Better Than AI? Expanding the Boundaries of the Human Mind: Justin C. Key + Nelson Delles

From Writer's Voice: compelling conversations with authors who challenge, inspire and inform.

What happens when artificial intelligence reshapes not only our systems—but our bodies, minds, and relationships?

That’s something writer and psychiatrist Justin C. Key explores in The Hospital at the End of the World, a speculative novel set in a near-future America where an AI corporation controls medicine and public life.

The story follows a young medical student forced to flee New York for a hospital in New Orleans—the last place in America resisting AI dominance. There, the doctors practice medicine driven by the uniquely human gifts of intuition, the doctor/patient relationship and wholistic care.

In our conversation, Key explores the tension between machine efficiency and human intuition, the risks of technological dependency, and the political forces shaping how technology is used.

Then, memory champion Nelson Dellis joins us to talk about Everyday Genius—and how ordinary people can train their minds for sharper memory, deeper focus, and far-reaching intuition.

What if the reason you forget things has nothing to do with your memory — and everything to do with how you retrieve information?

Nelson Dellis, six-time USA Memory Champion and author of Everyday Genius, joins Writer’s Voice to explain how ordinary people can develop extraordinary mental skills. Dellis — who grew up with no exceptional memory — began studying memory techniques 15 years ago and transformed his mind entirely.

In this conversation, he breaks down the ancient method of the memory palace, explains why multitasking is a myth built on dopamine, offers practical tricks for anyone who fears numbers, and describes his unexpected encounter with a classified government program that trained psychics to gather Cold War intelligence.

His book, Everyday Genius, covers memory, focus, number sense, creativity, decision-making, and intuition — making the case that every one of us has an inner genius waiting to be developed.

Two conversations that explore what the human mind can do — and what AI never can.

Segment One: Justin C. Key

FR:

This was just a terrific and extremely thought-provoking novel, The Hospital at the End of the World. It’s set in a near-future America where a powerful AI-driven corporation controls medicine and public life. Now, tell us a little bit, just to orient us, tell us a little bit about the architecture of this novel, the plot architecture. Where are we? When are we? Who are the main protagonists?

JK:

So the novel takes place about 20 years in the future, so a step in the future, and it takes place, it starts in New York City. And New York City is really like the hub for the technological boom. And there’s this big AI company called the Shepard Organization, and they’ve just bought up all of the top medical schools in the country.

And the novel follows a young medical student, Pac, a medical student, hopeful, he’s applying to med school. And he’s supposed to be a top candidate, and he applies to all these top medical schools, and then he gets rejected by all of them. And so he’s trying to deal with that while living with his father, who is a physician.

His father is like an old-school, quote-unquote, physician. And then his father dies from a mysterious illness, and the Shepard Organization has something to do with it, and Pac is next on the list. So he finds himself having to flee all that he knows.

He flees New York City, and he travels to New Orleans, which is the last holdout city that’s refused to adopt AI. And they have the last human-led hospital, and the last human-led medical school, where it’s still teaching the next generation of human doctors. So he has to navigate the difficulties of medical school while unraveling his family secrets to uncover the truth of his father’s mysterious death.

So it’s a lot about AI versus medicine, quote-unquote, at its core, but it’s also about the implications of AI as it applies to other things like art, law, and sports, and really also focuses on the importance of that physician-patient, that human-human connection, and, you know, the thought that, what I believe, technology is best when it’s a tool wielded by humans. So that’s it, kind of in a nutshell.

FR:

And the book does not give easy answers. I mean, there are difficulties, really, one could say, on both sides of the practitioners, the human practitioners versus AI. One of the key figures, Odysseus Shepard, who is the cyborg at the head of the AI organization, which is called TSO, or the Shepard Organization, he argues that AI is humanity perfected, which seems to be a very different kind of formulation than what you just said, which is humans using AI as assistance.

This is more the emphasis is on how AI is better than humanity. Is that right?

JK:

Yes, that’s one of the different arguments that’s explored in the book, whereas, you know, we’ve made this AI system as humans, and it’s almost supposed to be like the next step in evolution and intelligence evolution. And I think that you can see that a lot now with kind of how AI is taking shape. Like, you know, when you go to respond email-wise, it suggests that, you know, this is what you should say instead.

And I think the underlying part of that suggestion is, oh, you know, we could think about this, you know, we as the AI system or the algorithm, we could think about this better than you can. And, you know, it starts with something fairly little, which is, you know, just responding to an email, but what happens when we kind of scale that up? What’s the difference between doing that and using a system, like, after you’ve already drafted, like, the response, it’s saying, like, hey, you know, is there a way that this can be better in terms of grammar-wise, versus it doing the task for you from the beginning?

And then if we give the reins over to an AI system, you know, then what are the implications of, you know, what skills we’re taking from ourselves? Like, are we training ourselves to be reliant on that AI system generations down the line? Like, one of the things that I think about is that, you know, for example, if there is technology that assists me with, I don’t know, directions or assists me with, oh, checking interactions on a medication or what have you, you know, I’ve already learned how to do that, right?

