Hello I'm Dr. Anadale and I teach philosophy at Mount Saint Mary's
University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. The memory palace technique originated in
the ancient world as the method of loci, or locations. It was invented by the
fifth century BC poet Simonides and recently popularized in an episode of
the TV show Sherlock. It works because your mind is naturally oriented toward
knowing through your senses, so you're going to piggyback on that natural
tendency by associating what you want to remember with your sensible memories of
familiar locations. In this video I will describe the technique and show how it
is used. The memory palace technique works in five steps. Step 1: select 12
locations from a familiar environment. Ideally you should use your house or
apartment or someplace where you are every day. Choose just one to three
locations per room and feel free to skip locations; you don't have to cover
everything. Choose things that will not change their position easily, so not
movable furniture or a picture on a wall that might get rehung in the future.
Step 2: come up with a fixed sequence, a route that you could walk that will pass
each location in turn. The route must be invariant and it must not cross itself
or double back. Start with... make the starting point of your path either
getting home from work or getting out of bed in the morning or some other
familiar event. Step 3: imagine this route repeatedly until you
know the sequence well. Visualize yourself walking through your home
looking at or touching each of the locations. Think of whether you look left
or right, up or down as you approach the location, and think of the sounds and
smells, etc. that you associate with each place. For example, the smell of shampoo
or the warmth of hot water in the sink. These are the specific details that will
be important for triggering your memory.
You are creating memory slots where you will file things that you intend to memorize,
and triggers that will activate your memory when you want to call something
up out of the slot. Step 4: list the things that you want to
memorize in order and match them up with your 12 slots. If there are more than 12,
start over again at slot 1 or expand your list of locations or build a second
memory palace in a new location, perhaps your workplace. 12 slots seems to me to
be enough for most memorization tasks. Step 5:
imagine some unusual or outrageous connection between the location and the
thing that's assigned to its slot. The more striking, the better. Imagine things
that are much larger or much smaller than usual or put them into bizarre
situations that never actually occur in real life. You want to be very specific
and detailed. Really let your creativity go at this step because you should not
just put the things in the slot and trust yourself to remember them--you want
to imagine specific sensible qualities, details of sight and sound, of smells or
feelings that you have about the thing. These are the sensible qualities that
are your memory triggers. They are absolutely necessary for this process to
work effectively. You want to draw on your personal memory and on pop-culture
references that you are familiar with. Choose things that you will instantly
recognize. For some associations you can play on the sound of the word for what
you're trying to remember, as well as its meaning. I'll give examples of all these
things in my application coming up. So here are the 12 places in my home that
I've chosen. Yours of course will be different. I come in my kitchen door,
I look down and to the left and see my keys rack where I hang my keys. I take a few
steps forward and I look down and to the right and see the kitchen sink. I turn
left and walk a few steps and I pass the upright freezer. Then I go into the next
room: ahead of me is the sofa, and on my left a little bit down is the TV. Then
I turn right and go into the hallway, where there's a bookshelf. I go up the
stairs and at the top of the stairs the first thing I see is a laundry basket.
I turn left and as I'm walking on my left I see my office with my office chair and
then the bathroom door. I go into my bedroom and I see my bed and then
through my bedroom onto the back porch. Now I'll use my system to memorize
something that I want to remember but do not currently know. In the Catholic Mass
sometimes the priest says the First Eucharistic Prayer, which contains a long
list of saints, and it ends with these twelve:
"Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and
Paul, Cosmas and Damian." I want to memorize this list in order, so
I'm going to place it in my memory palace.
The first slot is the keys rack, and here I want to remember the name Linus. So I
think of Linus from Peanuts, and he's always carrying around his blue blanket
and sucking his thumb. So I imagine Linus's blanket hanging on the hook of
my keys rack. My second slot is the sink and the name is Cletus.
I remember Cletus the Slackjawed Yokel from The Simpsons.
So I imagine him at my sink washing the dishes, chuckling to himself.
