Dylan Kistler

Board Certified Behavior Analyst, tabletop game designer, and Learning Sciences and Special Education researcher.

B.S. in Cognitive Studies, Economics and Creative Writing, Vanderbilt University.

M.A. in Educational Psychology (concentration in Special Education).

“For a decade, I’ve been fascinated by learning, especially as it pertains to play, games, and neurodiverse populations. Typical limitations on my working memory - the information a brain can hold and use for a current task - have always forced me to do extensive note taking during creative endeavors. Even then, those notes often cannot be called to mind immediately when needed. I offloaded a lot of critical information to my notebooks for when I (hopefully) reviewed them, and the benefits to my memory of having handwritten notes still had mixed results in allowing me to recall a helpful idea at the perfect time. Furthermore, as a designer of tabletop games, I see many children and adults with neurotypical and neurodiverse brains alike feeling frustrated learning the rules to games or applying themselves to working memory-intensive tasks in their academic or professional life.

Ted approached me early in his research for the Mental Atlas. Through regular correspondence with Ted, I was able to follow his research and help iterate on this new learning technique. After seeing him pass benchmarks not achievable by most memory champions in a short amount of time, I knew I needed to try the technique myself to see if Ted’s brain was simply extraordinary, or if the his Mental Atlas technique was the real deal.

I’ve now gotten to apply the Mental Atlas to a wide variety of use cases, from storing lists of key ideas, to reading comprehension for academic articles, to finding insights across a list of my detailed personal goals. The sensation of using the Mental Atlas - where your attention snaps to relevant information stored as effortlessly as snapping to images of furniture in your own home - is incredible.

It’s unusual how everyone I know engages in important tasks using their memory - from school, to the workplace, to personal creative projects, to mastering a new hobby or game - and almost none of them use evidence based memory techniques. This suggests to me that existing techniques are not well adjusted for many everyday uses. Yet, working on applying the Mental Atlas to new situations, I have found the learning curve to be shockingly easy. As a growing number of strangers in memory and cognition interest groups testify to the effectiveness of using the Mental Atlas for incredibly diverse tasks, I am more and more convinced that this technique can be of practical benefit to those willing to try a unique, efficient approach to using their memory more intentionally.”