And this is enhancing that ability. It’s almost like, you know, the Swiss cheese model of, like, checking my work. But if somebody from the beginning of their training or beginning of their experience, if they’re using that, do they ever learn to do that themselves?

And then it makes us dependent on it down the line.

FR:

Yeah, I think dependence is a very key theme. In fact, people become physiologically dependent on AI. People from New York, well, first of all, actually, let’s contrast New Orleans, the hospital named Hippocrates, which is in New Orleans.

And the people who live there, how did New Orleans become a kind of refuge from AI, the last bastion against it?

JK:

Yeah, so in the book, New Orleans in Louisiana, it’s set the stage for them to be at odds or separate from the rest of the country because of what’s going on with climate change. And so it’s the decisions that the country is making, New Orleans was already put in place to be wary of those decisions and to go its own route. And one of the ways it did that was with technology.

So it recognized that the technological decisions the country was making was not in their best interest. So then as you go like decades in the future, and you think about how those two branching lines, like the different directions they would go, then working with that in the novel, making New Orleans a place that doesn’t adopt the latest technology, but still builds upon the advancements that we’ve had in medicine still builds upon evidence-based medicine. And then how do they fill in that gap?

How do they make up for not having those latest technological advancements? And I think that’s going back and leaning on that human intuition, that human-human interaction. So it’s not perfect, but it does make a case for the opposite, which is taking the human almost completely out of it and it all being cold calculations.

And then with that, it gave me room to explore just the cultural significance of New Orleans and thinking about what we see today, I think with social media and everybody online, et cetera, et cetera. And I was able to think about, okay, what is the antithesis of that? What would it look like?

We had a society that was going forward without those advancements, without just everybody’s life being online. What would it look like? And what would it return to?

And my thought is it will return to culture and that human connection.

FR:

Yeah. And talk more about, well, first in medicine, because this is what’s really fascinating. I think a lot of my listeners probably don’t know that at a certain time in my life, I was a massage therapist and of course, very attuned to the art of massage.

I mean, I did a lot of study too. It was a year long year of study and studied anatomy and physiology and pathology and myology and all of those ologies, but really what’s at the heart of it is the human connection. So I was really fascinated by how deeply you go into examining what it means to really be in tune with your patients.

And I wonder if you could elaborate on that and explain that to our listeners.

JK:

Early on, thankfully in my medical career, I remember having an experience on anesthesiology rotation where I was with a young attending and attending is basically a physician that has finished their training, finished medical school and residency, and now works autonomously without having to be under somebody else’s supervision. And even though there was all this technology around to put patients under for surgery and to bring them back and to track their breathing and their outputs, et cetera, he says that the first and foremost, be a physician, look at the patient, be able to see, for example, when they intubate or put the tube down so they can breathe mechanically that the chest is rising, right? These machines will tell you if it’s placed right, but the first, you want to be able to see with your own eyes.

Does the patient look sick or not sick? There’s a lot of intuition there that is in addition to the data that we get, and that expands outside of the operating room to just when you’re seeing a patient on rounds, being able to see, is this somebody I should be worried about versus not? In addition to that, you have the data and you have the metrics so that if somebody may look like they’re doing fine, but then based on the numbers, you can be concerned or know that you need to take other actions, but then also being able to listen to the intuition.

And those in combination, I think, has been what’s very important in being a physician and the experience. There’s something about over time, seeing a large volume of patients and being able to be familiar with what the different types of patients and the different types of backgrounds and different types of situations look like, so you have that experience to be able to bring that to that interaction. And then being a psychiatrist, I think I know this particularly, you know, the trust that’s built with patients, that a lot of people come to me honestly feeling wary of seeing like a mental health specialist and letting them know that it’s a place where they can feel comfortable trusting me and also letting them know that this is a collaboration, like a collaboration in their care, that I’m not going to just do something to them. They’re part of the decision making too.

So I think that that’s all things that are important when, you know, trusting somebody with your care. The physician-patient interaction is very unique. I mean, just in that setting, there’s, you know, so many things that we may share with a doctor or show a doctor or put in a doctor’s care that we haven’t done with any other human before.

So it can be a very vulnerable relationship. So I think that it’s very important to not gloss over that human connection aspect.

FR:

I mean, I think the way you’re talking also actually calls into question a lot of the power dynamics that exist and, you know, certainly existed before AI, but can be actually potentiated by AI. Now the expert is a machine and has all the data available to them and can be in some way, you know, fetishized as being better than human. And I think that is something that your medical student does in the beginning of the book and that whole ethic of AI very much or ethos of it does.

It creates a kind of unequal power. So could you address that whole issue of power as it exists in this wonderful novel, The Hospital at the End of the World?

