In short: Most memory advice gives you a list and leaves you to forget it. In this London Real clip, Jim Kwik does something smarter: he gives you ten habits for a sharper brain, then teaches you a 2,500-year-old technique to remember all ten in a few minutes. Brian Rose recites the whole list back at the end, without notes.
It’s one of the most-watched London Real clips of all time. Here’s a guide to the ten steps and the memory method behind them.
▶ Watch the full episode: Jim Kwik – Unleash The Genius Within You
Key takeaways
- There is no magic memory pill. Kwik says a sharper brain comes from processes and habits, not shortcuts.
- Ten habits support the brain. His list covers brain food, killing automatic negative thoughts, exercise, nutrients, peer group, a clean environment, sleep, brain protection, new learning and stress management.
- Use a memory palace. The method of loci, traced to the Greek poet Simonides, attaches each idea to a stop on a route you already know.
- Make the images silly. In Kwik’s words, information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory, which is why playful images stick.
- Habits shape who you become. His closing line: first you create your habits, and then your habits create you.
The 10 keys to a “Kwik brain”
Kwik’s starting point is that there is no magic pill. “There’s no magic memory pill,” he says, but there are processes. He asks viewers to rate themselves from zero to ten on each one:
- Good brain food. What you eat matters to your grey matter. He mentions blueberries (“brain berries”), avocados, healthy fats, walnuts and dark chocolate.
- Kill the ANTs. Automatic negative thoughts. Whatever you rehearse in your head, you wire your brain to get more of.
- Exercise. Move your body to help your brain.
- Brain nutrients. Kwik is clear he isn’t a nutritionist. His advice is to see a doctor and get a blood test rather than guess.
- A positive peer group. You tend to become like the people you spend time with.
- A clean environment. A tidy desk, but also clean air and water.
- Sleep. Sleep is when short-term memories become long-term ones. He also tells the stories of ideas that came in dreams, from Frankenstein to “Yesterday”.
- Brain protection. Wear a helmet, and think about how close you keep your devices at night.
- New learning. Novelty builds new connections in the brain at any age.
- Stress management. Meditation, yoga, massage: whatever brings you down from fight-or-flight.
The memory palace: how to remember all ten
The second half of the clip is the real lesson. Kwik tells the story of Simonides, a poet in ancient Greece. Simonides was the only survivor when a banquet hall collapsed, and he identified the victims by remembering where each one had been sitting. The idea he gave us is now called the method of loci, or the memory palace.
Our brains are good at remembering places, Kwik explains, because our ancestors needed to know where the water, food and danger were. So you pick a route you know and attach one idea to each stop. Kwik walks Brian through his own office in New York:
- the parking lot hosts a food fight with brain foods;
- on the bridge, you stamp on giant ANTs;
- in the elevator, someone is doing burpees;
- the hallway floor is covered in vitamin bottles;
- the closet is full of your happiest friends;
- the receptionist is obsessively cleaning;
- in the fish tank, the fish are asleep in pyjamas;
- you open the door by headbutting it in a helmet;
- the whiteboard says “new learnings” in red;
- and you meditate on prickly bonsai trees.
The images are deliberately silly. Kwik’s reason: “Information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.” The fastest learners are children, he points out, because they play.
Why this works for talks and presentations
Kwik recommends the technique for anyone giving a talk without notes. If a question throws you off, you just walk back to the last “place” you were in. He also makes a bigger point about work: as more jobs are automated, creativity, imagination and strategy are the skills that make us more human, and this kind of exercise trains all three.
His closing line is a good summary of the whole clip: “First you create your habits, and then your habits create you.”
Who is Jim Kwik?
Jim Kwik is a brain coach, memory expert and author of the bestseller Limitless. After a childhood head injury left him struggling at school, he taught himself speed reading and memory techniques, and has since coached CEOs, athletes and Hollywood actors. This clip comes from his first London Real episode, recorded in 2018. He came back in 2019 to go deeper on memory: Jim Kwik – How To Master Your Memory.
See every Jim Kwik episode on his guest page: Jim Kwik on London Real.
More on London Real
Frequently asked questions
Jim Kwik is a brain coach, memory expert and author of the bestseller Limitless. After a childhood head injury left him struggling at school, he taught himself speed reading and memory techniques, and has since coached CEOs, athletes and actors.
It comes from his first London Real episode, recorded in 2018 and released as Jim Kwik – Unleash The Genius Within You. He returned in 2019 for How To Master Your Memory.
Good brain food, killing automatic negative thoughts, exercise, brain nutrients, a positive peer group, a clean environment, sleep, brain protection, new learning and stress management.
Also called the method of loci, it means picking a familiar route and attaching one idea to each place along it. Kwik traces it to Simonides, a poet in ancient Greece.
