Welcome to The Memory Palace: The Place Where People Come To Dream

Before I start, I’d like to just refer back to my previous posts on the value of emotions in learning. After reading my ‘Self-Taught Teacher’ post, a friend of mine recommended that I look up something called the affective context model; which I Googled and immediately recognised. To be more specific, it was this video that I recognised. I had seen this video on memory a while back, but I forgot (does that count as situational irony?); anyway, credit where credit’s due, this guy gives a slightly more scientific explanation of what I've been discussing. Thanks to Chris as well, for reminding me of it.

Today, I want to continue with my little series on memory by passing on a memory retention technique I first read about in Derren Brown’s book ‘Tricks of the Mind’. Just for the purpose of testing, and to give you a way of judging exactly how well the method I am about to teach you works, I’d like you to take thirty seconds to try and memorise as many things as possible from the list below. Please don’t just skip over them and keep reading, actually read them and try to remember them. It won’t take long and it really will help you to appreciate the method I’m about to discuss.

1. Camera
2. Mug
3. Birthday
4. Book
5. Guitar
6. Cat
7. Pencil
8. Anniversary
9. Apple
10. Toilet roll
11. Hammer
12. Newspaper
13. Milk carton
14. Donkey
15. Snow globe
16. Easter
17. Ninja
18. Dinosaur
19. Duster
20. Paper

Now you’ve had your thirty seconds or so to memorise the list, put it out of view (turn away or minimise the window for a minute) and try to remember as many things as you can without looking at the list. It might help here to write the items down on a piece of paper or in a word processing program if you don’t have paper and pen to hand. Go ahead; I’ll still be here when you get back.

So how did you do (write down how many you got; you’ll want it later)? I suspect you didn’t remember many, and almost certainly not all of them; if you did, you must be either some kind of autistic savant, or a liar. Or you already know a similar method to the one I am about to impart.

Today, I want to continue with my little series on memory by talking about the loci system of remembering things, often referred to as the memory palace. The loci system is a way of remembering things by placing them into a mental projection of an environment, or ‘loci’. For example: You might try remembering a shopping list by picturing the items placed around a room; Cheese on the armchair, celery on the bookshelf, and so on. Once you have sufficiently locked in these images in your mind, you can then return to that image at a later date to recall the information.

The trick to this system is really the locking in of the images, and there are a few tricks that will help in this respect. As I’ve mentioned before, emotions are a great aid in remembering things and, by making your images emotionally striking, you can improve your recall of items in an environment. You might, for example, imagine a large cheese cartoon character sitting in the armchair, smoking a pipe, and reading War and Peace (funny enough?); or a giant stick of celery being used as a bookmark in one of the books on the bookshelf. Try to make the images vivid in your mind; imagine colours as being very bright, and try to add smells or sounds. Try to make the object large, not so large it takes over the room and interferes with other items being remembered, but large enough to fill a chair, cupboard, or window for example. The image also really needs to be interacting environment in a memorable way for it to be attached (such as the cheese being in the armchair and the celery being in the book).

It’s also a good idea to try and stick to existing places. The problem with inventing rooms yourself is that it can be hard to create a solid consistent image, meaning that something you use as an anchor in that room might be there on one occasion but not there the next time you imagine it, because you haven’t set it as a definite feature. That’s not to say you can’t invent your own rooms, but you need to really lock down the contents and layout before you can use it as a loci. For the same reason, you should also avoid attaching things to features that are inconsistent in the real environment. Generally large furniture isn’t moved around too much, so things like sofas, bookcases, and fridges tend to be safe bets. Don’t attach the image to something like a book or a lamp (unless you know that that lamp always is, and will be, there) since these things can be easily moved or even taken out of the room. It might be worth pointing out something mentioned in the video on affective context that I linked at the top of the page. In the video it mentions the idea that something like the train journey to work will essentially be averaged out over time so that we end up mostly remembering the things we see consistently. This rule could be applied to a room you see often. If you’re asked to recall the layout of a room you will most easily recall objects and features that are always there. This is a good thing to consider when picking your locations.

So where do you start? Well I’d say start with your home. This tends to be the place most people have a strong mental image of simply because they’ve spent a lot of time there over the years. You can also use any other particularly memorable place such as the house you grew up in, the school you went to, or even just an especially impressive or interesting building that you‘ve visited. All that matters is that you have strong memories of the location. I play a lot of video games numerous times and, whilst I haven’t personally tried it, it should be theoretically possible to use virtual spaces such as these to aid in memory. In fact, the neurochemical reactions that games can create could help to provide a rich environment for planting your information. You could also be certain that the environment, in most games at least, would not change over time and could be revisited as often as required. Anyway, that all just sounds like an excuse to play videogames, but it would be an interesting experiment.

So now you have an idea of what kind of rooms to use, and images to create; let’s put your memory to the test. Look back up at the list you tried to remember before and, as you go down the list, imagine yourself actually standing in your loci, and begin anchoring the different items around you. Be sure to make the item and it’s interaction with the environment memorable. It may help to start with the feature immediately to your left and work clockwise around the room attaching items to each memorable feature. If the item isn’t really an item but something like an event, you should try and come up with a memorable image which represents that event to you. If you find you start to run out of features in a location, don’t strain to remember extra ones. Remember: the whole point of this is to make memorising things easier; if you have to struggle to remember the thing that is supposed to remind you, it’s not going to be any use. Instead, simply walk to the next room. It doesn’t have to be real-life adjoining room, just the next memorable location. You could even step out into the street or into a park. Continue doing this until you have placed all of the items from the list. I’m intentionally avoiding any specifics here because only you will know the most effective places and images for you. Now grab another piece of paper and test yourself again.