JK:

When it comes to power, there’s a lot of power that inherently I believe the physician has, and it could be recognized and used with care, or it could be taken advantage of when it comes to like the physician-patient interaction. And I think that a good physician is someone who recognizes that and is able to kind of bring that into the room and also invite the patient in so that they can have autonomy in their care. Because I think that a lot of times what we learn in medicine, we almost learn like a whole new language.

And for example, that could be used to alienate patients, right? That could be used to talk about things that they might not understand. They might feel, you know, self-conscious about pushing back on and what have you versus being able to translate that so that they feel, you know, empowered by their care.

Now, when it comes to AI and the idea that they have this access to all this data and that they’re potentially able to recall it perfectly, for example, or fill in a lot of the gaps or fix a lot of our own human flaws, then there’s the thought of can AI or these technological systems easily take power because then they become the obviously more competent systems. But I think one thing that we can’t forget is that one of the abilities of humans and one of the, it could be a flaw at times, but one of the advantages of humans is that we also know what things to ignore, right? If you give all the data to an algorithm, an AI system, what type of things is it going to use in its calculations that is not going to be in the best interest of the patient?

What type of information is it going to add to its calculation that a human would obviously see? That’s not relevant to this case. That’s not relevant to the best care for this person.

This is actually working against them. I mean, an easy example is, you know, thinking of the bottom line of insurance, right? Like if an algorithm is thinking or is considering, okay, these two courses of treatment, which is actually going to cost more, right?

And sometimes that can be at odds with what’s best for the patient. And then you think about power. Like if you have companies that own everything, right?

If they own the hospital, if they own the AI, let’s say if there’s AI doctors, for example, if they own the medication, the pharmaceutical companies, and they own the insurance, then all of that hypothetically is going to be involved in the algorithm. And then what is it making its choices on? Is it in the best interest of the patient?

Is it the best interest of the company? Or even if it’s supposed to be some best interest of society as a whole, what place does that have when you’re talking about individualized care? So I think right now, it’s definitely recognizing, I think, from a one-on-one, the power dynamic between physician and patient, but then thinking about globally, like how that power could be shifted in terms of who is in control of these systems, who’s in control of the data, who’s in control of the bottom line.

FR:

Exactly. At a certain point, there’s a discussion that’s going on in one of the classes, and I believe the teacher asks Park, at what point does best for the patient shift to best for the shepherds when they’re talking about AI? And the answer comes back, politics.

So I think this is a really important issue, because even though this novel, The Hospital at the End of the World, is about technology, and how we deal with it, and how we maintain our autonomy, how we use it in a way that is useful to humans without becoming too dependent on it, it’s really saying that tech itself is not the determinant of how it’s used. It’s politics.

JK:

Yes. And it’s based on what I’ve seen over the last several years in terms of things that happened, for example, with the pandemic or COVID that affects so many people and then elicits so many different opinions. And you can see how these events can make society right for someone, whether it’s a company or whether it’s an entity, to swoop in and to win over favor of people.

So, for example, in the case of a pandemic, if people are disgruntled with how their officials have handled it or what have you, that makes it right for a company to come in and say, hey, let us show you that we can do this right. And then they might win favor, I think, very quickly and can pave the road for some system to take over fairly quickly. So I do think that public opinion and misinformation and who is in control of the news and how people get their information, I think, can be very pivotal for how these different things take shape.

And I could see very clearly people right now being so disgruntled with the health care system, the gaps in it, the access to care, the premiums going off for them to be right to embrace, for example, in this example, like an AI system or some company that says like, hey, we’re going to simplify this and we’re going to take those greedy humans out of the equation and people being more readily willing to accept that than they would at another part of history, for example.

FR:

And, Justin Seakey, in this novel, The Hospital at the End of the World, you really explore the issue of dependency and what that does, dependency on technology. And you actually turn it into a physiological addiction. Explain how that works in the novel and what are you getting at by this whole discussion around physiological dependence of addiction to technology, really?

JK:

Yes. Me making it or taking that step further in the speculation or in the science fiction realm of making it an actual physiological dependence, then I’m able to kind of highlight more and make it more understandable or to provide a good analogy of what I think is already happening in terms of people becoming mentally dependent on these systems. Being able to track, for example, all of your metrics, I think, for certain individuals that can be very empowering and it could lead to them being more of their best selves, quote unquote, versus for somebody else, it could cause anxiety where they’re constantly obsessing, like the changes in their metrics and things being perfect.

And what does this mean or what does that mean? So it can look very different for two different people. And then the more that we’re exposed to information, we see it now with the news that we get on social media and these images or what have you or doom scrolling, the more it is that we then crave for that.

So we can see it from a mental standpoint now, and then now it does cross over into physiology, right? Like how is it affecting our sleep, our sleep-wake cycle? How is it affecting our eating habits and our appetite?

