![]() ![]() To remember 24, he pictures Nero, because of the letters N and R. In his mind palace, he places the dinosaur in the hotel room’s bathtub. To remember the first two numbers, 12, he pictures a dinosaur, because of the letters D and N. Konrad pictures a hotel he stayed at in Times Square. He associates each pair with an image, based on the mnemonic major system, which converts numbers into consonant sounds.įor example, if he’s remembering 1224, according to the system, 1 is the D sound, 2 is the N sound, and 4 is the R sound. When memorizing a string of numbers, Konrad will take an hour to set up his mind palace and group the numbers in pairs. “By knowing exactly the route you placed in various images, you can reproduce the sequence by translating it back to random numbers.” “You could construct kind of a fantasy palace with different locations, but it’s often easier to draw on physical environments that you’re more familiar with,” psychologist Karl Anders Ericsson of Florida State University said. He’s prepared 60 to 70 mind palaces, building from familiar locations and cities. If that sounds a bit complicated, Konrad describes his process for remembering something. When storing information, he associates that information with a concrete image and imagines it in various locations around his mind palace. ![]() Besides acing his tests, he eventually started participating in memory contests. Konrad started learning the method of loci in high school. There was never really pressure to develop memory skills for this kind of abstract information, but it was important to navigate and know where the home is.” “Numbers are one of the most abstract information you can learn,” Dresler said. The method of loci works because our brains evolved to remember visual and spatial information, says lead author Martin Dresler, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience at Radboud University in the Netherlands. In particular, the regions associated with strategic memory coding and applying existing knowledge to new situations showed stronger connections. In this method, one mentally creates a “mind palace,” which could be a room or a house or a landmark for storing images associated with words or numbers.Īt the end of training, the team scanned the subjects’ brains, and they found the subjects’ brain connectivity became more similar to that of memory champions. The book Rhetorica ad Herennium, which is about rhetoric and persuasion, describes this mnemonic technique. The method of loci actually dates back to the 80s BCE, in ancient Rome and Greece. The team asked naive subjects who had never underwent mnemonic, or memory-improving, training to train in the method of loci for six weeks. In a recent study published last month in Neuron, Konrad collaborated with other researchers to study how mnemonic training reshapes brain networks. ![]() “By making visual images and making associations with information, you can store information that wasn’t there before,” Konrad says. Top memory champions like the current world champion Alex Mullen and neuroscientist Boris Nikolai Konrad construct mind palaces of their own to remember vast amounts of information. Sherlock builds mind palaces to store his memories and keen observations. He falls backwards-but manages to maintain consciousness to stay alive. Within a slowed-down three seconds, Sherlock pictures various rooms from his memory, flashing through a sterile white hospital-like room, his brother’s office, and a cylindrical prison with his archenemy Jim Moriarty. In the Sherlock episode “His Last Vow,” we catch a glimpse of the inside of Sherlock’s mind palace right after he’s shot. ![]()
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