Greetings, fellow mnemonists!

I was recently a guest on The Medical Mnemonist Podcast. The host, Chase DiMarco, is himself a skilled mnemonist so we were able to really dig into some detailed examples and discussions. It was a lot of fun. If you’d like to listen, you can find the podcast below or by following this link: https://medicalmnemonist.podbean.com/e/atomic-memory-techniques-from-memory-athlete-daniel-kilov/

This article was originally printed in Issue 442 of the Australian Mensa magazine, TableAus.

Tansel Ali is a four-time Australian Memory Champion, Managing Director of the Tansel Institute and organiser/licensee of TEDxDocklands

Daniel Kilov: This isn’t our first interview. Memorious readers may recall our 2015 interview wherein we covered how you memorised the Sydney Yellow Pages in only 24 days, your attempts to bring memory techniques into the classroom and the School Mind Games event, and your use of memory techniques as meditation. However, I didn’t ask you about how you initially discovered memory techniques, or why you wanted to compete. So, what’s the story there?

Tansel Ali: I discovered memory techniques through curiosity really. A friend of mine back at uni had told me he could memorise a list of forty random items and I didn’t believe him. I naturally had to test him and surely enough he memorised every word I gave him in random order perfectly. I thought he was playing a trick on me, however he advised me he used memory techniques and to read up on it.

So, I went and did my reading and discovered a whole new world of self-development that actually worked. I always thought I had a pretty bad memory until I learned these memory skills myself. I wanted to learn more as I was excited about the benefits of having a better memory gave me, like learning and reading faster, and I stumbled across the Australian Memory Championships one day Googling memory training. I asked my friend to join me to enter the competition since we knew a few techniques. To our surprise we both did really well, broke (more…)

I have successfully qualified for the WCA world cubing championships to be held in Melbourne this July!

I competed at my first speed cubing competition on the 13th of April. I was pretty nervous. But there was a real sense of comradery and even the really young competitors (who were all waaaay faster than I was) would introduce themselves and chat away while we were waiting for our turn to solve. So I relaxed pretty quickly. I also met some local competitors and will be catching up with them for cubing and coffee.

Rubik’s cube is among the most popular and enduring toys of all time. What accounts for it’s popularity? Here is an answer from Rubik himself (From Ian Scheffler’s excellent book ‘Cracking the Cube’):

The Cube relates to human universals in a very simple and immediate manner. It crosses all cultural or age barriers and disregards socio-economic differences. It is languageless: it never needed a users’ manual, anyone who touches it understands the challenge instantly. The Cube also embodies the tension of our most basic contradictions: simplicity and complexity, dynamism and stability, pleasure and frustration and so forth.

Well said, professor Rubik.

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I’ve shared many of my own talks on this blog. But there are many other memory athletes with interesting things to say about the magnificent and messy mental faculty of memory. Here I’ve collected some of my recent favourites.

1. How to use memory techniques to improve education:

This first talk is by Boris Konrad. Boris is a brilliant mnemonist and a talented neuroscientist. Here, he talks about how to use memory techniques to memorise complex information and shares some cool stories from the history of the science of memory. If you want to learn more about Boris or his work, check out the interview I did with him here.

2. Memory as a special form of perception:

Next up is a talk by Ed Cooke. Ed is a grand-master of memory, the founder of the language learning app, Memrise, and a central character in Joshua Foer’s ‘Moon-walking with Einstein’.

Ed is also a philosopher and thinks about memory in really interesting and illuminating ways. Consider this quote from his talk:

3. Mastering Mongolian as a modern nomad:

This talk is by Yanjaa Wintersoul, one of the best athletes currently competing. This talk is not about memory as such, although she shares many memories of her own fascinating life. One of the things I most enjoyed was how clearly she communicates her affection for languages. Check it out.

This article was originally published the ‘Back to School Guide 2019’ published by MumsDelivery, here.

Teaching students to think critically is a primary goal of schooling. By critical thinking, I mean the ability to reasoning dispassionately, solve novel problems, generate new ideas, reason dispassionately and so on. But decades of educational and cognitive science have shown that critical thinking skills can only be learnt when students are equipped with a rich store of facts to draw from. As the cognitive scientist, Daniel T Willingham puts it, “The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge)”.  

The accumulation of facts requires memorization. You cannot know some fact that you do not remember. Unfortunately, your children are likely to consider this bad news. Internalising quotes, dates, the elements of the periodic table and anything else by rote repetition is painful even for the most dedicated of students. There is, however, a more effective and enjoyable way.