That's very memorable for me. The third location is the freezer. Here I imagine
that the door is off my freezer and my teenage son is sitting in the freezer
and he's shivering, his teeth are chattering,
and he says sarcastically, "Gosh, Dad, it sure is *Clement* in here!" Teenage sarcasm
is something I live with on a daily basis, and so that's a good memory
trigger for me for the name Clement. My fourth location the sofa and the name is
Sixtus. So I imagine six gigantic elephant tusks sitting on my sofa.
They're gigantic, they're weighing it down, the springs are bending and I'm
worried the sofa is going to break. Six tusks--that'll work for me. My fifth location
is the television. The name is Cornelius. That's easy--the TV is showing the
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer cartoon, and I think of Yukon Cornelius in
constant loop. Okay, so Cornelius on the TV. The sixth location is the bookshelf
and the name is Cyprian. So imagine my friend Ann is standing at the bookshelf
and she has a cup of tea on a saucer and she says to me, "You want a sip?" She offers
me a sip of tea. My mnemonic for this slot is "sip with Ann = Cyprian." Slot seven
is the stairs to the upstairs. The name is Lawrence and I imagine that the
stairs are piled high with D.H. Lawrence novels, which Ann obviously took off of
the bookshelf when she got here. I'd have to climb over them to get upstairs. Now I
really don't like D.H. Lawrence's fiction, so this is a good memory trigger
for me. The idea that I have dozens and dozens of D.H. Lawrence novels in my house.
So that's slot seven, my mnemonic for Lawrence.
Number eight is the laundry basket at
the top of the stairs and the name here is Chrysogonus. This is tough
because that's an unusual name. What I imagine here is a little tiny anti-gun
activist, gun-control activist, waving a placard and demonstrating, marching
around in a circle, and she's crying "Gun nuts! Gun nuts!" So "Cry Gun Nuts" is my
mnemonic for Chrysogonus in the laundry basket. The laundry basket's
turned upside down over her. Ninth is the office chair and the name is John.
That's easy: John Lennon is sitting in my office
chair playing his guitar. Number ten is the bathroom and the name is Paul.
That's also easy: Paul McCartney is in the shower, singing in the shower,
accompaniment to John Lennon's guitar. Number eleven the bed; the name is Cosmas
that I want to memorize here. Well, Cosmas sounds like Cosmos, and who's
the host of Cosmos? It's Neil deGrasse Tyson. So I imagine Neil deGrasse Tyson
asleep in my bed, and maybe to remind me that the name is not "Cosmos" but "Cosmas"
with an "a," he's wearing a stocking cap that has an "A" embroidered on it. So Neil
deGrasse Tyson, asleep in my bed wearing a stocking cap with an A on it. That'll
help me remember the name Cosmas. And then on the back porch the name I want
to remember for this slot is Damian. So I think of the evil kid from The Omen
movies. He's waiting on the back porch glowering at me, ready to throw me off
the porch and kill me. So those are my memory slots. So my memory triggers are:
Linus's blanket, Cletus from The Simpsons, teen sarcasm on
the word Clement, six tusks, Yukon Cornelius, 'sip with Ann,' D.H. Lawrence
novels, cry 'gun nuts,' John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Neil deGrasse Tyson
wearing a cap with an A on it, and the evil kid from The Omen. Now I just
practice by visualizing a walk-through my memory palace, past all twelve
locations, from my keys rack to the back porch. Practicing twice a day or more
often, you should see results very quickly. Write down your associations at
first if you need to. With each mental trip through the
sequence you're strengthening your knowledge of the slots, and this makes it
easier for you to remember things that you want to insert into the slots later.
Two final points: no one can do this for you. No one can prepare your memory
palace--it's individualized to your mind and no one can give you the detailed
associations that will trigger your memory. You have to do these things
for yourself. Thankfully, it gets easier with time. And finally: once you're using
the technique, the only difference between you and the Sherlock villain is
practice, to expand the number of slots and the speed with which you can recall
things out of them. So that's my introduction to the memory palace with
an example. Thanks for watching today; goodbye.