Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #3. Make Lots of Little Journeys

Making mental journeys (also known as "memory palaces") is a useful way to remember sequential information. If you have several familiar short journeys handy, you can be ready to remember whatever you need to, at any time. Here's how to start with the layout of your own house or apartment.

Practically every system of mnemonics relies on a series of pegs on which to hang information. For example, "Remember 10 Things to Bring" [Hack #1] associates the numbers 1 through 10 with rhyming objects (one = gun, two = shoe, three = tree, and so on) and then hangs the things to remember (such as medication, keys, and cell phone) on these mnemonic pegs by putting the peg objects and the things to remember in the same vivid mental picture.

An even older mnemonic technique—perhaps the oldest—uses places as memory pegs. By places, I mean ordinary, concrete places, such as the rooms of your house or apartment. If you mentally organize these places into a sequence that is the same every time, you will be able to walk through the places in your mind and retrieve the information you have stored there.¹

The Renaissance practitioners of the ancient ars memorativa (art of memory) referred to such journeys as memory palaces. Orators in classical times would prepare their speeches by stashing complex images that represented the things they wanted to talk about in the loci (places) of a remembered or imagined building, such as a palace. In fact, this practice is said to be the origin of today's expressions "in the first place," "in the second place," and so on.

In Action

When you create your mental images, make the impressions of the objects you want to remember as vivid as possible, to make the ideas you want to remember stick to the places of your journey. You can do this in many ways, such as by exaggerating them or using humor, sex, bright colors, motion, or anything else that holds your attention. (The word impression comes from yet another classical metaphor depicting memories as the marks left by a stylus on a wax tablet, the yellow legal pad of the day. When you make impressions on the wax tablet of your mind, press down hard.²)

To assemble your first memory journey, use a place you know extremely well; your home is a good example. You can also use the shops along a street where you walk every day or the benches, brooks, and shady trees of your favorite park. Just make sure you can trace your journey from beginning to end in your mind's eye before you try to use it as a mnemonic tool.

After you memorize one list of objects with your journey, you can "wipe the wax clean" and reuse the journey by mentally walking its length and visualizing the places as being empty of the objects you memorized. Blow up the objects with dynamite if you like.

You might want to create multiple journeys of different lengths, so you have one ready for any occasion. Then, if you need a journey longer than any you have memorized, you can link two or more journeys together by starting one where the last ended; imaginary journeys don't need to obey real-world geography.

In Real Life

Here are the first 10 places on my first journey, with typical actions envisioned for each. This journey is based on my real-life apartment. Places 1–5 start on the right side of the apartment (as seen from the start of the journey). After place 5 (the porch), the journey makes a left turn into the living room and doubles back so that places 1–10 make a horseshoe shape.

1. Bedroom

Where I start my day.

2. Back bathroom

My first stop every morning.

3. Front bathroom

Get some clothes out of the dryer.

4. Computer room

Check my email.

5. Porch

Get a breath of fresh air.

6. Living room

Sit down on the couch.

7. Dining room

Have breakfast.

8. Kitchen

Grab coffee to go.

9. Entry

Grab keys for the car.

10. Outside

On to the next journey?

When I was reading the "Famous Forty" Oz books, starting with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and running through the next 39 canonical books in the series, I used pegs 1–40 of the Dominic System [Hack #6] to memorize their titles. Let's use my apartment journey to memorize the titles of Shakespeare's 10 tragedies:

1. Bedroom: Titus Andronicus

A drill sergeant standing on the bed, wearing pants much too small, is cursing Private Ronald Reagan roundly (Tight-ass and Ronnie-cuss).

2. Back bathroom: Romeo and Juliet

A teenage boy and girl (guess who) are necking in a bright red Alfa Romeo sports car in the bathtub.

3. Front bathroom: Julius Caesar

An ancient Roman man sits in the bathtub sipping an Orange Julius drink and eating a Caesar salad.

4. Computer room: Hamlet

Piglet (the character from Winnie-the-Pooh) is stranded on the top of my computer monitor (Piglet = Hamlet).

5. Porch: Othello

Two men in Shakespearean garb are seated and playing the board game Othello on the porch table.

6. Living room: Timon of Athens

There is a tiny baseball team on the coffee table. They are of Athens: they have long white beards and are declaiming from scrolls.

7. Dining room: King Lear

An old man in a crown (a king) is seated at the table. He is leering at me, elbowing me in the ribs, and winking.

8. Kitchen: Macbeth

A gigantic Mac computer in the sink starts with a "bong!" sound and displays a beautiful picture of Queen Elizabeth I (Beth).

9. Entry: Antony and Cleopatra

A woman in ancient Egyptian headgear (Cleopatra) sits in front of the door, wrinkling her nose and picking anchovies (Antony) off her pizza.

10. Outside: Coriolanus

I find some bright green herbs on the ground. Feh! They're coriander (cilantro), which I hate. I wash out my mouth with anise seed, which tastes like licorice.

Notice that I used images to remind me of specific words in the titles of the plays. Since I'm already familiar with the play titles, this should be enough to remind me of them. If you don't already have a rough idea of the things you're trying to memorize, you might need to make more detailed images that are less ambiguous, or piggyback another memory technique onto this one.

The images need not have a logical connection with the mental location where you place them, since the places in the journey are essentially arbitrary, just like the pegs in the number rhyme system [Hack #1]. For example, I don't have a Macintosh in my kitchen sink, nor would I ever put one there. Actually, that very fact makes the placement of an imaginary Mac there all the more memorable. Absurdity is one of the many techniques used to make images vivid.

If you want to remember more play titles, simply add more places to the journey. For example, place 11 could be my car and could hold the first Shakespearean comedy, The Comedy of Errors. I could open my car door outside and find that the controls on my dashboard are backward and upside down, which makes me laugh.

Imaginary journeys can be extended indefinitely, so after you memorize all of Shakespeare's plays, you can move on to the works of other authors, or anything else you want to remember.

Tip

Try this the next time you are shopping in a familiar place, such as the usual place you buy groceries: mentally plot an efficient path through the store as a memory journey, then pick up what you need and go directly to the cashier. If you normally browse and buy a little too much, this technique may suggest a different approach.

End Notes

1. Mentat Wiki. "Memory Palace." http://www.ludism.org/mentat/Memory Palace.

2. Mentat Wiki. "Link Quickly." http://www.ludism.org/mentat/LinkQuickly .

See Also

• The Amazing Memory Kit (Duncan Baird) by Dominic O'Brien is a useful collection of interactive tools for training your memory. Amusingly, it also contains a sample memory journey for remembering Shakespeare's 10 tragedies; I was unaware of the example while writing this hack.