How is it affecting our gut, right? There’s a lot of already connection right now between the brain and body that’s happening on a subconscious or an unconscious level. So I take that a step further in the novel when there is a physiological effect of growing up in these all like AI dependent cities where there is like a protein that’s, for example, circulating in the blood because of what people eat, what people consume, like what people breathe, like being in these cities.

And then in coupling with being away from those cities and being away from those technology, like there’s something that happens in the brain and then there’s also, it potentiates a physiological effect as well. So that was something I had to make a choice of, okay, is this going to stay just mentally and then the downstream effects physiologically there, or am I going to add an element to make it that much more potent to show that there’s something potentially more nefarious going on? And I think with that, being able to do that, I think it’s the great part of fiction.

Then I can, through metaphor, allegory, like show the potential dangers of the future through science fiction.

FR:

Do you think that we can ever regain our full humanity once some technological thresholds are crossed? I mean, I think, for example, how very different human brains are being formed these days when kids are on screens from the get go. Just imagine what’s going to happen when they have little AI companions that can really interact with them all the time.

JK:

I think of a question that sometimes comes up from certain patients who might’ve gone through like a traumatic event or what have you, and they’re kind of dealing with the anxiety from that. And they might ask like, will I ever be back to how I was before? And I tell them, honestly, I don’t think that it’s possible to get back to where it is before, but that doesn’t mean that the future can’t be better.

I think that whatever it is that you’ve been through, we can’t change that. And you are on a trajectory that I don’t think can go back to where you were before. And I don’t know if that should necessarily be the goal, right?

Because that might not be achievable versus, okay, taking where you are now and with the experience that you have, how can we make the anxieties that you have more tolerable, right? How can we make it, we might not make it so that you’re faced with that situation in the future and you’re just nonchalant as you were about in the past, but we can make it so that it doesn’t, for example, cause a panic attack, right? So I think using that analogy, as we go forward, I think it’s more about, okay, recognizing the deficits that we have or that it’s causing.

And I think that a lot of that is, we’re not really going to know until it happens, like we can speculate, but I think we aren’t going to know the effects of it until after, similar to COVID-19. I think years after we’re really looking back and seeing like, there weren’t just this effects that it had on people’s health in the moment, but this is like the psychological and societal effects that it is downstream. I think recognizing that and then thinking, okay, how can we then address this?

How can we make this better? Right. And I think that might be more, thinking more about, okay, how do we get kids interacting with each other more now?

So for example, people lament, I have three kids and almost 12, 10 and five. And we lament about how in our childhood, we spend much time outside playing and that doesn’t happen as much anymore, just organically or naturally. So we recognize that.

And then we’re very conscientious and forward about, okay, how do we get our kids outside and doing activities? How do we make sure that they know how to ride a bike? How do we make sure that they have time that’s allocated every day to actually go outside and be active and be busy?

So that’s recognizing some of the things we might’ve not had to think about before and then thinking about new solutions for it. So I’m optimistic, but I don’t think, I think once we go forward, it’s not necessarily the goal is to get back to where we were before, if that makes sense.

FR:

Well, that does make sense. But just a final question then that I think really does go to the heart of this novel, which is how do you see realistically us being able to use these advanced systems, AI, and this AI without losing our autonomy, our human creativity, even our human failings that end, result in the surprises that are key to life?

JK:

So I think that there’s, there’s two, there’s from an individual standpoint and there’s from like a societal standpoint. I think that the societal standpoint is going to be harder and I have less answers for that because I think that that is dependent on us as a society deciding what it is that we want to spend our money on to invest in because these companies for better or for worse, that’s what they’re going to respond to, right? If we have an AI or AI system that’s eating up our resources and dumbing down our entertainment, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

But if the consumers are buying into it and using it and engaging with it, then the companies that are making those, that are profiting from those are going to continue in that direction, you know, similar to the idea of boycotting, right? On an individual level, I think about it the same way that the example I just used with my kids, right? Like with the technologies they have now, with video games, even with things that I think are intellectually stimulating, like now they can, my son is taking like Japanese classes online.

It would be easy to just always have them inside all the time. So I have to be forward about what it is that I do want them to learn, what it is for them to be in team sports, what experiences that they aren’t automatically going to get at home. I have to be forward about that.

And the reason I say that is that, for example, if somebody is starting out and wants to be a great writer, right? Like one path could be that they just use chat GPT to do all their writing versus they are conscientious about, I want to actually learn this craft. Similar again to that doctor, it was like, be a human doctor first.

We have all this technology and a lot of this technology can do some of these things for us, but it’s important to also have core competencies of physician so that if all of this stuff is turned off, you aren’t lost. You may be a little bit less to an advantage, but you still know how to navigate yourself, navigate as a physician. That same way if the GPS goes off, can I still navigate the city?

Maybe I won’t get there as fast as when the GPS is on, but am I completely lost? So I think we have to be mindful of that as for things that we’re, how we’re going about life and things that we’re learning and for our education system and for our kids or what have you. So I think it’s much easier from an individual perspective.

