February's snippets are ready!

This month, we're going to delve into math and memory techniques you may have thought were too dificult to develop. With sufficient practice, however, they become powerful additions to your mental toolkit!

• One of the main reasons people want to improve their memory is so they can recall names and faces. This appears difficult to many people, because of the social pressure involved, and the apparent difficulty of connecting a name with the face. As USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis will show you, it's not as difficult as you may think:



• Another memory skill that comes across as impressive is memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards, especially when you can do it in under 60 seconds. Over at the Four-Hour Work Week blog, they have a wonderfully vivid tutorial on memorizing the order of a shuffled deck. They use the easy-to-understand analogy of a software purchase. They start your new brain software off will a trial version they call “Bicycleshop Lite,” where you get the basic process down of memorizing shuffled cards. Once you've done that, you're ready for “Bicycleshop Pro,” which improves your speed. Need some incentive to learn this feat? They're offering $10,000 to the first person who masters it from their tutorial!

• For those who have mastered squaring 2-digit numbers, you might have wondered about taking numbers to higher powers in your head. To do that, you'll need to develop a few other skills. First, you should know the binary equivalents of the numbers 2 through 10 from memory, as well as getting comfortable squaring 3-digit numbers (Video tutorial: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Being able to multiply 3-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers is also helpful.

Once you develop those skills, the following video will teach how to bring them together to take any small number to any small power in your head:



• Multiplying numbers by themslves repeatedly is one thing, but how about multiplying any 2 numbers together in your head, up to, say, 7 digits? YouTube user Joesph Alexander has a series of tutorials on how to develop your mental multiplication skills to this level. He starts by teaching how to handle 2- to 4-digit numbers (presentation, explanation), then moves you up to 5-digit numbers (presentation, explanation).

When you're comfortable with doing those type of problems in your head, you're ready to move up to 7-digit numbers (presentation - shown below, explanation):



Try picking just one of these skills to develop, and you just may amaze yourself at how far you can go!