Mandala: Memory Palace and Simulated Worlds

Robert Lamb and my name is Christian Sager. I am I have a terrible memory. I'm gonna I'm gonna confess something here. Okay, I don't know about you, and you don't need to admit to this if you don't want to. But when we after we record episodes, you know, we build them a lot of research. We record episodes, A

lot of it just goes right out of my head. Um. I retain the basics and the of the knowledge and the ideas that we convey, but the very fine details like names or locations of things I lose almost immediately. Oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm very similar in that regard off and tell people that I have approximate knowledge of all things because they cover so many topics. I do not retain all the details. I certainly don't retain the numbers,

but I retain the basic essence. So yeah, we discussed yeah, um, but today's episode is about a topic, or it's tying two topics together that I think could help us with that if we if we really wanted to write. Although I'm now starting to think of the podcast as being sort of a portable memory unit as well. Yeah, or even a mandola exactly one of the topics here today.

And that's why the quote at the top of the episode here was m the Tibetan Book of the Dead, because though in order to unpack the idea of the mind, although we have to discuss Tibetan Buddhism a little bit, and and in doing that discuss Buddhism a little bit. But from there, don't worry, we're gonna get into the idea of the memory palace in uh Western and modern traditions, as well as a little bit into the idea of virtual worlds. Now, in putting this together, we look to

a number of different sources. One source that I particularly enjoyed was Robert E. Fisher's Art of Tibet because Ultimately, we're dealing with with an artistic tradition here, and it's great to have some wonderful images to look at while you're learning about it. So if you're if you want to learn more about Tibetan art in general, uh, this is worth picking up. You can find this online or

certainly at various museum stores. Yeah, I mean, I would recommend to, like, if you're listening to this and you've never seen a mandala before in in it's intriguing you, like, go image search for them because they there's a lot of variety first of all, but also just they're stunning. There's and this is across there's so many different styles of them too. That's one of the things we're going to find out. Yeah, and we'll describe them in greater

detail later. But essentially, if you don't have one in front of you right now, if you're not looking at our our home page, then the mandola are are these various Tibetan pieces, and they're also mandelas outside of Tibetan tradition, where you have a figure at the center usually and that figure is often a either a Buddha, buddhistattva or a or a god or a goddess, and then there's there's like concentric circles and they and even squares around them.

There's a lot of activity, their additional deities and figures all just sort of flowing out from the central entity. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I up until really, when you propose that we do this episode, was familiar with them as sort of just like the aesthetic trappings of Tibet or India, especially from you know, my growing up overseas. I would see stuff like this in Singapore occasionally, but like I never realized how culturally and almost pneumonically important that they are. Yeah.

They I think I started learning about them in greater detail a few years back when Emory University here in Atlanta, they at least in the past, have always done Tibet Week and they'll have some actual Tibetan monks come in and make mandolas out of sand, out of colored sand, which is this, you know, fabulous, you know, quintessentially Buddhist practice of creating these wonderful works about art out of individual pieces of sand and then you just destroy it

at the end. Yeah. I have some notes about that that will go over later. The process is fascinating. All right, So let's let's talk for just a minute about Buddhism and the and the Tibetan version of Buddhism. So as ROBERTI. Fisher explains in the Art of Tibet uh and and this is also something that's come up in previous research for me. I did a bit on sky burial for House to Work few years ago and got to dive

into Tibetan history and Tibetan culture a little bit. Have we have has stuffed abul your mind on the sky burial episode, I don't know that we have. I feel like Joe has also done research on that. Separate from this, Yeah, it would be something worth it, uh tackling. There was a recent War and Ellis comic that was all about sky barrel. Yeah. I mean it's a fact. Just to explain what we're talking about. It's an exposure burial where

one takes the body of the disease. There are a few different burial practices Intobet, but this one is the more famous because, especially to outsiders, it seems mccab that they take the body, they break it down into pieces, and then the vultures eat the pieces. But it is a. This is a very remote region, very mountainous, there's just not that much soil in which to plant a body.

So this is very much an option on the table, and it falls well in line with the older shamanistic animistic traditions, like the pre uh pre Buddhism traditions of the bat. Yeah, and there's a which is very much connected to what we're going to be talking about today, although we did not intend to bring up sky burial, but yeah, like the idea that you're sort of giving

back to the ecosystem, to the universe. Yeah. So again, it's a remote region, it's framed by some of the world's highest mountains, and it served as quite a fascinating I guess you could say an incubator for foreign religion influences, most notably that of Buddhism, which came from several different directions into Tibet in the seventh and twelfth centuries see.