I don’t know how confident I am about where society is going to go or the choices they’re going to make as a whole.

FR:

It’s just a terrific read, captivating. Thank you so much, Justin Key, for talking with us here and much success with this book. It’s gotten a lot of raves.

JK:

Well, thank you so much. This was a great conversation and thank you for your really thoughtful questions about it.

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Segment Two: Nelson Delles

FR:

This book, Everyday Genius, is about hacks to boost your memory, also about, I’d say, living more effectively, solving problems, much more, as you say in the subtitle. But you are capable of things that truly seem superhuman, like memorizing the numbers on each side of a pi sequence, that’s PI, that’s thousands of numbers in on demand.

So you don’t have to be a savant to get good at remembering things at that level?

ND:

I don’t believe so. I think everybody can do the things I have taught myself with my memory. I never had a good memory growing up.

It was something that I was inspired to change and learned all about it and really started to work on it about 15 years ago. And my mind has been different ever since.

FR:

Yeah, it’s incredible. You’re really an athlete of the mind. You’re six times USA Memory Champion.

I’d just like to ask you first, what is it like to train for a memory competition and to attend one?

ND:

They are fascinating. At first glance, or first thought, you might think it’s just a room filled with people who have photographic memories, just naturally good memories, and it’s probably pretty boring. There’s some truths in there, but I’d say more than anything, it’s inspiring because you see what everyday people can do with their minds with a little bit of technique and practice.

Nobody in those rooms at these competitions actually has a photographic memory or will say that they have a good natural memory. They all will say the same thing, that they learned about memory techniques and they practice. And it’s all ages, kids in middle school, all the way up to seniors who just want to better their memory as they age.

And if you go to these competitions, it’s a bunch of different events where you’re obviously memorizing things under a timed condition. You’re memorizing decks of cards, you’re memorizing long strings of numbers, names and faces, poems, lists of words, all sorts of things. And yeah, over the years, it’s been around for 25 years, at the beginning, people weren’t doing all that incredible things.

But nowadays, records are being broken all the time and pushing the limits of what people think are possible with memory.

FR:

And you’re saying that actually people who are older can start when they’re older, or would you say it’s much more difficult?

ND:

I coach memory techniques. That’s part of what I do now. And all of my clients are such a variety of ages.

And I have plenty that are 60 plus, and they can learn to do these techniques just as good as anybody who’s younger. Sometimes the younger kids have less on their plates, so they have more time to dedicate and focus on training hard. But I’m currently working right now with an 89-year-old, and he is memorizing the periodic table, helped him memorize all of his peers and all the boards he’s on, all the names of people and their backgrounds.

It’s over hundreds of people that he has their names memorized. And he’s constantly telling me how he goes into these meetings, and he’s around his family and friends, and they’re just wondering what he’s on and how he can remember so many things at his age. So I think anybody can do it.

FR:

Well, that’s really inspiring. Now let’s start with a couple of techniques. Of course, the memory palace is a classic hack.

Explain it.

ND:

So memory palace is a technique to organize information in your mind in a way that makes it much, much easier to retrieve and recall. If you think about someone who might say, I’m forgetful, I forget things all the time, I have a bad memory. If you look at it a little closer, probably most of the problem comes from the recall, the ability to pull out the information that you want, that you know you know that you learned at some point, but you just can’t find it at the moment that you need it.

And sometimes, yes, there are things that you completely forget, and you don’t even remember that you once remembered it. But a lot of times, it’s that active recall, that retrieval process that is the problem. And that’s because nobody ever takes a second to think about how do I organize in my mind the things that I’m memorizing or trying to learn.

And so a memory palace is just that. It’s an organizational process to structure the information that you’re trying to memorize. And it basically works by you envisioning a physical place in your mind and a route through it.

And if you can imagine your house, which we all can because we live there and spend a lot of time there, you can store pictures of things that you’re trying to memorize along a path through your house. And then when you want to recall it, it’s like a little file cabinet. You know that you’ve stored that information in your house.

You just go to the front door of your house and walk through your house and pick up the pieces of the things you left there that represent what you memorized. It sounds tricky, but it’s actually way easier than most people think because it’s just something our brains are really, really good at, which is navigating spatial information in our minds, especially for familiar places too, like our homes.

FR:

But it’s not just that simple. There are some principles for making things more memorable in a memory palace. Is that right?

ND:

Right. So the memory palace itself is that structure, right? I talked about thinking of pictures for things.

That is also equally an important part of making something memorable. So whenever you’re trying to memorize anything, oftentimes, especially in 2026, things are abstract. They don’t hold much meaning.

And there’s so many new things flying at our brain, so many distractions. If you can turn those things that you’d like to memorize, whether it’s names, numbers, speeches, into very associative, meaningful images in your mind, you can remember them better. So the first step to memorizing anything is taking what you’re trying to remember and converting it into a mental image.

