Some people have asked me: "What do I do when my memory palace is
full? Do I have to make a new memory palace
before I can memorize new things? And the answer is no, the memory palace
is actually infinite in capacity. There is no limit to what
you can memorize using it. Right now I'm going to try to explain
why that's the case. To begin with, I think the metaphor of a
mind palace may mislead us a little bit. We think of a palace as being a place,
and in a place you put things, like you're putting furniture
into the rooms of a castle. Well, no matter how big the castle is,
eventually you run out of space, eventually you hit the capacity,
then you have to think about expanding it or building a new castle.
But that's not the way the memory palace is.
I think a better metaphor for thinking about it is that the memory palace is a
kind of pattern. It is like having proper
form when you're doing a push-up. If you learn the right way to do a push-up: how
to hold your arms and your elbows, how to keep your back tight,
there's no limit to the number of push-ups you can do.
You don't ever go to the coach and say: "Coach, what do I do when I've done
all the push-ups, when I run out of push-ups to do?" You simply
apply the form again to do them in a new location,
on a new day. The memory palace is a lot like that.
It's a, it's the right form to use in organizing your memories, to make them
easy to recall. And provided you're using the form
correctly, there's no limit to its application.
To understand why, let's talk about how the memory palace works.
It works by combining the familiar with the unfamiliar.
Now, the familiar are these locations, these loci
in my home, or in some other location where I am
every day. Recall that we should be choosing these
as fixed locations in a sequence that we go through every single
day. My method of loci, my memory palace, begins
with my keys rack: I come in through my back door,
I look down and right at about elbow height on my left is the keys rack. And I
put my keys there every single day when I come home. I take
three steps forward and on the right is the sink.
I turn left, four steps forward and there's the freezer.
So I'm picking large objects in a certain sequence that I walk every
single day. The reason this is helpful to me is that
that sequence is invariant. I know the freezer and the sink never
change places. And I'm familiar with it, I know it by heart.
There is no effort required for me to remember
the layout of my kitchen and the rest of my house,
for example. The memory palace technique combines the familiar
locations in sequence with the unfamiliar images that I'm loading
into these locations. So for each location I'm picking some
sort of exaggerated or unusual association with it.
So I don't want my first memory to be keys
being put on the keys rack. That's too ordinary, I would never be
able to remember that because it's not striking
and unusual. Instead, in one of my previous videos my first example was to remember
the name Linus. And so I remember Linus's blanket
from Peanuts, hanging on my, on the hook of my keys
rack. Why is this memorable? It's memorable
because it's my keys rack, that's the familiar part, but blankets
don't normally hang on it, only keys hang on it.
So to see a blanket on my keys rack is the unusual association that remember,
that causes me to remember the owner of that blanket,
named Linus. So why does this work? This works because human brains are
exceptionally good at recognizing patterns and especially
breaks in patterns. So think about the
evolutionary adaptive value of this: our ancestors on the
savannah, the fellow who can recognize that
there's a shadow in the tall grass 100 yards
distant that wasn't there just a couple of minutes ago is the guy
who can recognize that he's being stalked by a lion.
He's the guy who's got a tremendous survival advantage over people who don't
notice that. So regardless of its origin we humans
have brains that are very exquisitely attuned to spotting
anomalies in familiar environments. You may have
had the experience before of walking into a room
and stopping because something is out of place, something's unusual, something has
changed, even if you can't pinpoint it at first. Then after a little bit of
examination you may find yes, something's been moved or something is
new that wasn't supposed to be there. We're using that instinct, that deeply
embedded trait in human brains, when we employ the memory
palace technique by combining the familiar with the
unfamiliar. So to wrap up I think the better image
to use, instead of thinking of cramming furniture into the rooms of a
palace, think of the memory palace technique
as a pattern, like good form and doing a push-up,
that will allow you to produce a series of chains.
You're producing a series of linked memories where the first [link] is keyed
to your first, location the second link to the second
location, and these chains all go off in different
directions. The only real challenge for you then is to remember the first
link in the chain. It's for me to remember Linus's blanket hanging
on my keys rack. The first link then will carry you to the second
link. For me, I look at the keys rack to my left, I walk three steps forward and
turn right and then I see whatever it is that's at the sink,
that I've programmed that location for in that particular chain in my memory
palace. So that's my attempt to explain how it
is that the memory palace can have an infinite capacity, and there can be no
limit to the number of things you can memorize using it.
I hope you found this helpful. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.