#1 Memory Expert: How to Think Clearly When You’re Put on the Spot

The Jefferson Fisher Podcast

In this episode of The Jefferson Fisher Podcast, memory expert Jim Kwik shares practical strategies to improve mental clarity, focus, and performance under pressure. Drawing

Key takeaways

• Memory is not innate—it's trainable; there's no such thing as a good or bad memory, only trained or untrained memory.
• The brain performs best when it's regularly exercised through deliberate practice, much like physical fitness.

Main topics

• Improving memory through training
• The power of pause in high-pressure situations

Notable quotes

"There's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's a trained memory and an untrained memory."

"Your brain grows through stressors, but what happens when AI removes all the friction?"

Conclusion

Jim Kwik's message is clear: mental performance can be dramatically improved through consistent,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) I don't want humans become more artificial because the danger is not cognitive offloading, it's the trend towards cognitive surrender. If it's thinking for us, then what happens to a society that can't critically think? Is the reliance on AI making our brain weaker or stronger? Your brain grows through stressors, but what happens when AI removes all the friction? There was a recent MIT study and the students had to write communication essays. Group A used ChatGPT, Group B used Google, and Group C neither. Which one had the most? cognitive engagement. It was the one that did the work themselves. What's more interesting for me was, is there a reason that our inner self-talk is usually harsher? emotional thinking about this. I had some severe learning challenges after my traumatic brain injury at five. I was called broken by a teacher in front of the whole class when I was nine. I was called the boy with the broken brain. That label became my limit. With the brain injury, it was one limitation. Far greater limitation was the conversation I was having inside my own head. Your brain is this incredible supercomputer and your self-talk is a program overrun. People come to me and say, I have a horrible memory. I'm just too old. And I would say the same thing. I would say, stop. There's no such thing as a good or bad memory. There's a trained memory and untrained memory. How do we stop our Speaker 2 (1:09) minds from going blank what causes our brain to underperform what is the number one thing that somebody can do that's going to start improving their brain yeah absolutely i've never talked about this but this is what i do personally How do we stop our brains from forgetting what we want to say in Speaker 1 (1:28) the moment? Well, I feel like sometimes we don't rise to the level of our aspirations or expectations. We fall to the level of our training. And it's especially more difficult when you're under pressure. It's like if you have a fire extinguisher in your home and there's an emergency fire, it's one thing to know where it is. It's another in the moment to think about. what to do when you're under literally in this kind of bad storm and there's family and everything's going on. And sometimes maybe people feel like that in the conversation. Maybe they've read your book or listened to podcasts and they know what to do, but they're able to kind of retrieve it when they need it the most. Or maybe it's at their tip of their tongue and they can't get it out. Um, so I would say that, um, a lot of it is this context learning where things get mapped over and it's, it's all practice, right? It's all rehearsal. So for example, um, let's say, uh, the power of the pause. We had you on our podcast. We were talking about the power of a pause. So you're not reacting. Um, you're, you're, you're, you're thoughtfully responding to somebody, right? Um, let me be that. People know that because they read it and they heard it and they saw the video. But in the moment, when they're in a spirited debate, that doesn't even register in the moment. So I would say the practice is what happens because all athletes do mental rehearsal, right? Pilots have a checklist that they go through. You know, musicians still... you know, practice their scales because they want it to come. So not because, I mean, they're successful, but they still practice that because they want it to come without thinking about it. So it's automatic. Like it's almost an unconscious habit. So I would say, for example, with the power of the pause, I would practice pausing. Like, so it's all about triggers, right? You know, something reminds you of something else. So even something silly, a mental exercise, every time you reach for a door handle, just pause. right every single time your phone rings train yourself to pause so yeah how you do that when you do those things repeatedly you get better at it just like with a meditation i don't meditate become enlightened. I meditate because when I'm quiet and my thoughts go somewhere else, I don't want it to go. I could pull it back to a mantra. I could pull it back to my breath and I built a mechanism and I've trained myself. So when I'm stressed or somewhere else, my mind gets distracted when I'm on zoom or I'm with my kids. Yeah. I have a mechanism and then train, rehearse. to be able to do that activity and get that result. So for example, you train it, that's one thing. Or even something silly, like when I train people, I'm one of those guys that get from an audience and memorize 100 people's names and it wasn't always that way because I had a traumatic brain injury and I had very severe learning difficulties, very poor memory. But I would say that you could use your imagination. Like imagine you're with somebody and they start getting heated up. This is kind of silly, but this will work, I promise you. When people are getting heated up and you want a reminder to pause, just imagine when that person's getting heated that all of a sudden there's a big, that heat is turning all red and it's creating a red pause button on their forehead. And here's Speaker 2 (4:38) the Speaker 1 (4:38) thing, when you see that, it'll make you laugh, it'll break your state, which is very useful between stimulus and