Imagine for a second that Eckhart Tolle wasn’t a spiritual teacher, but a deep cover operative with a gun to his head.
And just for a second, pretend that Tolle’s Power of Now wasn’t a way to find peace, but a survival mechanism used to slow down time when your reality is collapsing. And your memory has been utterly destroyed by forces beyond your control.
Until a good friend helps you rebuild it from the ground up.
These are the exact feelings and sense of positive transformation I tried to capture in a project I believe is critical for future autodidacts, polymaths and traditional learners:
Vitamin X, a novel in which the world’s only blind memory champion helps a detective use memory techniques and eventually achieve enlightenment.
It’s also a story about accomplishing big goals, even in a fast-paced and incredibly challenging world.
In the Magnetic Memory Method community at large, we talk a lot about the habits of geniuses like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
We obsess over their reading lists and their daily routines because we want that same level of clarity and intellectual power.
But there’s a trap in studying genius that too many people fall into:
And helping people escape passive learning is one of several reasons I’ve studied the science behind a variety of fictional learning projects where stories have been tested as agents of change.
Ready to learn more about Vitamin X and the various scientific findings I’ve uncovered in order to better help you learn?
Defeating the Many Traps of Passive Learning
We can read about how Lincoln sharpened his axe for hours before trying to cut down a single tree.
But something’s still not quite right.
To this day, tons of people nod their heads at that famous old story about Lincoln. Yet, they still never sharpen their own axes, let alone swing them.
Likewise, people email me every day regarding something I’ve taught about focus, concentration or a particular mnemonic device. They know the techniques work, including under extreme pressure.
But their minds still fracture the instant they’re faced with distraction.
As a result, they never wind up getting the memory improvement results I know they can achieve.
So, as happy as I am with all the help my books like The Victorious Mind and SMARTER have helped create in this world, I’m fairly confident that those titles will be my final memory improvement textbooks.
Instead, I am now focused on creating what you might call learning simulations.
Enter Vitamin X, the Memory Detective Series & Teaching Through Immersion
Because here’s the thing:
If I really want to teach you how to become a polymath, I can’t just carry on producing yet another list of tips. I have to drop you into scenarios where you actually feel what it’s like to use memory techniques.
That’s why I started the Memory Detective initiative. It began with a novel called Flyboy. It’s been well-received and now part two is out. And it’s as close to Eckhart Tolle meeting a Spy Thriller on LSD as I could possibly make it.
To teach through immersion.
Except, it’s not really about LSD.
No, the second Memory Detective novel centers around a substance called Vitamin X.
On the surface, it’s a thriller about a detective named David Williams going deep undercover.
In actuality, it’s a cognitive training protocol disguised as a novel. But one built on a body of research that shows stories can change what people remember, believe, and do.
And that’s both the opportunity and the danger.
To give you the memory science and learning research in one sentence:
Stories are a delivery system.
We see this delivery system at work in the massive success of Olly Richards’ StoryLearning books for language learners. Richards built his empire on the same mechanism Pimsleur utilized to great effect long before their famous audio recordings became the industry standard: using narrative to make raw data stick.
However, a quick distinction is necessary.
In the memory world, we often talk about the Story Method. This approach involves linking disparate pieces of information together in a chain using a simple narrative vignette (e.g., a giant cat eating a toaster to remember a grocery list).
That is a powerful mnemonic tool, and you will see Detective Williams use short vignettes in the Memory Detective series.
But Vitamin X is what I call ‘Magnetic Fiction.’
It’s not a vignette. It’s a macro-narrative designed to carry the weight of many memory techniques itself. It simulates the pressure required to forge the skill, showing you how and why to use the story method within a larger, immersive context.
So with that in mind, let’s unpack the topic of fiction and teaching a bit further. That way, you’ll know more of what I have in mind for my readers.
And perhaps you’ll become interested in some memory science experiments I plan to run in the near future.
