March 13 is “Pi Day,” a celebration of the irrational number pi.
Six-time USA Memory champion Nelson Dellis has memorized hundreds of pi digits. He talks about how, and other techniques to improve memory in his new book “Everyday Genius: Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More.”
9 questions with Nelson Dellis
You just recited to me several digits of Pi. How you’re doing that?
“Yeah. So, I’m going through a fun little story, navigating through my high school. And obviously the three, point, everybody knows that. So, I start recalling from the 14159. And that’s Sam Neill, the actor dressed as ‘Iron Man’ on the steps there. I’m visualizing that. Then I make my way down the parking lot in front of the school. And it’s my childhood friend. We call her baby Ellen two, six, five. And she’s doing the thing from ‘Gladiator,’ the emperor, where he puts his thumb up or down. And so that’s the three, five. So, it’s two, six, five, three, five.”
So, you’re assigning each individual number or numbers to an image in your head that you’re then locking in place in your brain. Is that roughly how it goes? You call it a memory palace in your book.
“Exactly. There’s two things at play here. One is turning the numbers into pictures so they’re easier to visualize. And then anchor it or attach it to like you said, this is called a memory palace where you choose a route that you mentally walk through and you can attach or imagine certain images strewn about along the way and that’s how you can recall it in order.”
What I love about this book is what you write really early on. You say, ‘The gap between ordinary thinking and extraordinary thinking is much smaller than people believe. What separates a genius from everyone else isn’t some mysterious gift bestowed at birth.’ So, are you saying we can all do what you just did?
“Yes, 100%. I believe that genius is something that we can unlock and build rather than it being something that, you know, the lucky few have been given from birth. I would forget things just like anybody else. And I trained this skill. I learned it from another memory champion and practiced the hell out of it until I was able to do it.”
Why did you decide to make this memory thing a mission of yours?
“Around 2005, 2006, my grandmother developed Alzheimer’s and she eventually passed away from it in 2009. And it was from watching her decline over the years that I was inspired to just investigate what it means to have a healthy brain. And in my research, my rabbit hole diving, the thing that kept coming up was this competitive memory competition.
“And I immediately thought, OK, well, that’s for people who are savants or who have photographic memories. And I was quick to learn that the people who do well in these competitions, the people who win, are just people kind of saying what I’m telling you now, that they never had a good memory. They learned memory techniques like the memory palace, for example, and then just practiced it.”
What is a memory champion?
“So, a memory champion is somebody who competes in the U.S. memory championship or any other memory championships around the world. But it’s a competition where there are certain events like memorizing a 500-digit number in 5 minutes, 250 names in 15 minutes. We had to memorize decks of cards as fast as possible. So, it’s all these different memory tests that are timed, and it’s whoever can memorize the most in the time most accurately ultimately gets crowned as a memory champion.”
One thing I would love to do is I would love to be better at remembering people’s names. What about that? Can you show me some other tips?
“Sure. The process is very similar. If you kind of unpack what I did with the numbers there, I took the data, the numbers, and I turned it into a picture and then I stored it in some way that was easier to retrieve. So, what I teach people when they’re memorizing names is to choose a distinguishing feature about the person. You know, when you meet somebody, you’re usually looking at them in the face and we notice things. A beautiful smile. They have a little dimple, a mole. So, you can choose those as the anchor. And just like in the memory palace where I was placing pictures, you can place a picture for the name on that feature.”
And I’m kind of afraid to ask. What would you do to remember my name?
“What’s the first thing that comes to mind for the name Peter? For me, I think of Peter Griffin from Family Guy. I could picture him, you know? And so that’s my image now. Now I attach it to a feature. And so, your hair is the first thing that kind of talks to me. It’s kind of like flowy hair. Yeah, flowy. That’s the word. So, I’m going to attach Peter Griffin to your flowy here. Right. So, I’m going to picture him kind of making fun of your flowy hair with that funny laugh he does. And he’s just maybe like combing your hair, running his fingers through it. So very silly, bizarre, over-the-top.
“The tamer, the image is the less memorable, honestly. So, you really want to try to go as wild and crazy as you can?”
How long will that memory stay in your mind?
That’s a great question. Our brains are phenomenal for getting machines. They’re designed to forget most things because imagine if we remembered absolutely everything, how distracting, how noisy that would be. So how do we get our brain to make things stick for the long term?
“I, first of all, will use that name in practice right around the time that I memorize the name. So, I’ll say your name. ‘Hi, Peter. Thanks for having me on the show.’ If I’m in a social setting, I might introduce Peter to other friends or be like, Hey, Joe, meet Peter.’ Not in a weird way, but I would use it enough so that I’m testing myself. Another thing I do is before I leave a situation, I’ll mentally test myself, right? So I may not say it out loud, but I’ll be like, OK, that’s Peter, blah blah blah.
“And then one more thing I do is I keep a name journal. I don’t have it with me right here, but I keep track of everybody I meet: the date I met them, the image that I use, and any other facts that came along with our conversation or interaction. And I review that. It’s a fun game that I play and it pays off so much because especially as a memory guy, everybody expects me to remember their name. I can’t mess up, right? So, I really take that to heart. And I’m always training and remembering and reviewing the names that I learn.”
What’s next on the horizon for you?
“My number one goal and the reason why I write my books, I want to share this with as many people as possible, that you have this ability within you and not just with memory, but other, you know, mental feats. There’s a lot left in our minds that we aren’t fully aware of or tapped into that we can unlock. We’re at a really important juncture right now. And with AI and tech, that’s threatening to take a lot of that away from us completely. And so, to be able to kind of take agency over our own minds and keep hold of what makes us human, I think is even more important than ever. If I can show somebody how a memory technique works and they can do it, and they’re surprised because they’ve always thought they had a terrible memory. That’s such a powerful thing. And the floodgates can open. I mean, that’s what happened to me. I was curious. I learned a little technique and then boom. And I’m a memory champion.”
This interview was edited for clarity.
Book excerpt: “Everyday Genius’
By Nelson Dellis
Excerpted from “Everyday Genius” by Nelson Dellis. Copyright © 2026 by Nelson Dellis. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams Press. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2026 WBUR