response. There's that space, as Viktor Frankl talks about. But I would say when that button appears, you can't respond until you hit that button mentally. And then you hit that button in your imagination, and then it reminds you to take a pause, and then you could speak. So it's all about, and that's important in neuroscience because it's how habits are formed. You know, there's always a trigger that creates some kind of behavior. It's nice when you could choose those triggers and whether it's a trigger of training, like touching the door and remind yourself to pause, the phone rings, pause, or visualizing a pause button on that person's forehead to kind of interrupt the pattern, the state, but also to remind you you can't speak until you... hit the button and take your own pause. What Speaker 2 (5:32) I hear you saying is if you plan to only say it or do it for the conversation, Speaker 2 (5:39) most likely you're going to have a far less chance of actually remembering to do it unless you apply these skills outside of the conversation. I Speaker 1 (5:51) do believe it maps over how you, how you do a lot of how you do something is how you do a lot of things, right? You know, even, even the meditation example I use, it helps me to focus, but it maps over into other areas when I'm reading. I don't. You never read a page in a book and forgot what you just read because your focus is not there. But I think focus is a muscle. I also feel like memory is a muscle too. There's no such thing as a good or bad memory. It's been my experience after 35 years that there's a trained memory and there's an untrained memory. A trained and an untrained memory. Absolutely, because it's not taught in school, right? School teaches you what to learn, what to remember, what to think, but there are not a lot of classes on how to learn. or how to remember. I didn't take that course or how to think. How to study. All right, how to study. How to listen to the teacher. Yeah, how to actually do school. Yeah, like going to a student or even an adult and saying, focus or remember this is like going to someone saying, play the didgeridoo or the ukulele who's never taken any kind of class on how to do that. And that's the challenge is more of that 20th century education where you cut. taught the what math, history, science, Spanish, but not the how. And I think it's a very important skill to have today because the world is, the what's always going to change. It's always going to be updated, you know, outdated also as well. So our ability to learn, to unlearn, to be able to relearn, I think is one of the most valuable skills today, especially in an age of AI. For the person listening Speaker 2 (7:20) and they say, okay, I resonate. with Jim on, yeah, when I go into that conversation, I have everything prepared in my mind and then I'm in that moment and I know I read it in a book somewhere, I saw it on something and all of a sudden it's just gone. I first want to know, why does that happen? Why do we lose our train of thought? And is there a reason why some people lose their train of thought easier than... others yeah Speaker 1 (7:46) absolutely uh well the goal is to be more mentally fit just like uh people are physically fit they exercise and they eat right and they sleep right and they could get for better performance at work or at play um we don't exercise our minds the same way or at least as structured, because we don't see it. Like in photos on social media, I always point it to my brain or I always have a brain on my shirt to remind people. Because what you see, you take care of. It's in your awareness. You see your clothes, your car, your air. You tend to take better care of it. But we don't see the thing that takes care of us, right? So I Speaker 2 (8:21) would Speaker 1 (8:21) say, number one, a good habit is to love your brain. Just fall in love with your brain. Start loving your brain. But the other thing is I feel like it's lost because all learning and performance is state dependent, meaning that especially under stress, like one of the challenges a lot of people come to us for for coaching. I have a lot of TED speakers memorize their speech because a lot of it has to be verbatim. Actors memorize, you know, 30 pages of scripts on can set. A lot of people can remember things, but under the challenges, how why people forget part of the reason is is this is just uh i would say pressure like it would be stress yes right because chronic stress will put you in that middle brain like it uh your amygdala is firing off and uh if you're in fight or flight you're not in flow right you're not accessing your executive functioning like when you're in fight or flight it's like you're hold held hostage and you're just in survival mode and it holds and keeps you away and holds you hostage from executive functioning good decision making good problem solving being present being able to focus being able to even be compassionate also as well so it's the stress that's keeping i would say that would be one thing absolutely i think another one could also be their beliefs around their memory Like some people believe and they've rehearsed forgetting. Like the fear of public speaking, which we know is one of the preeminent fears people have, right? Being seen in front of an audience. But I think underlining that is they wouldn't have that same intensity of fear if they were confident they would remember what they needed. do and say. And I feel like a lot of people mentally rehearse failure unconsciously. So it's like they visualize it where they are failing and they are forgetting. And, you know, it's interesting, you know, when the brain is mapped, you know, under scans that the mind doesn't know the difference between something that's vividly imagined, something that's real, right? People do. There's a study at University of Chicago where they took three groups of people, A, B, and C, and had them do free throws, basketball. And they... you know, they measured how well they did. And then they said, okay, great. For 30 days, group A, we want you to practice for an hour a day. Go out on the court, you know, shoot your shots. Group B, we want you to just practice mentally. So don't go out on the court, don't touch