How did you do? If you find that there were any things you couldn’t remember, you may need to come up with a more memorable image. If you forgot a location, don’t use it again, it’s not memorable enough for this purpose. Compare your new score with the number you memorised before. How do they match up? Is there a big difference? There should be. The first time I did this I found I was able to easily remember every item on the list whereas before I could only remember about a handful. The images do fade over time and if the information isn’t important you can just allow this to happen; but I found you should be able to remember your list for maybe a week or so depending on how often you think about it. On the other hand, if it is information you will need often, you will find it gets locked in deeper every time you remember it. The biggest problem with this method is that it can still be difficult to remember numbers. You might be able to attach an emotional reaction to a giant number 2 (brings a tear to my eye actually) but what’s funny about 45,768? There is a relatively simple way to deal with this issue but I’ve gone on long enough for today, so I’ll leave that for a future post.

Feel free to post your before and after scores in the comments below; it would be interesting to see how this worked for different people. And be warned: I will be coming around to your house and testing you soon, so don’t forget or you’ll have me to answer to.

What was I talking about?

Memory is a funny thing. I’ve already mentioned the idea that emotions are a way of making things more memorable, but it can be quite difficult to know what to do with that information. What do you do? Next time someone tells you to remember the date of an event do you think of your dead pet to make yourself sad? Perhaps you spend all your time before an exam flicking through page after page of information and crying with laughter (come to think of it, that’s how I got through my GCSEs)? The blunt answer is no, apart from generally being quite silly things to do, these particular examples wouldn’t work.

There has been quite a bit of research done on how emotions can affect memory, and the two things are generally considered to be closely related. A great example of emotions’ effect on memory actually debunks a commonly held misconception that people are able to perceive things more quickly in an emergency. It had been previously suggested that the reason time appears to slow down in moments of extreme danger was because the body released adrenaline which sped up the body’s reactions and senses. I have heard of a couple of experiments that have put this theory to the test, and you can read about one of them here. Basically, in this experiment, the scientists scared volunteers by dropping them 150 feet, and then tested for sped-up sensory abilities. They did this using a device that tasks the subject with reading numbers, as they fell, from a display that operates at a speed just above ordinary speeds of perception. What they found was that, whilst the volunteers estimated their own plummet was about a third longer than the dives taken by other volunteers, they were still not able to read the device’s display. Admittedly this might be because they were too busy s**tting their pants as they hurtled towards the ground at 70mph, but the scientists concluded that this had more to do with how fear affects memory as opposed to how fear affected reaction times. You can see more on memory vs. experience here.

It’s thought that this has come about through evolution due to the fact that our simian ancestors needed to learn to stay alive. If you’re a happy little primate stumbling around the jungle and you hear a hissing sound followed by a giant reptilian head flying at you firing venom, and your adrenaline kicks in allowing you to narrowly avoid being mauled, the next most important thing is to remember that the next time you hear a hissing sound, you need to run like hell. It basically comes down to instinct.

Whilst fear might be the most obvious example to use here, it's not the only emotion to have this effect. Ever hear someone talk about the first time they saw the love of their life, and how “time seemed to slow down”? Aside from being a nausea inducing cliché, this is actually similar (chemically) to the brains response in times of extreme danger. And if you’re still not convinced consider this: how often do you find yourself remembering an event that causes you to fill up with emotions similar to or the same as the ones you felt when experiencing that event; sadness when thinking of a loved one who has died, sentimental when thinking of an old flame, rage when thinking of an old flame, or mirth when thinking of a funny friend.

A reason why funny people tend to be popular (“The thing I look for most in a guy/girl is someone who can make me laugh”) is that amusement causes the brain to release certain chemicals which can, amongst other things, make a person laugh and generally feel good. If this response is associated strongly enough with a specific person because, for example, they made you laugh a lot when you first met them, or they make you laugh regularly; the sight of that person will trigger the release of a small amount of those same chemicals, making you feel happy to see them. This might explain how an obnoxious person who can make people laugh might still be seen as a desirable person to be around. It’s a bit like mirth being the drug, the person telling the jokes being a drug dealer, and the person laughing being the crack addict.

This release of a small amount of chemicals is necessary for providing context by which we recognise things. It’s a bit like if I say “Don’t think of a red square”; to understand that command you must first think of what a red square is, so that you can then focus on not thinking about it. If someone says “I accidentally saw a bit of Jordan’s TV show the other night”, for you to understand that phrase, you must recall what you can about the things being referenced; whilst this may be a mixture of facts and opinions about Jordan, it will almost invariably involve recalling and re-experiencing your emotional response to Jordan (in my case, leading to bouts of uncontrollable rage, followed by feelings of futility).

To be honest, none of this is really new thinking. In fact, theories about memory’s relation to emotions date back as far as the first millennium BC and are thought to have roots possibly stretching as far back as the ancient Egyptians. Such theories also discuss the importance of visual markers, claiming that even things such as sounds require a mental image to aid in recall. These theories are where we get the basic idea for many mnemonics; a popular one being Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, the initials of which are the same as the colours of the rainbow (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet) and you may have caught an alternative mnemonic for this at the end of my post on the seven wastes (ROY G BIV) which works for me because it sounds funny.

I think this is an acceptable point to end this blog for the day. You now, hopefully, have a slightly better understanding of how memory can work; and I intend to cover this subject far more extensively in the posts to come. For now, consider that if you can turn something into a funny image, it will make it much easier for you to remember. After all, I’ve managed to remember DMAIC as ‘Duh! Make’, which is the no-nonsense advice given to people implementing the Six Sigma improvement processes; and DMADV as ‘Duh Mad V’, the crazy DJ rapper who body pops into a factory to introduce his new Six Sigma process.

I told you my brain was different.