How to Remember Everything
The Method of Loci/Memory Palaces
Have you ever noticed it’s far easier to remember how to get somewhere than it is to recite something you’ve read?
On one hand, we can hop in a car, pull out the drive and visualize the journey from start to finish for a route we may not have traveled for weeks or months; we can visualize the destination of somewhere we have been before and remember what we have done there. Yet try and recall with any level of accuracy a magazine or significant passage from a book read over a similar timeframe and it's nigh on impossible.
This is an evolved trait, it was perhaps an important survival distinction for our distant ancestors to be able to retain in their heads maps of the journeys they had undertaken, to find their way back to safety or to survive migration and to find what they had stored or hidden.
This innate capability is little taught and little used these days but was once a fundamental skill trained by some of the greatest orators and philosophers of antiquity to enable them to recite vast public speeches and remember huge quantities of information.
The History
As our ability to reason developed, the story goes this capability was discovered by a famous Greek poet Simonides (500bc). According to Quintilian, Simonides was enjoying a nice dinner party with Scopas a businessman he had been doing some work for. When a couple of people arrived and asked to see him.
As Simonides ventured outside, the building he had left came tumbling down around him killing a number of people.
In the forensic investigation that ensued Simonides was said to have been able to remember where guests at the party were sitting and was able to take people to their bodies located under the rubble, from this he realized the strength of this capability and developed his Method of Loci.
The Method
Otherwise known as memory mnemonics or memory palaces the Method of Loci is a super simple brain hack that allows for the memorization of large amounts of information.
The basic premise is to visualise a room in your house and in that room remember pegs. A peg should be something permanent, perhaps a chair that doesn't get moved or a picture on the wall. Try starting with a dozen pegs in a single room. Take time to write them down and use active meditation (i.e. close your eyes and see them) to visualise them in their room in the order you have written them down.
Next, find something you want to remember, start with keywords like Prime Ministers, Presidents etc. just a collection of words to get you going.
Now working through your pegs assign each word to a peg, the key to being able to remember the words comes down to what you hang on the pegs, it needs to be more than just the word. It needs to be something vivid that you can bring to mind and that will prompt you to derive the word you wanted to remember from it. Keep running over the pegs in your head and within a short time, they will be pretty well retained. Keep a notebook of your pegs and what you have stored against them.
As an example, I once wanted to remember that you can’t draw a normative conclusion from a descriptive statement, this was part of a wider talk I was doing and I wanted to ensure I remembered the two keywords normative and descriptive in order and in context with the rest of the talk. A few years later I can still recall someone building a brick wall with descriptive graffitied on it over my front garden hedge and a Norman Knight, wounded from battle standing on a drain cover in my front garden.
The more vivid, violent or sexual the image the easier it is to remember, which says a lot about our ancestors (and us). As Themistocles is purported to have said:
“I would rather a technique of forgetting, for I remember what I would rather not remember and cannot forget what I would rather forget.”
Whatever you do don’t think about two pink elephants getting it on.
Once you have nailed your first room, you can go on to build your palace, the beauty is this is fractal and you can build a palace with numerous rooms, you can use journeys you know or you could even use 3d technology to create huge palaces.
During the Renaissance there was an ideal that this could be used for retaining all knowledge ever.
“Now if the ancient orators, wishing to place from day to day the parts of the speeches which they had to recite, confided them to frail places as frail things, it is right that we, wishing to store up eternally the eternal nature of all things … should assign them to eternal places.”,
Giulio Camillo
You’ll be in good company learning this method, Cicero, Da Vinci, Einstein, Vegas card sharks, Hannibal Lector, the list goes on of people that have capitalised off the back of Simonides discovery, I hope our schools start realising the benefit of standing on the shoulders of giants and teach our children this method too.
