Supercharge your brain: How to build a Memory Palace
This article intends to train the reader in the mnemonic techniques of the method of loci method or more colloquially ‘memory palace’ method. This is single-handedly the most effective method for revolutionising your ability to store and recall vast amounts of information.
The reader may have first come across this method in series such as the excellent BBC adaptation ‘Sherlock’ starring Benedict Cumberbatch Or perhaps you encountered the memory palace techniques from the series ‘Hannibal.’
Before we discuss the how let us discuss why it is everyone should be building their own repositories of knowledge.
My palace was built before the series I mentioned earlier, however, it has evolved, with some rooms being torn down and renovated and contents being moved about at will to create a richer experience.
From my own experiences, I can offer a few reasons why I first built and maintain a rich and vivid palace.
1. As a mnemonic technique:
First and foremost, going back fifteen or so years I realised that much of what I was learning need remembering. My memory is no less poor than the next person. However, once I learned the memory palace technique I was stunned not only at the efficacy of the technique but how well it worked and the potency and duration of the remembered information.
2. As a tool for quizzing:
More than one question has hinged upon some capital of a country, or a coronation date, or some other exact piece of information. The memory palace works with such speed as to render questions such as these easy points to gain. I have used my memory palace as a tool to answer crossword clues with at least one capital being mentioned at least once in every puzzle.
3. As a tool for mediation and relaxation:
Finding myself on the autistic spectrum means that I’m often plunged rather coldly from the safe space I call home and in shops and streets which carry the risk of mental overload.
Without the technique of the memory palace, I don’t think I would deal with social life such as queues, shopping, interaction and purchasing with as much ease as I do. In true Darwinian style, I try to adapt to my surroundings and the memory palace technique has enabled and enriched this spirit of adaptation.
4. As a tool for sleep:
This technique I discovered by accident is a great tactic for encouraging sleep. Countless times I have found the nights being spent in frustration, tossing and turning with thoughts racing into focus for but a second before another thought takes its place. The memory palace focuses one’s attention and therefore quiets the mind most effectively to enable sleep. More than once I have been walking through the rooms of my ‘mind palace’ only to discover the next morning that I had fallen asleep.
So there you have four good reasons to begin building your very own memory palace.
Now comes the easy guide to building your very own mental library. At the end of this article is a link to my Youtube channel where you can finds tips, ideas and a whole walkthrough of how to build and maintain a memory palace.
Learning to build a memory palace is extremely simple and the technique can be learned in a few minutes. However, practice will take a memory palace to a whole other level. With it, you can memorise countless scores of phone numbers, historical facts and figures, decks of cards, trivia and you’ll never forget your anniversary again.
The limits to the memory palace are but the limits of your imagination.
Right enough selling, let’s learn the technique and supercharge your memory.
1. Pick a location you know well.
To begin your construction of a memory palace, we’ll start with a location you know well. This can be where you presently live, or perhaps the home of a parent or sibling. The location should be one where you know intimately and can picture easily within your mind.
Exercise: Close your eyes and do a mental walk through the chosen location. If it’s the home you currently live in, try mentally picturing yourself standing outside of the front door.
Use all your senses to imagine pushing down on the handle and entering the house. What do you smell? What do you first see? Practising our ability to mentally picture what we see around us will aid us in our later tasks of assigning images.
The important task here is to recognise that the route you take in your mental amble will be the same every time. Since this location will be your first memory palace, I would suggest doing a mental walk through it at least three or four times a day walking the same route every time.
2. Anchors and pins
The next task is to return to your memory palace (the location from the previous section) and pick out from each room a notable feature. The form of these features may be such things as sofas, beds, ovens, fridges and freezers. Other features may include the front door itself, fireplaces and alcoves. The more features the more memories you’ll be able to assign to the memory palace.
Ideally, you should be looking for two to three features per room. For instance, in a lounge you may pick out a television, sofa or chair and the television.
Exercise: Once you have the features you wish to use from each room, do another mental walk through your memory palace making special note of those features already selected. If one of your features was a sofa or bed, mentally sit upon it and feel the fabric with an imagined hand. Use your senses to assess the texture.
By doing these exercises your strengthening associations and it will make encoding memories that much easier.
3. Memory palace complete?
You’ve done it! You’ve constructed a memory palace, there’s just one thing missing — a memory.
Okay, it’s time to add something to your memory palace.
Imagine your front door or the first feature of your memory palace.
Exercise: I want you to imagine a man-sized carton of milk dancing and spilling its contents all over the front door. See yourself almost slipping on the milk, whilst trying to open the front door.
A quick aside here will be useful. For this article, I’ve kept the images relatively clean but your images should be as politically incorrect, rude, obscene as possible. The brain remembers best, that which is unusual.
I’m now going to add nine items to remember n addition to the milk.
Your job will be to walk through your memory palace using the same route you have already built. When you read an item from the list, add it to a feature within a given room.
For instance, the first item is bacon, thus if the first room and feature is a chair in the lounge, picture a pig sitting on the chair and cutting off parts of itself whilst grilling the flesh. Disgusting? Maybe but also memorable.
Here’s the list:
Bacon
Tuna
Cheese
Red wine
A hammer
A bar of chocolate
Mobile phone
A football
A garden hose
Tips and advice:
Add each item to the feature within your rooms.
Make each image something that you could never say out loud.
Use all your senses to engage with the image and make it more stable.
Take your time in coming up with suitably memorable images, you’ll get faster eventually but every new skill requires time and patience.
Once you have completed adding the items from the list, close your eyes and start your mental walk from the beginning.
You should find that there is remarkable ease with recalling the items. If you find one or two that you have trouble recalling, it could be that your association between the feature and item or image wasn’t ludicrous enough. Take the time to redo the image, this is not a failure for you’re learning all the time how to tailor images to make them more memorable.
What you have memorised is a mixture of random objects, and items that may appear on any shopping list. The only limit to the amount that you can store away as images is the number of features and rooms that exist within your memory palace.
If you wish to learn more or get free ideas on improving your memory palace head over to my Youtube channel. On my channel, you’ll get ideas on what to memorise, from mnemonics and ways to encode information effectively.
In following articles, I’ll explain how one goes about adding abstract information such as bones of the human body, countries and capitals as well as other information that one might think it not so easy to add to their memory palace. In fact, the process is the same and in future articles, I’ll show you how easy the technique truly is.