Our brain will remember pictures better. And if you can instill, like I said, this associative thing, so kind of link these things you’re trying to memorize to pictures of things that you know, that you are familiar with, that tickle your fancy, if you want to call it that, something funny or interesting or over the top, bizarre, even grotesque, those are the things that stick. And that’s a key principle to making things more memorable before you put it in the memory palace.

FR:

Now, at the risk of sounding incredibly uncreative, I’ve tried a memory palace before, and I have a hard time thinking up images that are striking. Is that something that just gets better with practice? Or am I just totally uncreative?

ND:

No, no. And that’s a funny thing that you bring that up, because I felt the same way when I started. You know, I was using an audio book of a former memory champion when I was brought through my first memory palace as an example.

And, you know, it felt great. And I could follow along. And his examples were fantastic.

But I thought the same thing. I was like, wow, I don’t know if I would have come up with those creative images. And so that was something that definitely came better with time.

You know, I find as I worked with all sorts of students, different ages, that younger children were phenomenal at this, because they don’t have any blinders up. They think of the silliest things. And it’s so memorable.

As people get older, they kind of have their minds set in their ways. And maybe they’re not so open to thinking so absurdly. It’s just not how they think.

So there’s a little more of a learning curve there to building on that creativity. But I definitely feel like as a byproduct of improving your memory or working on your memory, your creativity explodes. You know, some of the images that I come up with now are so effortless, and they’re always so memorable.

And I don’t have to try as hard. And I’ve heard that story from many other people who’ve trained their memory over the years.

FR:

You know, that brings up another question that I had. They say, you know, the brain games are just good for learning how to do that one thing. But if you’re training your brain to say, memorize numbers or to memorize your grocery list, does it also make your mind more powerful with other aspects of your life?

ND:

Yeah, I’ve seen so many benefits from just memorizing these very specific things. You memorize numbers, you memorize cards, names. I liken it to, you know, going to the gym where you focus on specific muscles, you do specific exercises to isolate your biceps and your quads and whatnot.

But in real life, you know, you’re never really doing a movement that’s just isolating one of those muscles. Usually, you know, when you’re out playing sport or running after your dog because he ran away, like your whole body is suddenly using all of these muscles, right? But because you trained in the gym, each one isolated as a whole, you’re now more prepared for this real life scenario, right?

And there’s other benefits that come from that. So same idea here with training memory, very specifically, these little brain games. Yes, you’re getting quite good at that one task.

But if you have a broad range of these different trainable skills that you’re practicing, you know, you build out a very rounded out memory that your everyday life can benefit from. And so that’s how I think the training can benefit your life. But there’s so many other things that come from having a better memory.

For one, I’d say the number one thing is confidence in just being able to navigate through life where there’s information everywhere, you know, stuff at work, stuff with your relationships, whatnot, there’s information always bombarding us. And if you know that your memory is solid, and that you have control over it, it’s not this kind of amorphous thing in your mind that you sometimes can rely on sometimes can’t, you don’t know. But if you can have that control, it’s such a powerful thing.

And you don’t have to worry about, oh, man, I’m going to forget this, or I’m a forgetful, I’m a goldfish, right? You can go on and focus on other things that are more important, knowing that information can lock away more securely in your mind.

FR:

And Nelson Dellis, this book, Everyday Genius, really talks a lot more than just memory. One of those that I’m especially was especially interested in, because I’m kind of dyslexic in math, I think it’s called dyscalculate. It’s about number sense.

And it was more like tricks and hacks on how to think about numbers, not necessarily how to remember numbers. And I found those things extremely helpful. Could you talk a little bit about training the number sense?

ND:

Yeah. So in my chapter on memory, yes, we do cover memorizing numbers. That’s one thing.

But you’re right. This number sense concept, I have a whole chapter just on mental calculation and little tricks to make numbers seem more friendly. Because I feel like that’s truly what number sense is.

It’s a comfortable relationship with numbers. And people have that to varying degrees. Some people don’t have it at all.

And it’s hard to say where that comes from exactly. But I think there’s a strong correlation between how you’re taught numbers. And then based on that, it’s how afraid of them you are or how welcoming you are to them in your life.

So for me, for example, I’ve always grown up loving math. And again, I don’t know exactly where that came from. Maybe I had the right teacher show me the right thing and encourage me in the right way.

But I went on to do physics and math and computer science for my degrees. My sister, on the other hand, hates numbers. You give her a basic addition problem, she can do it.

And I know she would be totally fine with it. But she has this thing in her mind where she hates that and she knows that she’s terrible at it. And so it feeds that story.

And so she just has accepted that she’s bad with numbers. But I don’t think she truly is. And I don’t think anybody is.

I think it’s just this relationship of number that needs to be worked on. And in this chapter, it’s all about introducing how to do basic calculations, little tricks that make it easier. And it should be the way that people think about how to do these calculations.

