I recently read Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. It’s an incredible account of how a young journalist goes to cover a memory championship (yes, it’s a real thing). Where people are performing mind-bending tasks like memorizing hundreds of random numbers, the order of three decks of cards, the poetry they’ve never seen before, and all of this, within minutes. Foer gets hooked on to the idea of overclocking his memory and finds himself a coach who explains to him that these seemingly incredible feats aren’t god-given gifts but rather a result of training. Appropriately, they call themselves memory athletes and they have worked on techniques that help them memorize and recall these specific pieces of information. Foer decides to spend an hour or so every day, in learning and mastering these techniques, and lo and behold, a year later, he becomes the US memory champion.
That’s basically a super-short overview of the book. I got seriously inspired by this and have been practicing a technique called the memory palace every day now. The idea is pretty simple actually. Our brain is an absolute supercomputer that loves visual details. The more detailed the image, the better it gets imprinted in our system. In an experiment, described in the book, kids in schools were shown 100 images on a screen for a few minutes followed by another set of 100 images, some of which included some images from the older set. Everyone was able to correctly identify the images they had seen previously. This is how powerful images are.
The memory palace technique, or the ‘method of the loci’, is a mnemonic device adopted in ancient Greek and Rome. It requires you to think deeply about your home (or any other place you are keenly familiar with) and then visualize objects and images placed in the various locations inside it. Imagine you had a list of these 5 items
- Jar of pickles
- Pack of bacon
- Two filets of salmon
- A hula girl toy
- A respirator
Now the task is to visualise these items kept in the various locations as you walk through your house, in your mind. Human mind is awesome with spatial awareness. It takes us minutes to get used to the space around us and the combination of space and images makes it a really powerful technique. Let’s give it a shot.
I open the large iron gate to my bungalow back home in Jabalpur in central India. Right next to Dad’s car, I see a large glass bottle of pickles that my grandma makes and dries in the sun. The image is very clear and I can almost taste the pickles.
I move a little further ahead and I see bacon sheets hanging by the door as drapes. I can even smell it and as I clear it to enter the house, I hear it sizzle like it does when you put them on a pan. I enter the house and see, a tiny bear on the coffee table, trying to catch salmon in a large aquarium (I know, I am quite proud of this one). Next to the bear is a hula girl toy whose head is bobbling with all the bear action. Finally I see a tiny man scuba diving with the full scuba gear in the same aquarium.
If you’ve followed this closely, I bet you will never forget these images and walking through the home dictates the order of the items as well. You can come back here and recall this list in a week. I did this with 15 items, a week back and its as fresh in my mind as it was a minute after I imagined it all. This is the power of images and depositing them along with locations in the head. In a way, this is more about the creative depiction of things you see. The faster you can creatively draw images, the faster you’ll be able to deposit memories. The more striking the image, the more easily it will come to you and longer you’ll retain it.
The PAO method
The PAO, or the person action object method, is a way to draw an image to represent anything. For example, I was recently watching the John Oliver show on coronavirus, in which he talks about the top 6 meat-producing companies in the US.
These are Tyson, Smithline, Hormel, JBS, Cargil and National. While watching these I immediately paused and imagined Mike Tyson together with Agent Smith, climbing the Kargil mountain range (this one is quite famous because of the Kargil war back in 2000) with a national flag in his hand, while agent smith is holding a large JBL brand of speakers (with a large red logo). The image is quite striking and its hard to easily lose it. This small innocuous visual scene encapsulates all the elements. The other elements are self-explanatory but the Hormel isn’t. ’Hor’ translates to ‘and’, and ‘Mel’ loosely translates to together in Punjabi which is why I needed two characters. I am fairly certain these images aren’t getting lost anytime soon. It is a fairly useless piece of information that I am afraid will stay with me forever.
Using the PAO method for names and objects is perfect but that’s not all. You can use them for numbers, dates, cards in a deck, basically anything alphanumeric. I am a history buff, especially the world wars. I love reading about all the developments and battles that took place in world war 2 but I always keep messing up names and dates of the occurrences. This is something I am now working on. Designing my system for dates to match incidents that happened in world war 2. In the coming posts, I intend to share my date-incident pattern for remembering world war 2. For now, I highly recommend picking up this book and start building your memory palace.
I run a startup called Harmonize. We are hiring and if you’re looking for an exciting startup journey, please write to jobs@harmonizehq.com. Apart from this blog, I tweet about startup life and practical wisdom in books.