Illustration of “Cafe Mnemonic,” a fun memory training location the Memory Detective David Williams wants to establish once he has enough funds.
Fiction as a Teaching Technology: What the Research Says
This intersection of story and memory isn’t new territory for me. Long before I gave my popular TEDx Talk on memory or helped thousands of people through the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass, live workshops and my books, I served as a Mercator award-winning Film Studies professor. In this role, I often analyzed and published material regarding how narratives shape our cognition.
Actually, my research into the persuasion of memory goes back to my scholarly contribution to the anthology The Theme of Cultural Adaptation in American History, Literature and Film. In my chapter, “Cryptomnesia or Cryptomancy? Subconscious Adaptations of 9/11,” I examined specifically how cultural narratives influence memory formation, forgetting, and the subconscious acceptance of information.
That academic background drives the thinking and the learning protocols baked into Vitamin X.
As does the work of researchers who have studied narrative influence for decades. Throughout their scientific findings, one idea keeps reappearing in different forms:
When a story pulls you in, you experience some kind of “transportation.”
It can be that you find yourself deeply immersed in the life of a character. Or you find your palms sweating as your brain tricks you into believing you’re undergoing some kind of existential threat.
When such experiences happen, you stop processing information like you would an argument through critical thinking.
Instead, you start processing the information in the story almost as if they were really happening.
As a result, these kinds of transportation can change beliefs and intentions, sometimes without the reader noticing the change happening.
That’s why fiction has been used for:
Even many national anthems contain stories that create change, something I experienced recently when I became an Australian citizen.
As I was telling John Michael Greer during our latest podcast recording, I impulsively took both the atheist and the religious oath and sang the anthem at the ceremony.
All of these pieces contain stories and those stories changed how I think, feel and process the world.
Another way of looking at story is summed up in this simple statement:
All stories have the same basic mechanism. But many stories have wildly different ethics.
Teach memory improvement methods robustly. Protect the tradition. And help people think for themselves using the best available critical thinking tools.
And story is one of them.
6 Key Research Insights on Educational Fiction
Now, when it comes to the research that shows just how powerful story is, we can break it down into buckets.
Some of the main categories of research on fiction for pedagogy include:
1) Narrative transportation and persuasion
As these researchers explain in The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives, transportation describes how absorbed a reader becomes in a story.
Psychologists use transportation models to show how story immersion drives belief change. It works because vivid imagery paired with emotion and focused attention make story-consistent ideas easier to accept.
This study of how narratives were used in helping people improve their health support the basic point:
Narratives produce average shifts in attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and sometimes behavior.
Of course, the exact effects vary by topic and the design of the scientific study in question. But the point remains that fiction doesn’t merely entertain. It can also train and persuade.
2) Entertainment-Education (EE)
EE involves deliberately embedding education into popular media, often with pro-social aims.
In another health-based study, researchers found that EE can influence knowledge, attitudes, intentions, behavior, and self-efficacy.
Researchers in Brazil have also used large-scale observational work on soap operas and social outcomes (like fertility). As this study demonstrates, mass narrative exposure can shape real-world behavior at scale within a population.
Stories can alter norms, not just transfer facts from one mind to another. You’ll encounter this theme throughout Vitamin X, especially when Detective Williams tangles with protestors who hold beliefs he does not share, but seem to be taking over the world.
3) Narrative vs expository learning (a key warning)
Here’s the part most “educational fiction” ignores:
Informative narratives often increase interest, but they don’t automatically improve comprehension. As this study found, entertainment can actually cause readers to overestimate how well they understood the material.
This is why “edutainment” often produces big problems:
You can wind up feeling smarter because you enjoyed an experience. But just because you feel that way doesn’t mean you gain a skill you can reliably use.
That’s why I have some suggestions for you below about how to make sure Vitamin X actually helps you learn to use memory techniques better.
4) Seductive details (another warning)
There’s also the problem of effects created by what scientists call seductive details.
