Step Into My Memory Palace

If you’re like me, you have trouble remembering things from time to time, or if you are a lot like me, pretty much all the time. I cannot count the number of times I have been mid-sentence and forgot where I was trying to go. I have tried all sorts of memory techniques, from mnemonics to even treading so far out into the unimaginable territory of writing things down. I want to share one technique with you that has helped me immensely: the memory palace.

This is a time-honored technique that can help you remember a vast and detailed list of things that you want to remember. It has been featured on the show “Sherlock,” but this technique has its roots planted far deeper than in the Victorian era. The Greek poet Simonides is credited to have devised the method

In the aftermath, Simonides helped identify the bodies by recounting where each of the guests were sitting. While doing so, he had an epiphany that he could use a similar spatial method to remember less morbid tidbits as well.

This technique works for a very specific reason. The hippocampus primarily constructs memories based on boundary perception. It constructs spatial scenes and defines everything within those boundaries relative to everything else. For us, this means that we can optimize our ability to create strong memories by taking advantage of this.

Building off of this, some of our strongest memories are tied with the places we are most familiar with. For a long time, I studied my dreams through inducing lucid dreams. I found that the places I was most familiar with always looked relatively the same, but the farther away I would travel from my house or school or wherever I spent a lot of time, the more distorted the world would become from reality.

I have always attributed this to how much information we must have encoded for a particular area. When our brains don’t have enough information to recall for a specific scene, it fills in the blanks with what it can generate on the fly. I have actually done experiments with how my dreams would construct themselves based on what I deliberately planted in my short term memory, but that’s a story for another time.

Returning to the topic on hand, since we have so much information for those places we are most familiar with, we can create strong, meaningful memories by creating a relationship between what we want to remember with those details. Since you have so many associations with, say, your house, you don’t need to try as hard to remember a series of scenes you construct in your head.

Using myself as an example, last night I created a series of fictional events in my head to help remember what I was going to do today. In this scene, I woke up and immediately ran down the stairs, a reminder to go on a run first thing in the morning. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I opened the door and found myself face to face with Sherlock Holmes, who promptly reminded me to write this article. I turned right into the bathroom, where I found toilet paper with a long list written on it; a reminder to do that paperwork I have been putting off. Suddenly, I turn to find some Norwegians in my bathtub, who obviously jump start my memory to practice my languages after that.

The list goes on, but it is easy to see how you can quickly recall a long series of information simply by creating a story built from scenes you are intimately familiar with. You don’t need to string to hard to thing what comes next, because you automatically know what must logically happen. You know the layout of your house, which makes imagining major changes easy to remember. It’s easy to add details to this as well, which makes it great for writing things in my head and jotting them down when I am free to do so.

Overall, I have been able to remember a lot more since practicing this technique. It’s automatic because it takes advantage of the way our brains inherently create and store memory. Little tools like this may not make a huge difference, but it certainly makes things easier, so add it to your toolbox and see what you can do with it!