There's No Such Thing as a Good Memory | Performance Neurology Podcast

In this edition of Brains, Banjos, and Beyond, the Performance Neurology Podcast kicks off today with my conversation with six-time memory champion Nelson Dellis. And to close us out, a banjo song (and tab) with my daughter Jules.

You either have a good memory or you don’t.

If you can recite the first 70,030 digits of the number pi, like world record holder Suresh Kumar Sharma, you must be a freak of nature. You must’ve been born with a rare and unusual brain.

This is what most people believe.

For many years, it was what Nelson Dellis believed. But when Nelson saw his grandmother’s memory slowly fading away due to Alzheimer’s disease, he wondered whether that was actually true. If your memory could get worse, could it also get better?

That’s when he discovered that, with training, your memory can improve.

Not by just a little bit. By a lot.

Enough to win memory championships. Enough to recite pi to 70,000 digits. In fact, the only way to achieve those kinds of feats is through training. As he puts it in our conversation, nobody wins a memory competition on a naturally good memory. Nobody.

Through his own training, Nelson has won the USA Memory Championship a record-breaking six times.

I’ve spent the better part of my career arguing that every one of the abilities we chalk up to “natural” gifts is built, and helping people unlock them. Nelson is on a similar mission to show people what they’re actually capable of, and help them get there.

In this episode, he shares how he built a world-class memory, and what it would take for you to build one too.

To hear the interview, you can watch the video above or if you prefer the audio only version, you can listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your pods!

Related Links:

• Nelson’s Book, Everyday Genius

• Nelson’s Instagram: @nelzor

• Josh’s Instagram: @brainjojosh

The feats of genius we celebrate, whether it’s writing Hamlet, deriving relativity, or memorizing a deck in under 30 seconds, don’t come from special brains. They come from something that we all share.

We’ve done the brains. Now for the banjos! In the form of a song and tab.

The only thing better than playing and singing on the banjo is playing and singing with my daughter Jules. Here we are playing "Wild Mountain Thyme" (you may know it as "Will Ye Go, Lassie, Go?"). See below for the banjo tab.

Below is the clawhammer tab for it, played in double D tuning (same as the video). There’s also an audio demo of just the tab itself below.