And the more you can play around with numbers in your mind, and you’re not so afraid of trying that, the more you build up your number sense. And the more you can navigate around numbers in day-to-day life and calculate with them.

FR:

Let’s talk about focus. You actually talk about meditation. And you say that most people think they have a motivation problem, when they actually have a focus problem.

So tell us about the issue with focus and how difficult it is these days. I mean, talk about multitasking as well.

ND:

Yeah, I have a whole chapter on basically focusing and paying attention and trying to get into that deep focus state or flow state, which is hard, harder and harder nowadays. We have so many distractions coming in at us and pulling at our attention. And these apps and programs that distract us are getting more and more in tune with how to distract us.

And it’s an uphill battle. But I think actually putting away those distractions and focusing on how your mind works and focuses is a super important thing to work on these days. And I talk about this idea of deep focus, where you might sit down to do some work, and you think you’re actually being productive, but you have so many things going on, you’re multitasking, you have this false sense of completing things, or being productive, right?

You’re watching a video on one screen while you’re typing an email. And the truth of it is nobody can multitask. People think that they can, but really what’s happening is you’re divvying up your focus, your attention sliver by sliver from one thing to the other, back and forth, back and forth.

And that’s a terrible thing to do because your brain does this little reset every time it switches. It’s this idea of task switching that is so disruptive. So if you just can eliminate everything and just do one task at a time, I know this sounds insane, but it’s also not insane.

It’s actually so obvious, right? That if you can sit down and focus on one thing, you’ll be way more productive with that one thing than if you’re trying to do more things at the same time.

FR:

Yeah. And actually you put it down to, it’s almost kind of like a dopamine addiction with multitasking. That especially since we have trained our brains to try to multitask, we get a little dopamine hit each time that we switch around that it becomes almost boring to focus, but it’s really not boring.

What are some of the ways that you suggest that people focus better?

ND:

Yeah. And I was going to say, you know, it’s easy to say what I just said that, oh yeah, don’t switch tasks. But as I said before that, there’s so many things vying for our attention that are much more algorithmic and smarter than us.

And we’re almost trying to fight this, that our primitive is sucked into things that are so well studied on how humans think and how to pull our focus away. So a lot of the chapter I spend mentioning tips on how to avoid task switching and to get into that deep focus state. So I am well aware that it’s not just an easy thing like, Hey, just do this.

I think there’s proactive things you can do to kind of fight this. One of them, and this is, I think an obvious step is to eliminate as best as you can, potential distractions, right? So being honest with yourself, you know, my phone, if I have it next to me while I’m trying to do my work, it is going to distract me.

There’s pings that go off, you know, it’s there and I know I can pick it up and text somebody or look at a video, just a press of the button. So put it somewhere else, right? You know, maybe putting it on, on silent is enough, literally put it outside of the room while you do your work in another room.

If you are one of these people with so many tabs open and you know that that says that you’re a very distracted person, then do enough to kind of close as many as you can, or just maybe try to do things analog instead of on your computer. If you can, if your workspace is a mess, try to clean it up. All these little things, there’s little adjustments you can make to the environment to make your focus states a little easier, less friction to get into.

Another great tip I think is something called a Pomodoro technique, which you know, has a fancy name and a very specific kind of outline to it. But generally what it is, is if you recognize that sitting down for a long period of time is difficult to focus, break it up into sections. So the Pomodoro technique specifically has you set a timer for 25 minutes.

And the idea is that for these 25 minutes, you just do the one task at hand. And the idea behind it is that, you know, anybody can focus for 25 minutes, right? Like that, that isn’t too hard.

And if 25 is too much, say 15 minutes, just get started on it, right? And literally no breaks on and no distractions, just that one thing. And then after the session is up 25 minutes, you can take a five minute break to step away before you then dive in and do another Pomodoro session.

And you can stack these and it’s super effective because, you know, in your mind, you’re kind of saying, okay, I can do 25 minutes. That’s easy. And then I’ll get a little break.

And then I’ll do it again. So there’s other techniques and tips in the chapter there, but those are kind of some of the most important things, I think.

FR:

And we don’t have time to go into everything you say in this book, and we leave it to our listeners to find out more. But I do have to say, it’s so much more than just a memory trick. As I said before, there’s a discussion of how to problem solve, about how to unleash your creativity or get it going when it seems to be stuck, how to make better decisions.

But the most unexpected chapter was the one on and I know you’re going to know what I’m going to say, remote viewing. Oh my goodness. First of all, you got into that in a pretty wild way.

Tell us what it is. And I mean, it just seems extraordinary your experience.

ND:

Yeah, no, I’m so excited. You asked me about that question. As stepping back from the book, the whole purpose of the book is to show in different aspects of mind and cognition, what we’re truly capable of, and that we all have this inner genius within us, whether it’s to have a better memory, to be better with numbers, to be more creative.

