Change Your Brain Every Day - Natural Ways to Improve Your Memory, with Jim Karol

Episode Date: November 5, 2019

“Ultimate Memory Magic” author Jim Karol has spent years refining his technique to help him achieve near-superhuman memory. But you don’t need to have a superbrain to drastically improve your own memory. In the second episode of a series with Jim, Dr. Daniel Amen and Tana Amen discuss the practical tips you can introduce into your life today to help you begin to remember things more clearly and easily.

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We're with our friend, Jim Carroll, and we're having so much fun talking about Memory Magic, his new book.

So Jim, we were just talking about how to make this stick. So for those of us who this isn't our business, memory is not our business. You're in it all day. You do brain stuff all day. I do nutrition and stuff like that all day. So that's stuff we know really well. But when you're doing something new, how do you make it last? How do you make it stick? How do we give our listeners the tips so that, because I know when I did it, we just talked about this in the last episode, it worked really well. And then I got really busy, stopped doing some of the tips, and then it started to disappear. And I noticed when I went back and started to work on it again, it came back. But how do you, what would you tell them? Like, so they don't feel bad when it, when they

don't remember it four months later or six months later, what do they need to do? Okay. That's a good question because even myself, I'm, I'm supposed to be the man with the world's greatest long-term memory, and my stuff would disappear if I don't practice it at least maybe two or three times a year. And I call it memitation, not meditation, memitation. I'll sit on my couch like this, and I'll close my eyes. My wife will be sleeping. It's 11 o'clock at night. And say, well, you mentioned the president. Say, for example, I'll review

the presidents in my head. I'll go Washington and I don't talk out loud. I'll say, they look crazy. I do it into my I go Washington, Adam Jefferson, Madison Crowe, Adam Jackson, and I do all of this. And then it's done. Then I'll go, well, let's do the

two-letter Scrabble words. A-A-A-D-A-D-H-I-L-N-A-R-C-W-I-N. I can't even keep up with my brain. That's how fast it recalls. So if you rehearse it every once in a while, after about maybe three or four rehearsals, it'll stick forever like it is for me now. Like right now, I'll never forget the presidents, the states and capitals, the countries and capitals, the Scrabble words, because I rehearsed it so many times with my memitation program. And it's really cool. And the memitation, it's a dark room. You relax. Do your breathing exercises.

And then you just recall, like yourself, you said you memorized the countries and the capitals of states. Just pick one of them. And you'd be surprised how that relaxes you. Now, Daniel could probably explain what's happening better than I can as a, as a, as a psychologist and a psychiatrist. I'm assuming that when you relax and you're reviewing this information, it actually puts me to sleep, Daniel. What's, what is that all about? It's almost like the old adage, challenge me. It sues you. But for the average person, working their brain actually grows their brain. And I'm certain when you were 49 and really struggling with heart disease, your brain was probably not very good. But by exercising, increasing blood flow with new learning, you started to grow it. And I think you and I would both agree that everybody has this ability

to varying degrees, obviously. But once you start nurturing it, it grows. And that's what we saw. That's what you saw. And you talk about it in Ultimate Memory Magic, your new book. And you and I talked about it in our course at Amen University. But let's help people start at the beginning. If someone goes, I want a better memory, what are the first couple of things they can do today? I would say the most important thing to have a better memory is to increase your focus, to work on your focus first, because without focus, there is no memory.

And for example, i i myself i was traveling with a gentleman named tony datino he was the founder of the usa memory championships he's older than i am i'm 66 he's 70 we're in orlando and we we went to universal studios to eat to eat dinner so we park as he's parking the car i'm on the phone phone with my wife, Lynn, oh my gosh, we're back down at Universal Studios. And because the last time we were there with the four kids, we had a great time. Tony's on the phone with his girlfriend, right? He parked the car. We go and we ate dinner, walked around Universal Studios. We come out, neither one of us knew where we parked the car. He said, well, you should know, you got the world's best memory. We go to USA Memory

Chamber and found it. And we're arguing for an hour, why? So I'm not the only one. I feel so much better. Well, it's not your memory time. It's focus. We weren't focused. I'm on the phone. He's on the phone.

People with these cell phones, it's easy to lose focus. This is important. I just want to reinforce this because we have a lot of people calling in. They're really scared because they forget where they put something or like this happens once or twice. They forget where they park their car and they freak out. So sometimes it is a matter of memory, but what I'm hearing you say, and you actually taught me this before, sometimes it's a matter of being present, being focused. So you have to figure out which one it is. Like, are you distracted? Cause you got way too much going on and you're distracted by your devices or are you, or are you actually in trouble?

Well, and our, we're not working our memories as before because everything's on Google. Right. And many people don't even remember their own phone number because you don't have to say it anymore. Once it's programmed, you don't get it. Where before I had 30 or 40 phone numbers in my head, now I have yours and mine and that sort of thing. And when you and I went to school, we had to memorize mass amounts of information.

