Crack the code on how to remember your shopping list Where did I leave my keys? Defeated by everyday memory lapses, Tom Ough meets the man who can help you unlock your own ‘mind palace’ through unconventional means
ABUNCH of bulging, purple grapes is stuffed into my front door postbox. Sticky trails of juice roll down the door, dark against the white paint. I’m confused and alarmed. What’s going on? I yank the door open; already, I’ve trodden on the yellow daffodils littering the carpet. I try putting my keys on the shelf to my right, but it’s covered with a dune of white powder.
Shocked, I look up to see a pillow flopping its way down the stairs like a Slinky. I’m not going to forget this scene any time soon – which, of course, is the idea.
“Welcome to your memory palace,” says Tony Buzan, smiling. He is the memory guru who popularised the mind map technique in the ’70s and has been known since for his books and TV series. He is 74 now, and moves slowly but elegantly, white silk scarf draped over his right shoulder.
“Memory palace” is a grand name for a mental re-creation of the place I rent in Britain, but if it helps me remember a shopping list then who am I to quibble?
It’s an ancient technique, and was shown by recent research at Radboud University in the Netherlands to improve brain connectivity in amateurs to a similar level to that of memory athletes.
After 40 days’ training, the amateurs were almost as good at remembering lists as the world’s best memorisers, leading the researchers to conclude that a superb memory is not so much a heaven-sent gift as something all of us can work towards.
Tony says it’s “madness” how much the 40-day figure overestimates the amount of training needed to radically improve memory.
But what everyone in these circles agrees is that the mind palace technique can make an ordinary memory extraordinary – and any old dunderhead can do it, which is where I come in. But there’s more, says Buzan earnestly.
“Improving your memory is the easiest way to enhance your life.”
At home, he explains, a good memory will help us show friends and family we care about them, from birthdays upwards. It’ll help when we meet new people: who among us hasn’t forgotten a name? Or – worse – got one wrong? (I certainly have, and I’m sorry, Anne, I really am.)
So far, so quotidian, but Buzan says that memory has far more profound applications. A better memory makes us more creative because we’ll have more raw material to draw on when we make new connections between seemingly disparate pre-existing ideas. It will help us enjoy music and literature more, because we can understand it better in relation to what we’ve already encountered.
Even physically, a good memory will help us in sports that require us to learn certain moves or strategies.
Tony is speaking in broad terms here, of course: this is memory in a wider sense rather than in its remembering-a-deck-of-cards guise. (“It’s tragic that people think memory is just a sort of filing cabinet.”)
A good general memory is underpinned by good physical and mental health; for more specific tasks, from remembering phone numbers to faces to ideas to dates to shopping lists, there are various techniques to be learnt, of which the memory palace is just one.
But it’s a good one. Soon after I meet Buzan, he sets me a basic memory test. He reads aloud a list of 20 items one might put on a shopping list: eggs, celery, potatoes and so on. He reads it again. My task, once he’s finished, is to write them all down again – in order.
As he goes through the list, I’m reciting it in my head, but soon enough I’m falling behind.
By the time I start writing, the first three are sufficiently lodged in my head for me to get them right, but the rest are lost in the mire. I remember many of the items, but can only guess where they came in the succession of 20.
It’s like secondary-school chemistry classes all over again: I score four. Twenty percent. I need help, evidently, and so Buzan teaches me the mind palace technique.
All you need is a place – your home, for example – you know well. Start where you enter the property (don’t know about you, but for me it’s the front door), and as you imagine yourself walking through the house, identify places you can put things. For me, once I’d entered, it was the carpet, the shelf on the right, the stairs up to the flat, the coat hooks and so on.
After a few minutes, I’ve thought of 20 such places, or “loci” – others included the kitchen table, my bed, my flatmate’s chair – in the order in which I’d normally encounter them.
And that’s my mind palace – my first, at least. Tony has 70 of them, vast and intricately constructed; I imagine him padding through a palace the size of Borges’s universe-spanning Library of Babel, a flickering candle in his hand and his scarf still over his shoulder.
But my own palace is ready to be populated with things I need to remember, and the more vivid the image the better.
“Make it colourful, crazy, juicy, surreal, aromatic, sexy, sensual, active, moving, funny, ridiculous, cartoonish, fantastical,” Tony instructs me.
And so, when he reads out a new list of 20 items, I imagine the oozing grapes in the letterbox, the pile of flour on the shelf, the damp spaghetti festooning the coat hooks.
This time I score 17, and I only miss out on full marks because I hadn’t ordered my loci straightforwardly. I am Rain Man. I am Sherlock. I am an adult male who is capable of being dispatched to the shop and returning with most of what I was sent for. I have a rudimentary memory palace, and it took just five minutes to build.
But I’m not special: anyone can do this. Age is no barrier to great feats of memory, Buzan tells me, and our 63year-old photographer suddenly perks up.
New evidence suggests that some areas of the brain can create neurons long after birth, synapses are made throughout a healthy lifespan, and mental techniques like the memory palace can be learnt at any age.
Which is fortunate, because the dawn of the digital age has been no good for memory. Quick access to facts, along with the increasing rarity of actually writing things down, has made us less able to retain information and thus in ever greater need of learning how to get the most out of our minds.
We pack up, and Buzan can’t find his glasses, but I’m still deeply impressed. I’ll never carry a shopping list again. — The Sunday Telegraph