Unlike the “luminous details” I discussed with Brad Kelly on his Madness and Method podcast, seductive details are interesting but irrelevant material. They typically distract attention and reduce learning of what actually matters.
As a result, these details divert attention through interference and by adding working memory demands.
The research I’ve read suggests that when story authors don’t engineer their work with learning targets in mind, their efforts backfire. What was intended to help learners actually becomes a sabotage device.
I’ve done my best to avoid sabotaging my own pedagogical efforts in the Memory Detective stories so far. That’s why they include study guides and simulations of using the Memory Palace technique, linking and number mnemonics like the Major System.
In the series finale, which is just entering the third draft now, the 00-99 PAO and Giordano Bruno’s Statue technique are the learning targets I’ve set up for you.
They are much harder, and that’s why even though there are inevitable seductive details throughout the Memory Detective series, the focus on memory techniques gets increasingly more advanced. My hope is that your focus and attention will be sharpened as a result.
5) Learning misinformation from fiction (the dark side)
People don’t just learn from fiction.
They learn false facts from fiction too.
In this study, researchers found that participants often treated story-embedded misinformation as if it were true knowledge.
This is one reason using narrative as a teaching tool is so ethically loaded. It can bypass the mental posture we use for skepticism.
6) Narrative “correctives” (using story against misinformation)
The good news is that narratives can also reduce misbelief.
This study on “narrative correctives” found that stories can sometimes decrease false beliefs and misinformed intentions, though results are mixed.
The key point is that story itself is neither “good” or “bad.”
It’s a tool for leverage, and this is one of the major themes I built into Vitamin X.
My key concern is that people would confuse me with any of my characters.
Rather, I was trying to create a portrait of our perilous world where many conflicts unfold every day. Some people use tools for bad, others for good, and even that binary can be difficult for people to agree upon.
Pros & Cons of Teaching with Fiction
Let’s start with the pros.
Attention and completion:
A good story can keep people engaged, which is a prerequisite for any learning to occur. The transportation model I cited above helps explain why.
The Positive Side of Escapism
Entering a simulation also creates escapism that is actually valuable. This is because fiction gives you “experience” without real-world consequences when it comes to facing judgment, ethics, identity, and pressure-handling.
This is one reason why story has always been used for moral education, not just entertainment.
However, I’ve also used story in my Memory Detective games, such as “The Velo Gang Murders.” Just because story was involved did not mean people did not face judgement. But it was lower than my experiments with “Magnetic Variety,” a non-narrative game I’ll be releasing in the future.
Lower Reactance
Stories can reduce counterarguing compared with overt persuasion, which can be useful for resistant audiences.
In other words, you’re on your own in the narrative world. Worst case scenario, you’ll have a bone to pick with the author.
This happened to me the other day when someone emailed to “complain” about how I sometimes discuss Sherlock Holmes. Fortunately, the exchange turned into a good-hearted debate, something I attribute to having story as the core foundation of our exchange.
Compare this to Reddit discussions like this one, where discussing aspects of the techniques in a mostly abstract way leads to ad hominem attacks.
Propaganda Risk
The same reduction in counterarguing and squabbling with groups that you experience when reading stories is exactly what makes narratives useful for manipulation.
When you’re not discussing what you’re reading with others, you can wind up ruminating on certain ideas. This can lead to negative outcomes where people not only believe incorrect things. They sometimes act out negatively in the world.
The Illusion of Understanding
Informative narratives can produce high interest but weaker comprehension and inflated metacomprehension.
I’ve certainly had this myself, thinking I understand various points in logic after reading Alice in Wonderland. In reality, I still needed to do a lot more study. And still need more.
In fact, “understanding” is not a destination so much as it is a process.
Misinformation Uptake
People sometimes acquire false beliefs from stories and struggle to discount fiction as a source.
