Use this Sherlockian trick to improve your memory
If you have seen the BBC adaptation of Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch, you are probably familiar with a technique called the “mind palace”.
In the show, Holmes appears to visit an imaginary place in his mind where he performs associations between words, places, and objects, until he finds the information he wants to remember.
Despite appearing in a fictional TV show, this technique actually exists and is one of the older known mnemonic techniques.
How does the “mind palace” technique work?
The “mind palace” memory technique is also known as the method of loci, which was used as a rhetorical technique by Roman speakers so they could remember and recite long speeches.
Generally, the first step is to imprint a series of places on the memory. Common place systems that people imagine are architectural, such as a house with a variety of rooms and different spaces, decorated with statues and other ornaments.
The next step involves inserting images related to the thing you want to remember. The more absurd the images, the easier it is to remember too.
For example, if you want to remember the phrase, “The world is suffering due to the pandemic of the new coronavirus”, you could imagine a globe sitting on a couch in the lounge room, sneezing and coughing while being tormented by the image of a giant coronavirus.
For the technique to work, a person would “walk” through their imagined house, observe the objects in each of the rooms, and establish a story so they can remember what they want.
As another example, imagine you want to remember a shopping list that includes bananas, milk, eggs, and cheese. To remember the items and the order they appear in, you could imagine walking around a particular room and seeing bananas sitting in armchairs and drinking milk. After that, you walk down the hallway and see a picture hanging on the wall of a family of eggs on holiday. Then, when you turn into the next room on the right, you find a cheese sleeping soundly in bed.
Though distributing objects throughout your imagined house is part of the technique, the key component is the narrative created from the relationship between what you want to remember and the spatial arrangement within the “mind palace”.