Enter the world of competitive learning and the World Memory Championships. Founded in 1991, the World Memory Championships gathers the world’s fastest learners to compete across 10 disciplines for brainy dominance. Katie Kermode, a high-level competitor, can memorize 97 names and faces in just five minutes. Another, Johannes Mallow, can memorize 132 historic dates just as quickly. To give that some context, they could probably memorize all 29 Australian Prime Ministers in the order in which they were elected in about the time it takes me to tie my shoes. But these athletes aren’t superheroes or savants.  Rather, they use a small set of mnemonic techniques that anyone can learn and apply. In fact, these techniques, which originated in ancient Greece, where central to education until as late as the 17th Century. I’m a memory athlete myself – I’m a three times silver medallist and national record holder – but my main interest is in the application of these techniques in the modern classroom.

Learning even a few simple memory techniques can transform learning into an activity that is imaginative, fun and effective. All the techniques used by memory athletes involve generating creative and unusual associations between visual images. Below are two examples of memory techniques and how they might be used to memorize material encountered in school. I encourage you to read these examples to your kids. Have them close their eyes. Invite them to create colourful ‘mental movies’. Afterwards, see how much they can recall.

Example 1: First 5 elements of the periodic table

To remember the first element, hydrogen, visualize a fire hydrant. ‘Hydrant’ sounds like hydrogen, so is our first mnemonic. Now picture that hydrant being carried into the air by a helium balloon – helium is the second element. Unfortunately, the balloon is popped by a spark from a lithium battery, as lithium is our third element.

Beryllium is the fourth element, so we will imagine our lithium battery bursting into a shower of berries, which are really yum! Here, we are taking advantage of the fact that ‘Beryllium’ sounds like ‘berries really yum’. We are going to use the same strategy to remember that the fifth element is boron. To do so, imagine the berries being turned into a jam which we pour on someone named Ron. Poor Ron! Both ‘pour on’ and ‘poor Ron’ rhyme with ‘boron’ and so allow us to easily recall the name of the element.

Example 2: Foreign language vocabulary

To remember that the Spanish word for rice is ‘arroz’, imagine arrows landing in a bowl of rice.

To remember that the Spanish word for donkey is ‘burro’, imagine a donkey writing at a bureau desk

To remember that the Spanish word for shrimp is ‘gumba’, imagine a giant shrimp dancing around in 10 pairs of shiny black gumboots.
Memory athletes have techniques that allow them to memorize almost anything, but they all come down to creating associations and visual mental images. During one talk, I had the entire audience learn the order of the planets in the solar system using these principles. Mastering memory techniques allows students to take control of their own learning, to conquer difficult material and to develop the skills of critical thinking, all while having fun. Not a bad deal.

This article was originally printed in Issue 433 of the Australian Mensa magazine, TableAus.

Jacques Bailly is a cartographer of the English language. He won the Scripps National Spelling Bee as a student in 1980 and now serves as the Bee’s official pronouncer. His efforts to tame the wild landscape of English led him to study Latin, French, German and Greek, skills he has also put to good use as an associate professor of classical philosophy at the University of Vermont. In this interview, Professor Bailly was kind enough to share some of his stories, as well as some of the secrets of successful spellers.

Daniel Kilov: You’ve been the official announcer and ‘voice’ of the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2003, but before that you were a competitor and, in fact, won the event in 1980, correct? How did you first develop an interest in competitive spelling? What did your training involve and what was it like to win?

Jacques Bailly: Correct. Back in 1977, my sixth-grade teacher, Sister Eileen, asked me and a few others who did well in language arts if I’d like to be on the school spelling team. Not knowing what it was, I said, ‘sure’. From there, I spent a couple of years memorizing lists of words from spelling bees past.

As I studied, my mother studied how I studied. By the third year, she thought there was a better way. Namely, one should study not just by memorizing words in the hopes that one would get a word one had studied. One should really prepare for the words that one had not seen. To do that, etymology, foreign languages, semantic fields, and generally everything that went into the shape that a word has now had to be studied.

Also, mock spelling bees: open the dictionary and quiz the speller. Give the speller all the info the spelling bee does and see if he or she can sleuth out an intelligent guess, then work to figure out how to hone those guesses into better guesses. The reason why I mention my mother is that she went on to coach another national champion, Molly Dieveney, as well as many national competitors, and then she helped run the Colorado-Wyoming bee. I was going to school in the meantime, and I learned a lot of Latin, French, German, and Greek; in 1981, I wrote to Scripps-Howard and asked if they could use a volunteer with my knowledge. Lucky for me, they could. Thus I was ready and willing when the opening for pronouncer came along.

Daniel Kilov: Do your experiences as a competitor influence how you relate to the competitors for whom you announce?

Jacques Bailly: Of course. I like to think I understand what will help them. I know that I want to help them in every way I am allowed, and I do that to the best of my ability. Also, I just enjoy them, and they seem to respond well to that. It probably helps that they have heard my voice all the year as they study online.