And to put that at all in perspective, the historical Buddha Sidharta Gattama or the Shakya Mooney Buddha would have lived in the fifth century b c. And these foreign influences flowed in on top of pre existing shamanistic bond religious ideas in Tibet. The shamanistic part is going to come back around is it's important for me, But I want us to get through the Mandalis stuff first. I think there's some interesting connections here between modern storytelling and

shamanistic thinking. Now, the incorporation of a foreign religion is not an overnight sensation, as it's not just like Buddhism came and said, all right, this is our jam. Now, as Fisher points out, we see cycles of royal import and support for Buddhism, along with periods of persecution. But eventually we reach this uh, this period of the Second Diffusion, a seminal period into Beetan Buddhism in the last quarter

of the tenth century. Now, at this point, I want to challenge everyone to to think about religion a little differently for the purposes of understanding to bit and Buddhism, or at least to understand it as much as an

outsider ultimately can. I want you to think about religion as technology now, not meaning to directly invoke scientology lingo here or to advocate equal footing between science and technology and religion, but rather I want you to think of religion as a system of rights, beliefs, and mental programs

intended to bring about one or more particular ends. You know, just think about why people engage with religion, right, They want peace, happiness, liberation, salvation, elevation to a higher human form, what have you. You know what that reminds me of cyborg is m Yeah, very much so, which we've discussed at length before. If you go back, we have an episode from last year, I think last year on cyborgs.

But we definitely I think we don't. You definitely get with the philosophy of and in a sense kind of into the religious idea. Yeah. So consider that the Mahayana branch of Buddhism one of the three main branches and the largest today. Okay, let's consider this one. This is the the great path, as opposed to the lesser path

of Theravada Buddhism, which originated in Sri Lanka. The Mahayana way of Buddhism focuses on ordered monastic life and rights, and it offers a rather long term technological solution to life's problems, a contemplative and intellectual journey to enlightenment. They can take eons to complete through endless rebirths across time, until at last all livings, all living beings, might be

free from suffering. Sounds good, right, But then this is where the esoteric forms of Buddhism in or the picture in particular the the vadrariana or diamond vehicle or thunderbolt vehicle, the tantric corpus of Buddhism. Okay, sometimes I've seen this referred to as apocalyptic Buddhism. So if Mahayana Buddhism was a to put this in sci fi terms, if it was a generation ship, a generation starship trudging its way endlessly across space towards a distant exoplanet, then the vadre

Yana Buddhism is a warp drive starship. It promises a means of individual liberation from the wheel of suffering within a single lifetime. I feel like this came up when we were talking about um mummification of monks. Yeah, I bet bet it did, because we talked a little bit about the bodhistoft for the future. Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, And that bodhisoft certainly plays into a Tibetan Tibetan culture a bit as well. But the crazy thing about this is that this UH, this this idea of esotery Buddhism

is it's it's not a mere shortcut approach. So it's not one of these to to sort of try and throw it into like modern Christian terms. It's not like, Okay, I just love Jesus and everything's gonna be okay, don't worry about any of the steps. It's not something like that where it's like, hey, don't do all this work, just do this now. They're the approach here is is is putting a tremendous amount of work into uh achieving

this end. The stakes are just as high, and the amount of mental effort involved is staggering, entailing the study and contemplation of of all these other roots, entailing additional rituals, and the worship of two distinct pampions, the five Buddha families of the celestial Buddhas UH each residing on one of the pure lands, and the appropriated Hindu deities. So

you have all these different deities going on. It's um like reading about it, I couldn't help but think of it in terms of say a dungeons and dragons character where you know, generally you just wanna you pick your character class and you pursue it, and you you do everything right, but you can dual class, you can multi class.

This would be like multi class in your dn D character. UH. And and just setting out to achieve all of his or her goals by just quadruple classing with wizard Presoorcerer Warlock, all to just to take something that would normally take lifetimes to achieve in a single lifetime. In the D n D comparison, you're combining the arcane and the divine. Fisher has a wonderful quote. I think that drives this home.

