Memory Palace: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Boost your memory with this ancient technique
🏷️ Categories: Memory.
The average person spends 40 days a year remembering things they had forgotten.
Joshua Foer was an ordinary person, one of those people who forget things.
He was a popular science writer, and one day, while researching memory for one of his articles, he realised something: anyone with the right training could have an extraordinary memory.
Intrigued, he decided to see if it was true.
After a year of training, he went from having an ordinary memory to winning the US Memory Championship and smashing the previous record.
What did Foer discover that made such a dramatic change?
And more importantly, what can we learn from this story?
Brain differences
Foer discovered a crucial difference between trained people and ordinary people.
Research using magnetic resonance imaging to compare brains showed that memory specialists had differences at the brain level.
During the memorisation process, more brain regions were activated (Dresler et al., 2017; Wagner et al., 2021). These individuals used the hippocampus to memorise, which made them remember better and longer (Maguire et al., 2003). The main function of this region is spatial orientation (Bellmund et al., 2016) (as we seen before) so that memory experts navigated their data like walking through a palace.
The Memory Palace.
What is the Memory Palace?
It is the technique Foer used to shatter the memory record.
It is an ancient memorisation technique that converts abstract information into images and places them in an organised mental space. It has been used for over 2000 years by people like Cicero, because at a time when information was not just a click away, it was crucial to store data in your head.
This ‘palace’ can be anywhere: your home, a library or an imaginary place.
The key is to associate the information with specific elements of this space.
This works for a reason. While remembering a list of facts can be difficult, our minds are very good at remembering images and locations. Memories are made up of 2 parts (Schacter, 1982).
Cue: Contextual stimuli (places, smells, sounds...).
Engram: The datum.
By combining both parts and not just trying to remember a list of facts, the Memory Palace becomes the ultimate tool for memorisation.
Remembering only the data (engram) is what most of us do, but the trick is to enhance the cue part. Trying to create a multi-sensory memory in your memory is the trick Foer used. The more cues you can remember, the easier it will be for the memory to be fixed in your memory.
What does it smell like?
How does it feel?
What does it sound like?
What time was it?
Where were you?
Let's do an example to help you understand the idea:
Suppose your memory palace is your current home.
Take a moment to imagine the place. Mentally, walk from the street to your front door, trying to remember as many details as possible. Imagine that you need to buy 2 loaves of bread today. Visualise the loaves of bread as you would see them in the shop, but mentally place them in the hallway on a table, for example.
Ready?
OK, now let's boost the memory cues. How about imagining 2 huge baguettes in the corridor? Maybe you can imagine the smell of freshly baked bread and the sound of the crunchy texture of the bread as you bite into it.
When you leave work and head home, visit your memory palace and, as you open the door, you will instantly remember the bread. What are you more likely to remember, a fact: buying bread, or that there are 2 huge, freshly baked, crispy loaves of bread on your corridor that you bought on your way home from work today?
If you know how to enhance the cue and the engram, you boost your memory.
The role of memory
Memory is undervalued nowadays, its capacity is less and less appreciated.
But the reality is that we are what we remember we were. We are nothing more than a skein of memories that intertwine to define our behaviour and personality. Every new idea that emerges when you connect memories, the history, the culture we share, all this and much more is born of memory.
But how fragile it is. It fades at an unsettling pace in this world that invites quick clicks and no effort to remember what you saw 5 minutes ago. Perhaps the only thing we really carry with us is memory: a map.
A map that tells us where we come from and where we are going.
People, experiences, traditions, moments, your identity, your life... it's memory.
✍️ Your turn: Did you know this technique? What do you do to remember better?
💭 Quote of the day: ‘When information goes in one ear and out the other, it's usually because there's nothing to hold on to. Joshua Foer.
Want to learn more? You have the complete series of articles on memory here.
See you next time! :)
References 📚
Bellmund, J. L., Deuker, L., Schröder, T. N., & Doeller, C. F. (2016). Grid-cell representations in mental simulation. eLife, 5. URL
Cicero, De oratore.
Dresler, M., Shirer, W. R., Konrad, B. N., Müller, N. C., Wagner, I. C., Fernández, G., Czisch, M., & Greicius, M. D. (2017). Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227-1235.e6. URL
Foer, J. (2011). Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
Maguire, E. A., Spiers, H. J., Good, C. D., Hartley, T., Frackowiak, R. S., & Burgess, N. (2003). Navigation expertise and the human hippocampus: A structural brain imaging analysis. Hippocampus, 13(2), 250-259. URL
Schacter, D. L. (1982). Stranger Behind the Engram: Theories of Memory and the Psychology of Science.
Wagner, I. C., Konrad, B. N., Schuster, P., Weisig, S., Repantis, D., Ohla, K., Kühn, S., Fernández, G., Steiger, A., Lamm, C., Czisch, M., & Dresler, M. (2021). Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci. Science Advances, 7(10). URL
I have researched this process and agree it works.
I think the biggest factor is being distracted. When first trying to learn and implement the training “Squirrel!!!“ Syndrome is a natural hindrance people have to learn to ignore and control.
Enjoyed the post.