We see this often in religion due to implicit memory. Darrel Ray has shown how this happens extensively in his book, The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.
His book helped explain something that happened to me after I first started memorizing Sanskrit phrases and feeling the benefits of long-form meditation. For a brief period, implicit memory and the primacy effect made me start to consider that the religion I’d grown up with was in fact true and real.
Luckily, I shook that temporary effect. But many others aren’t quite so lucky. And in case it isn’t obvious, I’ll point out that the Bible is not only packed with stories.
Some of those stories contain mnemonic properties, something Eran Katz pointed out in his excellent book, Where Did Noah Park the Ark?
The “Reefer Madness” Problem
While working on Vitamin X, I thought often about Reefer Madness.
In case you haven’t seen it, Reefer Madness began as an “educational” morality tale about cannabis.
It’s now famous largely because it’s an over-the-top artifact of moral panic, an example of how fear-based fiction can be used to shape public belief under the guise of protection.
I don’t want to make that mistake in my Memory Detective series. But there is a relationship because Vitamin X does tackle nootropics, a realm of substances for memory I am asked to comment on frequently.
In this case, I’m not trying to protect people from nootropics, per se.
But as I have regularly talked about over the years, tackling issues like brain fog by taking memory supplements or vitamins for memory is fraught with danger.
And since fiction is one of the most efficient way to smuggle ideas past the mind’s filters, I am trying to raise some critical thinking around supplementation for memory.
But to do it in a way that’s educational without trying to exploit anyone. I did my best to create the story so that you wind up thinking for yourself.
What I’m doing differently with Vitamin X & the Memory Detective Series
I’m not pretending fiction automatically teaches.
I’m treating fiction as a delivery system for how various mnemonic methods work and as a kind of cheerleading mechanism that encourages you to engage in proper, deliberate practice.
1) Concentration meditation.
Throughout the story, Detective Williams struggles to learn and embrace the memory-based meditation methods of his mentor, Jerome.
You get to learn more about these as you read the story.
2) Memory Palaces as anchors for sanity, not party tricks.
In the library sequence, Williams tries to launch a mnemonic “boomerang” into a Memory Palace while hallucinatory imagery floods the environment.
Taking influence from the ancient mnemonist, Hugh of St. Victor, Noah’s Ark becomes a mnemonic structure. Mnemonic images surge and help Detective Williams combat his PTSD.
To make this concrete, I’ve utilized the illustrations within the book itself.
Just as the ancients used paintings and architectural drawings to encode knowledge, the artwork in Vitamin X isn’t just decoration. During the live bootcamp I’m running to celebrate the launch, I show you how to treat the illustrations as ‘Painting Memory Palaces.’
This effectively turns the book in your hands into a functioning mnemonic device, allowing you to practice the method of loci on the page before you even step out into the real world.
Then there’s the self-help element, which takes the form of how memory work can help restore sanity.
A PTSD theme runs throughout the Memory Detective series for two deliberate reasons.
First, Detective Williams is partly based on Nic Castle. He’s a former police officer who found symptom relief for his PTSD from using memory techniques. He shared his story on this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast years ago.
Second, Nic’s anecdotal experience is backed up by research.
And even if you don’t have PTSD, the modern world is attacking many of us in ways that clearly create similar symptom-like issues far worse than the digital amnesia I’ve been warning about for years.
We get mentally hijacked by feeds, anxiety loops, and synthetic urgency. We lose our grip on reality and wonder why we can’t remember what we read five minutes ago.
That’s just one more reason I made memory techniques function as reality-tests inside Vitamin X.
3) The critical safeguard: I explicitly separate fiction from technique.
In Flyboy’s afterword, I put it plainly:
The plot is fictional, but the memory techniques are real. And because they’re real, they require study and practice.
I believe this boundary matters because research shows how easily readers absorb false “facts” from fiction.
4) To help you practice, I included a study guide.
At the end of both Flyboy and Vitamin X, there are study guides.