He says he is not a nutritionist and advises seeing a doctor and getting a blood test rather than guessing.
Transcript
Transcript: Jim Kwik – 10 Steps To Improve Your Memory (And How To Remember Them All)
0:00 Jim Kwik: I’m going to share with you the 10 keys to unlock what I call your Kwik brain. These are 10 things scientifically shown to help you be faster, smarter and better, to optimise your brain health and your fitness. Nobody’s going to debate any of them. People will say “yes, of course”, but common sense is not common practice.
0:15 Jim Kwik: So I’m going to ask people watching to rate yourself from 0 to 10 on each one: how well am I doing in this area, in terms of how I’m eating or exercising? Everyone wants to know the magic pill. There’s no magic memory pill, but there are magic memory processes. Everyone wants the one silver bullet, but you have to do all of these things. And I’ll teach you how to memorise them, so we can do it together.
0:52 Jim Kwik: Number one is good brain food. You are what you eat, and what you eat matters, especially to your grey matter. We did a whole episode on my top 10 brain foods. There are certain foods that are really good for your brain: blueberries, which I call brain berries, avocados and good fats. They’re very neuroprotective. That includes dark chocolate. What’s good for your mood is generally good for your mind. So rate yourself from zero to ten: how good is your diet?
1:39 Jim Kwik: Number two is killing ANTs: automatic negative thoughts, your self-talk. Rate yourself zero to ten. Maybe go on a cleanse. We cleanse the food we put in our body, but what about the thoughts? Thirty days of no negative thoughts, no complaining. People get addicted to complaining, and whatever you’re rehearsing, you’re wiring your brain to get more of. It’s not just the law of attraction, there’s a law of action going on. All behaviour is belief-driven.
2:24 Jim Kwik: They say a coward dies a thousand times in their mind, and a brave person dies just once. Every time you rehearse “I’m scared of public speaking”, you get the fear every single time, because your mind doesn’t know the difference between something vividly imagined and something real. If you put on a brain-sensing device, the same parts of your brain light up whether a dog walks in or you imagine a dog walking in. Imagination is the most powerful tool you have.
3:02 Jim Kwik: Don Miguel Ruiz, who wrote The Four Agreements, was at an event of mine. I asked him what his superpower was, and he said, “Jim, my superpower is everyone’s superpower here: imagination.” Knowledge is what is, but imagination is what could be.
3:16 Jim Kwik: There’s a study called the counterclockwise study, by Ellen Langer at Harvard. In 1979 she took eight men from a nursing home and put them in a monastery decorated as if it were 1959: Time magazine covers from 1959, black-and-white television shows, no mirrors. The men walked in with canes, and they were tested on focus, senses, memory and physical strength. A control group was put in a room that wasn’t decorated and told to reminisce about 20 years earlier.
4:13 Jim Kwik: One week later, the men came out and didn’t even look like the same guys. Many of them walked out without their canes. Their sight was better, their hearing was better, they had stronger muscles. And when a focus group who knew nothing about the study saw before and after photos side by side and was asked which one was younger, a hundred percent chose the photo taken after just seven days. That’s the power of imagination. Our thoughts are things. So don’t use your imagination to rehearse your fears. Only think about the things you want to happen.
5:11 Jim Kwik: Number three is exercise. We know that. Number four is brain nutrients. A lot of people travel and have fast-food lifestyles, and maybe they’re lacking certain nutrients. I’m not a nutritionist, so go to a good functional medicine doctor and have a blood test. Same with diet: do a food sensitivity test and see what your blood says. Red, stay away; yellow, sparingly; green, see how you flourish. Same with your nutrient profile: if you’re low on B vitamins or DHA, you can have cognitive issues.
5:57 Brian Rose: I was low on B12 when I was training for the Ironman, being vegan. Once I took the supplement, everything changed, including my motivation.
6:08 Jim Kwik: Exactly, it’s a huge factor for cognition. The fifth thing is a positive peer group. Who you spend time with is who you become. That’s not just a positive-thinking quote. You have mirror neurons in your nervous system. When you watch a sport or a movie, you feel what they feel. We’re always imitating people: their habits, behaviours and thought patterns. That’s why they say you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you’re around nine broke people, you’ll be the tenth. Analyse your social networks: whether or not you smoke has less to do with your neurology and more to do with whether your friends’ friends smoke.
7:06 Jim Kwik: Sixth, a clean environment. At an anecdotal level, when you clean your desk or your laptop, you get clarity of thought. But I also mean clean air and clean water, because a lot of pollutants aren’t good for your cognition.
7:23 Jim Kwik: Number seven, sleep. This is a big one for so many people. How’s your sleep, Brian?
7:32 Brian Rose: It’s getting better. I’ve always tried to hack it and work on the screens and the blue light, but it can be better.