But then there’s also this kind of intangible thing that I think we all have, to an extent, which is intuition, and what that means, and how far you can push that. So I kept that at the end of the book, just because I do go out on a limb and talk about some things that sound maybe a little more woo woo than the rest of the book. But it is based on an experience that I have.

And I’m so happy to share it because I think there’s something there. And I think we all can relate to this concept of us having some kind of inexplicable gut sense that is at play when we think about things. And sometimes we listen to it more.

Sometimes we don’t. Some people are more in tune with it. Some don’t even think about it or ignore it.

But remote viewing is all about that intuition. It’s really just a fancy name for a protocol that some government programs in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that are declassified now, you can look them up about remote viewing. If you go to the CIA website, you can look this up.

But they had programs where they were teaching people how to develop their intuition. And this was called remote viewing. And what it is, is basically viewing things remotely, as implied.

But what that means really is being able to sense things outside of our normal means of sensory perception. So for example, in these programs, they would use it to gather intel. So during the Cold War, for example, they were looking into silos in Russia.

But these were psychics that were sitting in a room in Virginia doing this with no information other than using their intuition. And I know that sounds absolutely insane. But in the book, I talk about how I was taught how to remote view.

And I run the readers through some exercises that they could try themselves and see how more accurate it might be than it might seem to you. So I didn’t believe in this stuff. I didn’t give it any credence.

But I was approached because there was someone who wanted to train memory athletes how to remote view because there was some theory that maybe they’d be better at it because they’re so well trained mentally. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But nevertheless, I was taught for a month from a remote viewing coach how to do this process.

And at first, I just kind of rolled my eyes. I was like, this is absolutely nuts. Cool story.

But that’s all it is. And then slowly, I started to have these experiences where I couldn’t explain them other than there’s something going on here. I don’t know how to explain it.

I don’t know. I know I have physics background. So I like to be able to explain things, but I couldn’t explain it.

But doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to it if I can’t explain it. And I was really excited to write a whole chapter about it with some actual exercises that people could try and see for themselves.

FR:

They wanted you to be able to do some stock market prediction. Did that work out for you?

ND:

That’s right. They were trying to train us to do something called associative remote viewing where it’s for situations. It doesn’t have to be for trading.

You can do this for anything where there’s maybe like a binary outcome. Think like sports, team wins or loses, A or B. And you try to remote view a session where you’re trying to describe something that comes to you in intuition and you sketch it out and you describe it.

And then there’s random photos of anything associated with each outcome, outcome A, outcome B. And then whatever you remote viewed, it’s judged by an independent judge. Then that’s the prediction you make A or B.

And you don’t even know as a remote viewer what each image relates to. Somebody on the team has decided that and you don’t have any information on that. So it remains completely bias-free.

So yeah, we would do that for stock prediction. So whether a stock would go up or down. And we had a whole team of remote viewers that we’d gather the results from everybody.

And this trading firm would make bets on the market as we did this process. I can’t really share too much on how it went, but at the very base of everything, it was an incredible experience. It changed my whole worldview perception on this.

FR:

Well, it’s interesting because I guess I’m one of those people who does have a sense like that. And I’ve known it for a very long time since I was a kid. So over the years, I’ve learned to trust my intuition.

And of course, prediction markets are very big deal now. In fact, I was just reading something today about AI being better than humans, getting better than humans at prediction markets, which is a strange thing because I think of intuition as very much an embodied thing, a bodily thing. That’s how I tune in.

Does this feel literally in my gut as if it’s going to happen? And of course, I can’t predict all things. But when I get that feeling, I know it’s right.

So it’s very interesting. I mean, computers do it because they’re taking in a huge amount of information. People must be...

What is your thought about how intuition actually does work? Is there information that we are privy to that we don’t know we’re privy to?

ND:

That’s a great question. And I don’t have the answer. I have some ideas.

What’s interesting when you talk about AI, some people in the remote viewing world have tried to code AI or tools to remote view and they are terrible at it. It seems and I feel like this is the case that intuition is something that is connected to consciousness. And if it isn’t conscious, I don’t think it has this ability.

And I think what the ability is, is to connect to information. And I think information is all around us in more ways than we can imagine and that we can see. And when we remote view or when we intuit, we are connecting to it as if it were a signal out there that we’re turning our little radio receiver into.

And I don’t think it’s an ability that we’ve trained very well. I think it has a small effect, but I think it is something that you can train. I think everybody can relate to this idea of having an intuition, intuitive feeling, a gut feeling, and it being right from time to time.

So imagine being able to train that and where that might take you. And that’s where you start to fall into where remote viewing excels. Yeah, I really think that it’s tied to consciousness.

And as of now, I’m not convinced that we will make machines conscious. We might get the appearance that they are, but I don’t know if they’ll truly embody that.

FR:

Well, Nelson Dellis, your book is Everyday Genius, Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More. It’s just been a delight to talk with you and likewise to read your book.

ND:

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you as well.