“I don’t like the idea of losing out to a machine because I feel like I’m losing a part of myself in the process.” — Nelson Dellis

Most of us can’t remember our spouse’s phone number. We barely know our own. We haven’t read a physical map in years. Some of us don’t even know what a map is. Such is the impoverishment of mental life in our digital age.
Nelson Dellis, unlike most of us, is a rich man — at least mentally. He can memorise a shuffled deck of 52 cards in under a minute. He stores every stranger’s phone number in his head for 24 hours before putting it in his phone — on principle. He’s a six-time USA Memory Champion, a computer science professor at Skidmore, and the author of a new book, Everyday Genius, which suggests we can all be a lot smarter than our smart phones.
Dellis got into memory after watching his grandmother get lost in the fog of Alzheimer’s. And as a computer science professor, he’s equally terrified by what he now sees in the classroom. His students can’t craft an email without ChatGPT. They can’t focus. They can’t solve a problem without asking a machine. He warns that we’re outsourcing our cognitive agency to devices and mislabelling it as human productivity.
For Dellis, it’s the same mental atrophy that destroyed his grandmother. AI-generated mnemonics, he warns, feel “dead inside.” Our brains, like our language, are degenerating into slop. Thus the value of his hacks to restore our focus and boost our memories.

Five Takeaways
• I Can’t Remember My Wife’s Phone Number. Neither can you. Dellis memorises every new number for 24 hours before putting it in his phone. His brain needs him to.
• His Grandmother Vanished into Alzheimer’s. That’s the engine beneath the party tricks. He won his first championship within two years of picking up a memory book.
• If Everyone’s a Genius, Nobody Is. I pushed back. But the London cab driver study is hard to argue with — hippocampi that grow with use, shrink without.
• AI Slop Is Forgettable by Design. His students can’t write an email without ChatGPT. AI mnemonics feel “dead inside.” The brain atrophies when you let machines do the thinking.
• Eat Your Blueberries. Four pillars: mental exercise, physical fitness, diet, social interaction. He trains a 90-year-old and a five-year-old. Both can do things their peers cannot.

About the Guest
Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion and author of Everyday Genius. He teaches computer science at Skidmore College.

References
Everyday Genius: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Everyday+Genius+Nelson+Dellis
Nelson Dellis: https://nelsondellis.com
Moonwalking with Einstein: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Moonwalking+with+Einstein

About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction: we've never had a memory champion
00:01:23 Is everyone a genius? The soccer medal problem
00:03:25 Controlling the thing inside our skull
00:05:07 The brain as the most complicated object in the universe
00:06:40 Grandmother’s Alzheimer’s: the origin story
00:08:26 Can brain training delay Alzheimer’s?
00:11:53 Mental longevity vs. the iPhone warranty
00:13:46 Inside the USA Memory Championship
00:15:52 Numbers, cards, names, poems: the events
00:18:13 Joshua Foer and Moonwalking with Einstein
00:21:28 Social genius: loneliness as cognitive decline
00:24:43 Blueberries, omega-3s, and pre-competition doping
00:27:24 Freaks or trained humans?
00:31:01 Your iPhone is atrophying your brain
00:37:51 AI slop: why machines can’t make memories
00:39:23 Hack: how to remember any name you hear