We had to go to the library and pull books when we wanted to do papers. We had to, I mean, it was like learning a new language. Now people come, like really most of the stuff they need to know is just in there. It's like right here. So they don't have to memorize as much. They may have to memorize it for a test, regurgitate it, and then it's just right here.

So it's a little bit different now. Now in our course, Jim, we talk about you want to have good habits, good brain habits, because then that supports your ability to memorize, right? So exercising exercising that obviously helps you. Eating right, sleep. But then, okay, step number one is you have to pay attention. So our ADD people have more trouble, so get that treated. You have to pay attention. What's step number two? Well, I like to call it, it's all about ESPN.

Okay. E for exercise, not only your body, but your brain, which in my opinion is just as, if not more important. So E for exercise, brain and body. S for proper sleep. Sleep is so important. I can't emphasize it. I mean, I hear a lot of people, I could go with three hours of sleep a day. Oh yeah, well, it's going to catch up. And as Daniel knows, you've got the glymphatic system that cleans out your brain. You get a lot of stuff going on when you have a nice sleep. It's very important. Plus you wake up more

energized and focused and it actually is good for your long-term memory. P for ESPN is in my opinion, the most important thing of all positive, positive thinking, positive memory, hanging out with positive people. That is so important. Positivity is so important. And then the N I'm sure you're really into this one. Nutrition. Yeah. Nutrition is the like that all those things really mean a lot they really do espn yeah it's good i like that all right so then step three because people want the goods because you know on the brain warriors way podcast they hear about espn all the time oh really so so you have to start somewhere. And I think you started with the- Presidents.

Presidents. And yeah, it was actually fun watching you do that. And you memorized them like over three days. Yeah. And you were amazing. It actually was a little less. It was actually not as hard as I thought. So I was reinforcing it over three days.

But how did you memorize? How did you do it? Yeah, I want to know. So for me, one of the tips you gave me, you gave me a whole bunch of different strategies. What I did is I picked furniture in my house. So I attached them to different, because for me, when I walk in my house,

I know my house so well. So depending on where I, like different pieces of furniture, different rooms, different things like that. So that just for some reason that clicked in my head. This is like, you know, whatever. So that's how I did it. It was just really easy for me to do. I know other people can use like body parts, you know, whatever. That's actually a very famous memory technique that was developed by the ancient Greeks, uh,

to know, um, like the furniture in your house and then just make associations so associations is one of the big memory tools correct right so like the entrance is washington i mean you don't even say and you just go like because that's number one it's when you first enter so that's the easiest one and then just from there i would pick things that made sense to me. But so that's how I did it. I memorized it really quickly and it was great. But I'm thinking that even for someone with ADD, this is a really good thing because what do you need when you have ADD? You need focus.

So this helps you to, it's fun and it helps you focus. And it gives you confidence. Yeah. And one of the reasons you feel good when you do it is because your confidence grows. And as your confidence grows, it relaxes people. They're not as stressed when their confidence comes up. And your self-esteem builds up. It's like, hey, and what I've discovered from focus, I mean, we talked about in the master memory course, focus with a deck of cards.

But since then, i'm doing things with with focusing like if i'm driving down the street and i see a stop sign and i i read signs as i'm driving like stop to me instead of seeing stop i quickly translate it into numbers nine nine zero five six nine because the s is the 19th letter in the alphabet i always drop off the first digit t is the 20th letter in the alphabet i drop off the two and so it's a zero o is the 15th and i look at the five and p is 16 and this is what i do and what it does is it trains your focus it trains you to focus just like here dr amon here, Dr. Amen. Amen would be 1, 3, 5, 4. It's like really cool.

Daniel would be 4, 1, 4, 9, 5, 2. See, I have to focus. So that makes you think. Yeah, it does. It does. It really, that's something I just came up with. It is really working. And I've been telling the Wounded Warriors about doing this.

Or even something as simple as just reciting the alphabet backwards yeah you have to focus like hey z uh y you know i mean anything that gets that noggin to think and focus is good for you it also clears your mind from whatever you were thinking about previously when you have to do that it's like a new exercise it's like if i was thinking about something negative or something really intense and I do an exercise like that, it sort of lets go of what you were- Exactly. So when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about your work with Wounded Warriors. We're with Jim Carroll, the author of a new book, which I wrote the foreword for, Ultimate Memory Magic. It's available now nationwide on Amazon.

I was in a Barnes & Noble last week, and I texted you a picture in Newport Beach. He also has a course on Amen University. If you go to amenuniversity.com, Jim Carroll's Memory Master Course, he and I did it together where we talk all about these techniques in great detail. So stay with us. We'll be back shortly. If you're enjoying the Brain Warriors Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode. And while you're at it,

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