 If you ever wake up and find that one of your limbs has been removed and you don't know how, put it in some ice, go to a hospital, and try to remember. In the recent BBC reboot of Sir Doyle's famous detective series, Sherlock Holmes, played by Benadryl Cumberbund, performs incredible feats of memorization and recall using a mnemonic system called a memory palace, or method of loci, which is made out to be some sort of intellectual superpower. I'm sorry, I got his name wrong. Bandicoot Cabbage Patch. Okay, just one more. Bombadil Crackerjack. There's a lot of fiction interlock, but the memory palace method is a real thing, and it kind of is a superpower. It allows people who practice it to remember an amazing amount of stuff with startling accuracy, like memorizing the order of a randomly shuffled deck of cards in a few minutes, or rattling off pi to several thousand digits. And it's actually pretty easy to learn. It does take a little initial investment of effort and creativity, but the mechanics are very simple. It's also a very old system, used as far back as ancient Greece, where facility with memorization was considered to be a human virtue, like morality or strength. In ancient Greece, if a scholar could get up in front of a room and rattle off 50 stanzas of Homer without any errors, there was someone to be admired and emulated. Memory was so important to the ancient Greeks that in Plato's fadress, he quotes Socrates going all crotchety old man about writing things down. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. And we think smartphones are rotting our brains. How would you like to be so old that you felt that way about books? People who can remember thousands of digits of pi, or every word of Mark Antony's speech from Julius Caesar, aren't really regarded as paragons of human virtue anymore. We generally treat them with the same attitude that we reserve for people who've collected every single Gundam model ever made. Okay, that's nice, I guess. However, although I'm generally on the side of technology supplanting human faculties, like books, or maybe implantable memory augmentation devices, I do think that there's a lot to be said for practicing and perfecting remembering things. Now, memory is a notoriously complicated topic, and our knowledge of the science underlying it is constantly evolving, but there is some decent data supporting the idea that having a mnemonic technique, like the memory palace, might be good for more than just party tricks of memorization. It might actually help general cognition in problem solving. You've probably heard of short-term and long-term memory, the idea that the brain has two more or less distinct systems for storing and retrieving information. Short-term memory is volatile, limited, but fast, whereas long-term memory has greater capacity, is much more stable, but slower. There's also a category or process called working memory, a term for the cognitive processes associated with active problem solving, which involve rapid storage manipulation and recall of items in short-term memory. Working memory capacity is a big deal. It's sort of the limiting factor for how quickly our brains can grab hold of things and process them. It's actually a better predictor of academic performance than IQ, and there's substantial evidence that it's intimately linked with creativity as well. That makes intuitive sense. A lot of what allows us to synthesize new ideas is having old established ones available for reference, and that's memory. You can't get Reese's Pieces unless you can hold both chocolate and peanut butter in your mind at the same time, which means holding them both in working memory. So working memory is great, and you probably want as much of it as you can get, but memory palaces are just for long-term memory storage, right? Well, in a paper called Long-term Working Memory by Anders Erickson and Walter Kinch, some evidence has shown that people who have internalized some mnemonic technique, who've practiced it to the point that it's quick and easy for them to use, actually have the ability to use their long-term memory as an expansion for their working memory. Those individuals who have trained themselves to use memory palaces effectively can rapidly offload or recall things that normally occupy one of the short-term memory slots. It's possible that they're hacking the part of their brain responsible for spatial awareness as sort of impromptu storage for working memory items. MRIs of people who are practicing memory palace memorization techniques show a ton of activity in parts of the brain usually reserved for things like orienting yourself in a mall. Activity which untrained people don't have. That's not definitive, but it certainly looks like they're harnessing some sort of auxiliary processing power. Okay, so memory palaces are great and ancient and might give you mental superpowers. I'll stop stalling. Here's how you make one for yourself. First, you'll want a place that you're intimately familiar with, ideally somewhere with lots of unique locations and details. Well decorated house good, series of hospital rooms bad. Next, you'll want to order those locations so that you have a set sequence for traveling from one to the next. It doesn't matter if you follow the left hand wall or use the path that you always take when you get home, just so long as each location follows naturally from the previous one. You'll perform a similar process for certain set details in each location called hooks because you hang your memories on them. You could start from the left and work your way clockwise around the room, but it should be pretty much the same thing. Unique easily remembered hooks in a set order. As soon as you have hooks for every room, you've got a memory palace. To fill it up, you start at the first location, like maybe your front door, and your first hook, maybe your screen door handle. To hang a memory on a hook, it helps to make it as outrageous and caricatured as possible. Let's say that I want to remember to pick up eggs from the store on the way home. I don't want to just put an egg on the screen door handle. I want something stupid and memorable, like maybe the velociraptor egg from Jurassic Park, oozing all down the front of the door and making that creepy little screeching sound. The more emotionally charged or weird you make each memory you hang on a hook, the easier it'll be to recall. And the more you practice using your memory palace, the more time you spend walking through that sequence and storing or retrieving things from it, the easier it'll be to call up and use when you need it. Maybe you'll use it to learn a famous speech or your credit card numbers, or maybe you'll learn it well enough that you can augment your working memory, or maybe you'll just use it to remember a list of silly names, like bumblebee scratch and sniff, beetle juice concubine, bend and snap countryside. Do you think that mnemonic techniques are just good party tricks, or do you think that Socrates was right? Please leave a message below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to ball ball subscribe, blush air, and don't stop thunking.