7:38 Jim Kwik: Sleep is important for your brain for three reasons. Number one, it’s where you consolidate short-term into long-term memory. Everyone who pulled an all-nighter at university hurt themselves, because you need that sleep. Number two, it’s when your brain clears out the plaque linked to brain ageing; that’s what the latest research is saying. Number three, we need to dream.
8:02 Jim Kwik: You don’t know how many ideas, inventions, works of literature and art came in dream states. Here in London, Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley in a dream. Paul McCartney came up with “Yesterday” in a dream. A chemist came up with the periodic table in a dream, and Elias Howe created the sewing machine in a dream. When you’re working and learning all day, your brain is more active at night than people realise. It’s coming up with solutions and integrating things in the form of dreams. Most people forget their dreams when they wake up. In my morning routine episode I talk about the first thing I do: six steps to remember my dreams, because there are gems in there.
9:04 Jim Kwik: Number eight is brain protection. I work with a lot of high-performing athletes, and concussions are a big deal. I’ve had a number of traumatic brain injuries myself. And it’s not just that: I did a whole episode on electromagnetic fields. Our brains never had electricity right next to them before smart devices, and I read recently that ninety percent of kids sleep with their phones under their pillows. Who knows the effect of that? Better to avoid it. Protect your brain, wear a helmet.
9:45 Jim Kwik: Number nine is new learning. Neurogenesis means you can create new brain cells until the day you die, which science never used to think. Neuroplasticity means you can create new connections. Einstein’s brain wasn’t bigger than ours, it was actually smaller, but parts of it were very highly connected because of his thought experiments. Every time you have a new thought, you can create new connections. Two things improve neurogenesis and neuroplasticity: novelty and nutrition. Just like training your body, you give it a novel stimulus and then feed it.
10:26 Jim Kwik: Finally, number ten: stress management. Stress is invisible. You don’t realise how much stress you’re under until you’re on vacation or getting a massage. It’s like the fish that doesn’t see the water. So what are you doing to cope? Meditation, relaxation, massage, yoga, whatever it is.
10:51 Jim Kwik: So those are the ten keys. Now I’m going to teach people how to memorise all ten in a few minutes. This is a great technique for when you give a talk or a presentation and don’t want to rely on notes. If you’re on stage and someone asks a question, you come back and think “where was I?” This tells you exactly where you were.
11:29 Jim Kwik: It’s a 2,500-year-old technique from ancient Greece. A Greek orator, Simonides, was giving a poetry reading. When he left, the building collapsed and killed everyone inside. He was the lone survivor, and he was able to help the families identify their loved ones because he remembered where they were all sitting. We do the same thing: think of a recent dinner party, and you can remember who sat on your left and right. As hunter-gatherers we didn’t need to memorise numbers and words. We needed to remember where things were: the clean water, the fertile soil, the food, the enemy tribe. So we store things in places.
12:07 Jim Kwik: I’m going to walk everybody through my office and designate ten places, then put one brain tip on each place. That uses visualisation and location, two huge principles of memory. By the way, if you’ve ever said “in the first place” or “in the second place”, that phrase comes from this technique.
12:47 Jim Kwik: Take a deep breath and, if it’s safe, close your eyes. Imagine you’re on a plane to our office in Westchester, New York, a suburb of New York City. It lands at Westchester Airport, a car picks you up, and you’re in the back seat on your way to my office. The first place is the parking lot. Say it out loud: the parking lot. When you get out, the first brain tip is waiting for you: a big brain buffet. Blueberries, avocados, green leafy vegetables, walnuts (they even look like brains), dark chocolate, turmeric, which lowers inflammation. You’re having a big brain-food fight in the parking lot. You might think this is childish, but who are the fastest learners? Children. Be playful.
13:52 Jim Kwik: Number two: there’s a waterfall that creates a moat around the building, and you cross a bridge. The second place is the bridge. Say it out loud. As you cross the bridge, you’re killing ANTs, stepping on automatic negative thoughts the size of rats. Use your imagination: that’s your superpower.
14:16 Jim Kwik: From there you go into the building. The third place is the elevator. Say it out loud, so you use your auditory memory too. You walk into the elevator and start exercising: your personal trainer is in there, maybe you’re doing yoga or burpees. See it and feel it.
14:41 Jim Kwik: You get out of the elevator into the fourth place, the hallway, and all over the floor are bottles of brain vitamins: omega-3s, DHA, ginkgo biloba, B vitamins, B12. You’re jumping over them like Indiana Jones or Lara Croft.
15:12 Jim Kwik: You open the door to the office, and immediately to the left is the fifth place, the closet. You open the closet, and inside is your fifth brain tip: your positive peer group. All your happy friends are in the closet having an amazing time, high-fiving each other, encouraging you, challenging you, cheering you on. You’re halfway there.