a ball, but just rehearse that you're successful for an hour a day making these shots. And then group C, they took and they said, don't practice at all, right? They followed up 30 days later, group A improved 26%. right? Which is obvious being a practice makes progress. Group C who didn't practice made no progress. Same exact scores, right? Group B who just practice in their mind, never touched the ball physically improved 24%. Oh, Speaker 2 (11:09) wow. Speaker 1 (11:09) Just a 2 % difference. And this has been repeated. And so the idea here is mental rehearsal. plays a bigger role than most people think. Obviously, they use it in athletics, but sometimes we use it against us because sometimes we're rehearsing our fears of forgetting. And so I think, number one, people are forgetting when they need it because they're stressed. Number two, sometimes they've rehearsed failure unconsciously or consciously, especially at things that have bigger stakes, like something at work or some kind of toast at a wedding or whatever it happens to be. um a third one is interference sometimes we're just distracted you know like even when people forget people's names which i think is one of the most important business etiquette you know, networking skills there is, right? How are you going to show someone you're going to care about their business, their future, their finances, what their family, if you don't care enough, just remember them. But a lot of times they aren't even present to remember a name. What are they doing? They're thinking about how they're going to respond or looking around the room, seeing who else is important and all that. And the art of memory is the art of attention. The art of memory is the art of attention. And a lot of people are just starting to observing. Speaker 2 (12:16) And Speaker 1 (12:16) so they're not even forgetting it. They're just never even... hearing the thing to begin with. Yeah. So what Speaker 2 (12:22) I'm distilling Speaker 1 (12:23) and what we like to do Speaker 2 (12:24) a lot on this show is to be able to kind of collaborate, collaborate, collaboratory. I need my brain. Speaker 1 (12:32) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Opened Speaker 2 (12:34) to collaborate. Yeah. On. Speaker 2 (12:38) How the advice we're going to give on especially this big question I have is how do we stop our brain from forgetting what we want to say in the moment? What I hear you saying is one, it's Speaker 1 (12:49) a Speaker 2 (12:49) stress issue. The people feeling the stress and the key being not to avoid the stress. Because the stress is going to happen. Sure. Because a lot of people say, well, how do I just not be stressed in the moment? And that's the wrong question to ask. I think people could. mitigate it to an extent, certainly. But certainly there are external things that we can't control. The feeling of pressure, that feeling of, you know, all of a sudden you get butterflies or that lump in your throat. That's going to happen because there's bad stress and good stress. And so what I hear you saying is to actually also practice, let's say rehearse that stress. in any way you can replicate it uh to where like i think of like olympic skiers you know if you if you've seen them before they go down they're like practicing yeah all their stuff because they have it already they're already going down the slope in their right right and so if we kind of do that in our mind before we're about to have a hard conversation and not seeing it as we're failing in all the ways we're going to fail yeah but keeping our mind on how we're going to get down the slope no matter the the pressure is that resonating and Speaker 1 (14:07) and i like it because like when i'm when i'm even setting my own goals or working with clients to achieve their goals i'm spending less time visualizing like the goal itself like like like the book written right right what i'm visualizing are the habits and the activities that will make that book inevitable so it's kind of like um a lot of people let's say they have they struggle with creativity or or they can't get themselves to just start something right um like for me you could visualize if they wanted to be an author for example they can imagine themselves and what i would rehearse it was not just visualizing the the best-selling book i would be visualizing opening up my laptop at a certain time in the morning. Oh, okay. Because what it does, most people have heard of neuroplasticity, right? Neuroplasticity is our brain's ability to make new connections through stimulus, through novelty. and proper nutrition. It's just like a muscle. You give it novelty to grow it and you give it exercise and then you give it nutrition to be able to nourish it. Same thing with your mental muscles, right? And so Hebb's Law is basically neurons that fire together, they're wired together. So imagine going through a forest and you kind of pave a trail. After doing it repeatedly every single day, it becomes almost like a highway, right? And it's kind of like how our brain works. Right through through repetition, creating a new neural path. Yeah. Which could be a new thought, a new belief. It can be a new identity. It can be new habit or behavior like brushing your teeth with the other hand. Yeah, I love I love that. Yeah, it's interesting. I started talking about this like over 30 years ago as far as we do a speed reading program, but just to engage a different part of your brain. But I also do it because of these viral videos about eating with the opposite hand and stuff like that. But what it does is it you know what it does besides potentially stimulating a different part of your brain, it forces you to be present because you're probably not great at brushing your teeth with the opposite hand. Like, Speaker 2 (16:05) functionally present, too. Yeah. As Speaker 1 (16:07) opposed to your mind wandering. And again, that's the other thing. Like, when you could train yourself to be focused when you need it most, you're going to retain more because you're going to be paying attention. As opposed to being driven to distraction. Yeah. Like, you wake up in the morning and the first thing we do is flex our distraction muscles, right? We grab