In Vitamin X, you’ll find a concrete method for creating a Mnemonic Calendar.
This is not the world’s most perfect memory technique. But it’s helpful and a bit more advanced than a technique I learned from Jim Samuels many years ago.
In his version, he had his clients divide the days of the week into a Memory Palace. For his senior citizens in particular, he had them divide the kitchen.
So if they had to take a particular pill on Monday, they would imagine the pill as a giant moon in the sink. Using the method of loci, this location would always serve as their mnemonic station for Monday.
In Vitamin X, the detective uses a number-shape system.
Either way, these kinds of techniques for remembering schedules are the antidote to the “illusion of understanding” problem, provided that you put them to use.
They can be very difficult to understand if you don’t.
Why My Magnetic Fiction Solves the “Hobbyist” Problem
A lot of memory training fails for one reason:
People treat it as a hobby.
They “learn” techniques the way people “learn” guitar:
By watching a few videos and buying a book. While the study material sits on a shelf or lost in a hard drive, the consumer winds up never rehearsing. Never putting any skill to the test. And as a result, never enjoying integration with the techniques.
What fiction can do is create:
That’s the point of the simulation.
You’re not just reading about a detective and his mentor using Memory Palaces and other memory techniques.
You’re watching what happens when a mind uses a Memory Palace to stay oriented.
And you can feel that urgency in your own nervous system while you read.
That’s the “cognitive gym” effect, I’m going for.
It’s also why I love this note from Andy, because it highlights the exact design target I’m going for:
“I finished Flyboy last night. Great book! I thought it was eminently creative, working the memory lessons into a surprisingly intricate and entertaining crime mystery. Well done!”
Or as the real-life Sherlock Holmes Ben Cardall put it the Memory Detective stories are:
…rare pieces of fiction that encourages reflection in the reader. You don’t just get the drama, the tension and the excitement from the exploits of its characters. You also get a look at your own capabilities as though Anthony is able to make you hold a mirror up to yourself and think ‘what else am I capable of’?
A Practical Way to Read These Novels for Memory Training
If you want the benefits without the traps we’ve discussed today:
Read Vitamin X for immersion first (let transportation do its job).
Then read it again with a simple study goal.
This re-reading strategy is important because study-goal framing will improve comprehension and reduce overconfidence.
During this second read-through, actually use the Mnemonic Calendar.
Then, test yourself by writing out what you remember from the story.
If you make a mistake, don’t judge yourself.
Simply use analytical thinking to determine what went wrong and work out how you can improve.
The Future: Learning Through Story is About to Intensify
Here’s the uncomfortable forecast:
Even though I’m generally pro-AI for all kinds of outcomes and grateful for my discussions with Andrew Mayne about it (host of the OpenAI Podcast), AI could make the generation of personalized narratives that target your fears, identity, and desires trivial.
That means there’s the risk that AI will also easily transform your beliefs. The same machinery that can create “education you can’t stop reading” can also create persuasion you barely notice.
Or, as Michael Connelly described in his novel, The Proving Ground, we might notice the effects of this persuasion far more than we’d like.
My research on narrative persuasion and misinformation underscores why this potential outcome is not hypothetical.
So the real question isn’t “Should we teach with fiction?”
Will we build fiction that creates personal agency… or engineer stories that steal it?
My aim with Flyboy, Vitamin X and the series finale is simple and focused on optimizing your ability:
If you want better memory, this is your challenge:
Don’t read Vitamin X for entertainment alone.
Read it to see if you can hold on to reality while the world spins out of control.
When you do, you’ll be doing something far rarer than collecting tips.
You’ll be swinging the axe. A very sharp axe indeed.
And best of all, your axe for learning and remembering more information at greater speed will be Magnetic.
The post A Thriller That Teaches Memory: The Science Behind Vitamin X appeared first on Magnetic Memory Method - How to Memorize With A Memory Palace.