Daniel Kilov: I’ve never had an opportunity to watch a Scripps National Spelling Bee in full, but it doesn’t take more than an afternoon on YouTube to understand why the event is nationally televised. Competitors often display humour and courage on a par with their spelling skills, like when one competitor asked you whether you could use her word in a song or when, in 2003, another kid recovered from a fainting spell to correctly spell their word. What is it about the Bee that produces such alchemy?

Jacques Bailly: Like any competition, the spectator can identify with the competitors in various ways. But these competitors are young, and that adds to the empathy/sympathy and interest. Then there’s the element of luck: the next 50 words might be easy for me, but the word I get is the one that matters, and I might miss it. It’s tense, and there’s a lot of scoring, a lot of tense moments, a lot of relief, a lot of commiseration, and a lot of celebration.

Daniel Kilov: What are the most memorable moments you can recall from your time as competitor and/or announcer?

Jacques Bailly: Well, winning was a big relief and a joy. Relief because we had been on stage for two days straight under hot lights. Joy for all the obvious reasons. I don’t remember who wins from year to year too well, but I remember certain spellers well. Just search for sardoodledom, numnah, alopecoid, and iridocyclitis on YouTube to see some of my favourite moments. But mostly, I just feel such warmth and joy at inspiring and helping these brilliant, interesting young humans strive for excellence.

Daniel Kilov: The last three events (2014, 2015 and 2016), have all ended in a draw, with competitors successfully spelling their way through the entire championship list. Prior to the 2014 event, this was nearly unheard of. Do you think this signals that the kids have suddenly gotten much better? If so, how?

Jacques Bailly: I guess it probably has mostly to do with the structure of the competition: once we moved to a 25-word championship list, it became much more likely that we’d have co-champions. And the spellers really have upped their game; they are spelling such challenging words that we just can’t get them to miss with any word most people have heard of.

Daniel Kilov: Aside from a good memory, what are the key skills of an elite speller?

Jacques Bailly: Memory isn’t just one thing: there is visual memory, conceptual memory, etc. But what really marks a good speller is the one who can keep cool when the speller has never heard of the word and ask all the questions and come up with an intelligent guess that takes advantage of all the information available. Right or wrong, doing that is the best way to improve the odds. Just guessing is not going to work for long; intelligent, informed guessing, done with knowledge of Greek and Latin roots, French, German, Hawaiian, Maori, Spanish, and many more spelling patterns, an ability to see similarities that range from meaning connections to spelling connections to what can’t possibly be right. An elite speller is a linguistic thinker who knows a great deal about all aspects of English vocabulary. But it never hurts to have seen the word, and some words are simply impossible to spell by guessing intelligently. They defy rules. They are one-off instances of weirdness in the language. For those, the only way to know the word is to know the word. I’d give you examples, but as you can imagine, my head is full of words for this year’s Bee, and I can’t talk about those.

Daniel Kilov: Does the ability to spell still matter in the age of electronic spellcheckers? What lessons, if any, do you think the public could learn from the attitudes, techniques, or methods of champion orthographers?

Jacques Bailly: Of course it matters: spellcheck doesn’t know a lot of words, and it is not intelligent. It is a coded program that can only mechanically check things. It cannot really think. But what is more, think about this: no one wins a Nobel Prize in spelling. And yet, learning all of these words opens doors to new realms. Before she ever studies chemistry, astronomy, deconstruction, art history, heraldry, Spanish cuisine, or so many other things, the speller encounters the words for the elements of all those disciplines. Each word is a door to a new phenomenon, but it doesn’t stop there. Each new phenomenon is simply an invitation to keep exploring further. Spelling is a gateway skill. It’s not the goal of life, but it’s ancillary to deciding what one’s goals are, to achieving those goals, and to being an interesting and interested person.

Daniel Kilov: Finally, how does your knowledge of language enhance or animate your everyday experience?

Jacques Bailly: That’s hard to say: it’s like asking me to tell you what it’s like to be a bat. Or what it’s like to have a lateral line, like a fish. We’ve all got language—it’s hard to imagine not having it. Language is one of the ways we think, and however smart a whale or a porpoise or an elephant is, none of them can do metalogic, calculus, relativity theory, Kantianism or art. Knowing more about language is simply knowing more of one of the key fabrics of thought, of what it is to be human. I don’t think I’m anywhere near the most-accomplished person at languages (I know too many people who know so much more than I do), but I know that language has been a key to the things I have accomplished and to many of the things I value in life.

Some exciting news! My first TEDx talk has been featured on the TED.com website in this article here! It’s hard to believe that it’s been over six years since I gave this talk.

Remember people’s names once and for all — by using this technique from memory champs

Here is the talk, on it’s own, although I recommend reading the accompanying article above: