Daily Smart Fact #18: Build Your Own Memory Palace

Key Takeaway: Its a lot easier to remember places and experiences than lists, numbers, or names. Use your own memory palace to improve your memory by visualizing and associating the things you need to remember with the outrageous and absurd.

I was listening to NPR the other day and the guest was Joshua Foer and they were talking about the USA Memory Championship. That’s right, there’s a national competition for memory.  In order to be a “grand master of memory” you must be able to do the following:

1. Memorize 1,000 digits in less than 60 minutes
2. Memorize the order of 10 shuffled decks in less than 60 minutes
3. Memorize the order of 1 shuffled deck in less than 2 minutes

As of 2005, there were only 36 grand masters in the world.  These people aren’t photographic memory freaks or people who have an IQ of a gazillion.  They’re ordinary folks like you and me.  So how do they do this?  Well one technique is called the Memory Palace.  According to this interview on NPR, Joshua describes origins of the Memory Palace from Ancient Greek times.  There’s a story about Simonides of Ceos walking out of a banquet hall right before the entire building collapsed, killing every single person inside.  In all of the tragedy, no one knew who was who in the hall, how to properly bury the dead, which families should claim which bodies, etc.  Simonides realized though that if he closed his eyes, he could remember every single person in the hall by where they were located. This is how the Memory Palace came to be.

When you visit someone’s house for the first time can you still remember it the next day? the next week?  Where was the TV and the couch?  Where was the kitchen in relation to the front door?  Its so much easier to remember than say, someone’s phone number or address.

The Memory Palace is a technique that allows you to visualize the things you need to remember based on an actual physical place you know.  Here’s how to build your own memory palace (for greater details, read this article):

1. Visualize a physical place you know really well (most likely your own home)
2. List all the distinctive features of this place (e.g., the front door, the main foyer, the big painting of the bull fight you bough in Madrid, the steps leading up to your bedroom, the bedroom door, etc.)
3. Imprint the palace into your mind – know every single detail of your actual physical palace; you’re going to need to remember this
4. Associate the things you need to remember to your palace – A key thing to note is that you need to make whatever you remember “crazy, unusual, offensive, extraordinary…” if its boring, its unmemorable.  I like the example given here about remembering a grocery list.  If you had to remember bacon, start at your front door.  According to the article, it says you might want to remember streams of bacon coming up from under the door, like zombie hands trying to get at you.  Then when you walk in and the first thing you see is a picture of your mother-in-law with your wife, and you have to remember eggs….and so on.
5. Visit your palace and see all the things you can remember!

Good luck!  Let me know in the comments how you’ve fared with your Memory Palace.  How many things did you remember?

Some things to try out this week:

1. Forego a grocery list (ok, maybe keep a backup list in your back pocket)
2. Memorize at least 2 of your family members’ phone numbers that is in your cell phone address book
3. The next new place you need to go, try to remember the address using your Memory Palace

Daily Smart Fact #11: If you use 10% of your brain, then you’re probably a vegetable

Key Takeaway: The notion that we use only 10% of our brain is laughable. Most of the brain is active almost all of the time.

I recently saw the movie “Limitless.”  The main premise involves a writer (Bradley Cooper) who becomes hooked on a drug that allows him to use essentially 100% of his brain (instead of the measly 10% that everyone else uses); as a result he becomes this version of a demi-god.  He can consume large amounts of information, predict the future (sorta), outwit/outsmart/outtalk everyone around him – and all because he takes this drug that lets him use 100% of his brain.

Having taken a neuroscience class in college, I knew this wasn’t true but decided to do some digging around anyway because I’m fascinated by how such a myth like this could sustain itself in our society.

Here’s some quick facts that I could find, from Scientific American:

• The “10% myth”: Although there’s no definitive culprit to pin the blame on for starting this legend, the notion has been linked to the American psychologist and author William James, who argued in The Energies of Men that “We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.”
• “It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time,” Gordon adds. “Let’s put it this way: the brain represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy.”
• Even in sleep, areas such as the frontal cortex, which controls things like higher level thinking and self-awareness, or the somatosensory areas, which help people sense their surroundings, are active.

This passage, I believe, describes it best:

Take the simple act of pouring coffee in the morning: In walking toward the coffeepot, reaching for it, pouring the brew into the mug, even leaving extra room for cream, the occipital and parietal lobes, motor sensory and sensory motor cortices, basal ganglia, cerebellum and frontal lobes all activate. A lightning storm of neuronal activity occurs almost across the entire brain in the time span of a few seconds.

The human brain is an awesome thing!