15:39 Jim Kwik: The sixth place is the receptionist, and the receptionist is cleaning the environment: changing the air filters, vacuuming, mopping. Everything is obsessively clean.
15:59 Jim Kwik: Behind the receptionist is the seventh place, a beautiful tropical fish tank, and in there you’ll remember sleep. See Nemo and Dory sleeping, but not just regular sleep: they’re in pajamas, snoring in bunk beds. If it makes you laugh, good. Information alone is not memorable. Information combined with emotion becomes a long-term memory.
16:27 Jim Kwik: From there you walk to the classroom for our speed-reading class. The door to the classroom is the eighth place. It’s locked, so how do you open it? You put on your helmet, which reminds you to protect your brain, and you headbutt the door open. It shatters everywhere, but the helmet is what you want to remember.
16:50 Jim Kwik: Right up front is the ninth place, a whiteboard. I’m there teaching you, and I’m writing two words: new learnings. What’s your favourite colour?
17:12 Brian Rose: Red.
17:13 Jim Kwik: So I’m writing “new learnings” in red, because new learning drives neurogenesis and neuroplasticity. There was a study of nuns on the cover of Time magazine, nuns living into their 80s, 90s and beyond. About half of their longevity was linked to their faith and gratitude, and the other half to being lifelong learners. I just talked about this in Sardinia, which is one of the Blue Zones.
17:38 Jim Kwik: Finally, on the side of the classroom are all these bonsai trees, and you need to picture stress management. Imagine meditating or getting a massage, but you have to do it on the bonsai trees, so it’s a little prickly. Whatever gets you out of stress. Now open your eyes.
18:12 Brian Rose: That was fun.
18:13 Jim Kwik: It’s a great exercise in focus, creativity and imagination. And on a meta level: jobs in the 21st century are going other places. AI is coming, everything will be automated or outsourced. So where’s the potential for growth in your career as an entrepreneur? Three areas computers won’t duplicate any time soon, that make us more human, and that I’d double down on: creativity, imagination and strategy. These exercises aren’t just to help you learn what I wanted to teach you. They exercise your creativity and imagination muscles with a step-by-step strategy: you imagine it, you link it, and you put it in a place.
19:23 Jim Kwik: So now you’re giving your TED talk, you have your 18 minutes, and you want to talk about the 10 keys to unlocking your Kwik brain. The research says about one-third is determined by genetics and biology, and two-thirds is in your control. These are the two-thirds. Let’s walk around my office and say it out loud.
19:47 Jim Kwik: Number one isn’t the place, the parking lot. What are you doing there?
19:53 Brian Rose: Brain food.
19:54 Jim Kwik: Perfect. The second place is the bridge, and the brain tip is?
20:02 Brian Rose: I’m squashing the ANTs.
20:04 Jim Kwik: Squash those automatic negative thoughts. You go into the building and get into the elevator, and what are you doing in the elevator?
20:14 Brian Rose: Exercising.
20:15 Jim Kwik: Burpees: great for the brain, they get your heart rate going, especially first thing in the morning. You get out into the fourth place, the hallway. What’s all over the floor?
20:30 Brian Rose: Supplements. Brain nutrition.
20:34 Jim Kwik: That’s number four. You go into my office, and to the left is the fifth place. You open up the…
20:40 Brian Rose: The closet. My peer group is in there, all getting along, having fun.
20:47 Jim Kwik: Positive friends are good for your brain. You get out of the closet and talk to the…
20:52 Brian Rose: The receptionist. They’re keeping everything clean: the air, the water, the environment.
21:02 Jim Kwik: And behind the receptionist is the…
21:04 Brian Rose: The fish tank. They’re sleeping. They’re getting the deep sleep.
21:11 Jim Kwik: Then you go to the class and open up the…
21:14 Brian Rose: The door, with my head. I thought I’d lost that one, but I got it. I’m careful with my brain: no brain injuries, because I’m wearing the helmet.
21:22 Jim Kwik: And immediately at the front of the classroom, I’m drawing on the…
21:26 Brian Rose: The big whiteboard, and it says “new learnings” in big red letters.
21:31 Jim Kwik: New learning is good for the brain. And finally, number ten, what’s on the side?
21:34 Brian Rose: All those bonsai trees. Stress management: I’m meditating on the bonsai.
21:39 Jim Kwik: Stress is good for fight or flight, physically, but not if you need to take a test or give a presentation at work. Those are the ten keys to unlocking your Kwik brain.
21:51 Jim Kwik: And notice: you could do all of that but not sleep, and you’re not in good shape. Everyone wants to know the one thing. You could do all of that and be deficient in B12, or be with energy vampires who suck the mental energy out of you, and then wonder why you have brain fog. Every single thing is important. Genius leaves clues; it’s not a mystery, we just have to do it. First you create your habits, and then your habits create you.
