Memory Palace

I used to think “good memory” was a talent – you’ve got it or you don’t. I don’t.

This was hard to swallow in 2007, when I had to get out the directory to phone my best friend. But then came the iPhone, and suddenly, it didn’t matter. I filed ‘memory’ between ‘whistling’ and ‘baking’ in the list of things I can’t do but don’t care to improve. Why bother with rote memorization when you can delegate passwords to the Notes app and reminders to… Reminders?

But lately I’ve started to wonder, is memory a lost art? And is there something bigger we lose when we turn over the keys?

I have 1335 notes in my app now. Most feel less like a lighthouse to point me back to the thought, and more like a stand-in for the thought itself. Others are just Greek to me. Like this one, which I assume is a song of some sort:

Youuuuu

Buda budada

Repeat

Bum bababum baba- bum bum bum

Repeat

To be fair, I wouldn’t trade modern technology for the ability to remember a friend’s birthday without a notification. But in offloading the little details of our lives, I worry we’re reducing ourselves. After all, what better marker of humanity than the ability to remember?

Moonwalking with Einstein

In search of the key to this lost art, I picked up Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, which makes the case that memory can (and should) be improved. And he makes it by becoming the example.

Foer starts the book curious about so-called memory masterminds, then ends by competing to join the ranks at the USA Memory Championship. So how did he do it? Well, it turns out to be less about “the recalling” and more about the storing process (aka my Notes-app-jotting stage). Foer tells us:

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

That led Foer to the greatest tool for memory athleticism: “The Memory Palace.” It’s an ancient Greek system that turns spaces into mnemonic devices. And if that makes your head spin, it’s simpler than it sounds:

First, take the items you need to remember, and you assign fanciful, exaggerated visual cues to each. Then, think of a space that you know well (your childhood home, the walk down your neighborhood street, etc.). The idea is to place these visual cues in a specific location within the space. That way, every memory has a place to call home, and you can walk yourself through the space in your mind, encountering each memory in order. The more outlandish and multi-sensory the cues, the better.

For example, if my to-do list was:
wash the sheets
pay my rent
sign up for a sewing class
send my brother a birthday present

And my memory palace was my apartment, then I might close my eyes and imagine:

I’m walking up the carpeted stairs. But instead of carpet under my feet, I see a sea of sheets rippling like waves, making it almost impossible to guess where each stair is: wash the sheets.

I turn the knob to the door and struggle to push it open, only to discover a mountain of coins in the way. I’d pay attention to the way they sound as they shift: pay my rent.

I’d imagine myself walking into the kitchen and having to spy crawl under a delicate arrangement of threads in the doorway, secret-agent style: sign up for a sewing class.

I’d imagine getting to the kitchen sink, where the faucet has a giant red bow around it. The tail of the bow falls into the sink in the shape of a B: send brother a birthday present.

Now, this may seem like more effort than it’s worth when you could write a simple to-do list (and in this particular case, you may be right), but imagine what it does to your brain to do the remembering on its own. In fact, I want to say there’s some science on the benefits. But truthfully, I can’t remember.