A Memory Palace uses visualization to organize and recall information. Its like building a palace with many rooms and in every room you can place one item. By combining each items with a location, you can later recall them by mind-walking through your palace.
Memory champions like Johannes Mallow who can remember 132 events and their dates in just five minutes or Ben Pridmore who managed to recall 4,140 digits of binary numbers - strings of numbers consisting of 1 and 0 - claim to use this technique.
For example if you want to remember how to make pancakes, try to place each ingredient in a specific location inside your apartment - milk at the entrance, eggs in the bedroom etcetera etcetera. By doing this, be as specific as possible and ideally link it to a little story. Lets give it a try…
After a day of hard work, you are coming home into your 7 room apartment (there are 7 ingredients) hungry to make 8 pancakes for you and your friends.
You already purchased flour on the way home, but now you need to check if you have all the rest of the ingredients. As soon as you enter the apartment you place the two cup of flour on the sideboard at the entrance.
On the living room floor you see the two cups of milk - almost full. Great!
In the corner of the big bedroom are two massive eggs cracked open watching TV - how weird!
You then walk into the small bedroom. Two teaspoons of baking power are peacefully sleeping in the bed.
You walk into the bathroom. A quarter cup of butter has melted on the floor. Be careful its slippery.
You try to get out on the balcony, but its full of sugar cane. It’s enough to make 3 teaspoons of sugar from it.
You walk through the entire apartment into the kitchen. Its empty. All you see is some white salt on the wooden table - exactly one teaspoon and thats all you need.
Now try it yourself: Close your eyes and place the 7 items in your own house. Then walk through your virtual apartment to imagine what is where. After try to explain someone else, or just say it out loud, what you need to make pancakes to test your memory. If you fail, do it again.
Tips and Notes:
- The funnier and graphic the images are that you imaging the more likely you can remember them.
- Neuroscientists and creativity experts argue that memory enhancement is great because the more you wire and re-write your brain with memory the more complex and intervening your synopsis get. This leads to higher creativity as when you switch into your defused thinking mode, you have more space in your brain to bounce an idea around.