I have a terrible memory.
I can’t remember birthdays,
I notoriously butcher movie lines,
and I forget somebody’s name five seconds after I meet them.
But by the end of this video I’m going to be
reciting an entire chapter from Moby Dick
by heart, because, as it turns out, there’s a way for anybody to hack their
memory.
The way that we normally try to memorize stuff is inefficient and pretty bad.
Flash cards, rote repetition, anxiously putting your hand on your forehead just don’t work.
That’s because as much as we’d like to, our brains don’t respond well to brute force.
What we are good at is remembering things when
we have a context,
be it visual, emotional, or spatial.
We’re good at remembering faces,
we instinctively remember what song was playing during our first kiss,
and we can effortlessly walk a few blocks to the store
and get back to our house without even having to think about it.
Why is that?
Well, it turns out that the same part of our brain that’s
thought to be involved in emotion and spatial navigation,
the hippocampus, also happens to control short- and long-term
memory processing.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: If only there were a way to combine the two.
Enter: the memory palace.
A memory palace is a memorization technique that
makes it easier to remember things
by giving it a visual and spatial hook.
It combines something that humans are innately pretty bad at
with something that we’ve been doing for ages.
Basically, you assign images to the content you want to memorize,
then place them on a path in a real-life location.
Then when you retrace the path in your mind, you see the images, are able to recall the
content,
and all of the sudden you look like a memory genius.
So does this actually work?
Step 1: choose a location that you know really well to
serve as your memory palace.
It seems pretty generous to deem it a palace, but for this example I
chose to use my apartment.
I went around and mentally mapped out the space,
making sure I had a clear image of the layout,
where the furniture was, and whether or not I needed to change
my cat’s litter box, which, it turns out, I did.
Step 2: choose what you want to memorize.
You can choose anything that you want: a poem, the state capitals, the first 25 digits
of pi.
Whatever.
I chose a chapter from one of my favorite books, Moby Dick.
Granted, it’s one of the shorter chapters, but it’s really good,
and you’ve got to start somewhere, so
how about everyone just play it cool, all right?
I’ve read this chapter a number of times, but I don’t
remember more than a few words off the top of my head.
So I know that the first line is, “I leave a white wake.”
There’s a line where he talks about a heavy crown.
And his destiny is on rails at some point.
Step 3: create a really compelling visual image for
each line or item.
What I did was take the chapter and break it up into
individual sentences,
38 in all, each one getting their own image.
So for the first line — “I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks,
where’er I sail” —
I create in my mind an image of John Waters, pale and dressed in white,
crying uncontrollably at somebody’s wake.
Pretty memorable image, right?
You want to make all of your images as distinctive and interesting as possible.
The weirder and more emotional that they are, the easier it will
be for you to remember.
Feel free to make them vulgar or outrageous.
Nobody needs to know what’s inside your memory palace.
Step 4: place your images along a path through your memory palace.
I took the John Waters image and placed it on the first stop
of my path: the landing on the stoop of my apartment.
I did this for the rest of the chapter, line by line,
until each line had a unique, weird image.
Step 5: memorize.
The thing about memory palaces is that they’re not going to
help you memorize anything instantly.
You still have to go through and do the work.
And it is work.
But studies have shown that students who use memory palaces
or other mnemonic techniques to study
consistently and significantly outperform students that don’t.
It’s also proven to be a powerful learning tool for
students with disabilities.
So does this actually work?
I got up in front of all my co-workers to find out.
I leave a white and turbid wake.
Pale waters, paler cheeks, wherever I sail.
The envious billow sidelong swell to whelm my track,
let them, but first I pass.
Yonder, by ever-brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves
blush like wine.
The gold brow plums the blue.
The diver sun — slow dived from noon — goes down, my soul mounts up.
Spending three or four hours everyday practicing, it only took me about four days to memorize
the whole thing.
The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul
is grooved to run.
Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains,
under torrent’s beds, unerringly I rush.
Naught’s an obstacle, naught’s an angle, to the iron way.
So now that I know some of the secrets to memorization,
does that mean that I’m going to enter next year’s US Memory Championship?
Um, we’ll see.