recall the names of where everybody was sitting. It was a banquet hall. So we don't call it the banquet hall technique, but it may have been a banquet hall in a palace, I don't know. But then it was in ancient Greek, so they wouldn't use that term. But the Latin in. I'm not sure if this is the Latin or Spanish, but it'd be something like Palazzo DEI Memoria, that sort of thing. And I don't know that that's actually in Augustine, because I haven't looked at the Latin. It'd probably be something like that. These fields and the palaces of his
- [103:07]
Interviewer
memory, what's a memory wheel?
- [103:11]
Anthony Metivier
They seem to first come from Ramon Lullaby, who was trying to get people to share his ideas, his conclusions about the nature of his relationship to God, et cetera, to evangelize. And so how would they remember the nuances of his system for meditating upon the nature of God? That's part of the puzzle. And so the wheels place individual letters to help you at a glance, unfold many more details. So if you have to remember that beneficence is a huge skill that you want to not only practice yourself, but also teach, then the B at the top of the memory wheel is where you would begin. And then if there's other things that you need to spend time in deliberation, the D would unpack all the things that allow you to do deliberation. That's part of it. And then there's the combinatoria or the combinations that come out of the wheels. So if you need to come up with mnemonics, for example, and you have an outer wheel that has only people, and A is Adam Sandler, let's say. And then the next wheel is only objects. And you take another A and that's an apple. And then the third wheel is only actions, then you have accept. So Adam Sandler accepts an apple, but you can rotate it so that it's. Adam Sandler breaks a cookie. The wheel rotates so that the A's aren't aligned, but it's A and then B and then C. I see. So that's the short story of the Memory Wheel.
- [104:45]
Interviewer
What is Rules Reborn?
- [104:47]
Anthony Metivier
Rules Reborn is an adaptation I made of the writings of Jacobus Publicius. And he has memory, a kind of memory wheel in his training. And he gets into the combinations and just these various rules. He's very rule oriented. If you want to remember, remember in this way. Basically, it's a lot of what we talked about today. I just turned the ancient writings that are very, very hard to access and read into a readable ebook and audiobook. And then I made some videos to talk about how that he was using these memory wheels to derive various images that you could use as associations. And I use the term reborn for the whole series because I'm adapting them. It's almost a theatrical project as much as it is a teaching one. In all three of the Reborn books, I perform the different characters. So I sound different when I do Peter of Rowena than I do Publicius. And then when I do Bruno, I really turn on the Bruno juice, as I understand him.
- [105:50]
Interviewer
Are there any tricks to getting better at them over time?
- [105:55]
Anthony Metivier
Yeah, I think the use. The most useful thing is to realize that there are a lot of different ways that a lot of different people talk about these techniques. And it can be very confusing, and it can feel like there's a real big barrier to entry that is frustrating. And also it can seem too good to be true because of how people talk about it. So I think one of the most useful things that you could do is just find somebody who you think you can learn from and just take it step by step and progressively and pick a goal that you want to remember a certain thing, and then try to work out what are the best techniques in order to remember the information so that you can achieve that goal. So you're giving yourself some kind of win. But also when you hear these extraordinary stories and they might make you think like, oh, I could never do that. Also remember that the stories are told in context, and sometimes they're exactly true, but they're in a particular context. So I remember speaking earlier about memorizing a deck of cards in 15 minutes at the first try. And you were A little skeptical about that. And I said, well, I didn't count. I think I said I didn't count the setup of the system. And that's the interesting thing about this, is that there are many, many people who have indeed won memory competitions on the strength of reading half a book. And I don't doubt them. That's what they say. They didn't even finish. I think it's Ben Pridmore. He said, I didn't even finish reading Dominic o' Brien's book. And then I went to the next memory competition and I won. But I mention this because memory competitions are not necessarily the context in which you would want to memorize the information in Latin. Or, you know, if you're studying law, there's like Latin phrases or whatever. That's not the same thing. So try to figure out who it is that could teach you to do that or where even a robot can teach you these days. But, like, find out what it is that's going to help you get into these techniques. And don't ever convince yourself that you can't do them, because we have impressions about what they are that often talk the people who are the best at them. And I've seen some very, very smart people talk themselves out of very simple activities because a variety of reasons, a variety of impressions have created the idea that it's other than it is. Right? But really, at the end of the day, what this is is squares on a piece of paper that represents a home or a grocery store. And you don't even have to draw the squares if you don't want to. And then it's just the Alphabet associated with people and things in the world that you already know, and you're just attaching it to the information that you do want to know and then revisiting it in particular ways. So that's the biggest thing that I can say, and I wish everybody that ever has felt locked out of this would. Would know that, because it's the most beautiful practice. I think it's a kind of qigong, a kind of martial art in the mind. And it's a thing that can just make you feel so great just to play around with information in your mind and just connect it. It's like Lego, mental Lego, just snapping things into place.
- [108:56]
Interviewer
Does everyone memorize the same way?
- [108:59]
Anthony Metivier
That, to me, is part of the question that I want to solve. And I think that probably the answer is yes, no, and something in between. And what I mean by that is there's almost certainly something so similar about our brains that we call ourselves a species. And so the difference is probably not as big as we might imagine it is. And the only reason why we would want to be so different from our, from each other in our ways of memorizing, maybe a problem of ego, because it, it would be much more interesting to figure out all the ways that we're the same so that then the differences could be celebrated in, in a much clearer light. But there's a lot of battles over the differences. I can't quite figure out what those differences mean or how that they would work. And so I have a long term response to problems like Aphantasia where people say they can't see images in their mind. Well, I can't see images in my mind either. I mean, I've talked about, I've used that kind of language all throughout our conversation. But the fact of the matter is I don't know what that means. A picture is something I go to the art gallery and see on a wall. But what's happening in my imagination is just so indescribable. It's like trying to describe the entirety of the now, you know. So I don't know that we do memorize differently or at the end of the day, it's kind of a Yoda thing to me. Like do it or don't. There's not really a try here. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge. What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton Counterculture, Tetragrammaton Sacred geometry Tetragrammaton the avant garde Tetragrammaton Generative art Tetragrammatin the Tarot Tetragrammatin out of print music Tetragrammatin Biodynamics Tetragrammatin Graphic design Tetragrammatin Mythology and magic. Tetragrammatin obscure film Tetragrammatin beach culture Tetragrammatin Esoteric lectures. Tetragrammatin off the grid living Tetragrammatin Alt spirituality. Tetragrammatin the canon of fine objects. Tetragrammatin muscle cars. Tetragrammatin ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.