He says, belief in the awesome possibility of harnessing the powers needed to achieve enlightenment in this existence inspired complex and mysterious practices. Such secret doctrines, visualizations, and magical powers were not things that could be easily spelled out in text, and the Vadriana literature remains as complex and mysterious as

any of the world's religions. So, in other words, to organize this vast system of beliefs and gods and ways of thinking about life in the universe, UH, to make it manageable, practitioners developed. Practitioners developed an enormous complex visual system, an artistic tradition complete with a host of instruments, symbols, and images. So all of this, if we take it all together, it touches upon a lot of topics that Robert and I have covered on stuff to blow your

mind in the last year. I'd say, like a theme that we've been working upon is mythology, archetypes, uh sort of cultural resonance of those things and how they allow us to make sense of the world. Right Like a very practical, objective standpoint, human beings need all of this, whether it's Buddhism or Christianity or jedi Ism, UH, to help them make sense of how the world works. And this form of Buddhism just presents a an incredibly complex

and esoteric answer to that question. And in doing so, essentially the practitioner is saying, Look, you're gonna need to look at a lot of charts, a lot of graphs, a lot of pie. This is kind of the equivalent would be like a really in depth power point presentation. We have to look at a bunch of charts and graphs to get the meaning of what's going on. These various symbols and artistic conditions play into that as well, and among these one finds the mandala. Yeah, why don't

we take a break and then we come back. We're going to define the basics of the man end to look for you so you can understand how we're going from power point presentation to the art. Alright, we're back. So the basics here of the mandola. So when you're saying, like, what is it literally, I've seen some people say have circles, some saying arc. I've also seen it translated as quote an essence protecting environment. They're ultimately though, nothing short of

a representation of the entire sacred universe. Yeah. The way that I've read about it is that it's a symbol of the entire universe, and it can be represented anywhere. It could be on a wall, or on paper or in the sand, like we talked about earlier, or entirely in your mind. Uh, And its purpose is to represent an imaginary palace that is contemplated upon during meditation. Yeah.

They can be two D, they can be three D in the form of a sculpture or even architecture, or they can be this this mental instruct and ultimately, I guess the physical representations are about creating the mental constructed mind. I really like the way that Robert F. Thurman explained it in his translation of the Tibetanan Book of the Dead, which I read from from at the top of this episode.

He said, they are three dimensional perfected environments Buddha verses or Buddha lands, created by the enlightenment of an individual individual as a place that expresses his or her enlightenment. They are realms through which other beings can be incorporated into that enlightenment perspective. So since it's kind of like, here's a here's a picture, here's a physical representation of my head space that allows me to make sense of the complexities of reality. Here, gaze into it and pour

this into your mind. So I may be stretching this a little bit, but let me continue on from what we were talking about with Dungeons and dragons are okay to me? What this sounds like is world building in fiction, like science fiction or fantasy. Right that you're you're creating an alternative to the real world, and you're giving it its own culture and deities and economy and locations. Right, And the mandola uh sort of encapsulates all of those

in one artistic representation. Yeah, I think I think that's a fair comparison, because when you think of a fantasy book in particular, or done as in Dragons Module, you inevitably think of maps and in number, and there's a there's a lot of map like structure in these as we'll get into the basic cosmology of the Buddhist universe with its Holy Mountain at the center, like that's very

much a part of it. Uh. But yeah, ultimately, their their symbolic expressions, they're teaching devices, their externalizations of complex theologies. You know. Way you can think of them as thumb drives of the gods, I guess. Yeah, Well, I mean one of the things I read about Tibetan mandolas in particular is that the deities within them, they're represented as

embodying philosophical views. They serve as role models for us to look at and remember, Okay, this is what has come before me, these are the lessons learned by my ancestors. What can I take from this to guide my life? Getting entailed number of symbols and essentially metasymbols. Yeah, it reminds me, Okay, this is what I think of this idea that number one, culture is how we understand the world. Uh, and number two, storytelling is our means of transmitting culture

to one another as human beings. And then third that the arte types that are within such stories they teach us lessons about the human experience from other people's perspectives. Right. So this is where and I am sort of trying to pull this together on my own. It's a little bit of young and stuff from what we've talked about mythology before, but I'm starting to see storytellers as modern shamans. And the mandola seems to me like another expression of that.

It's just done with art instead of words. Yeah, I think so words or sand even, Yeah, exactly. So we've mentioned these sand mandolas. Um, the construction of them has to be affirmed as a ritual, which is very shamanistic. Right. In order for the mandala to transmit positive energy to its viewers, it's drawn in a ceremony, and the ceremony

includes monks chanting and dancing. Uh. They use these metal funnels that are called check per and apparently they vibrate in such a way that it causes the colored sand inside to flow out like a liquid. When they're making them. Yeah, I want to say, they kind of tap them on the side as they go with a little metal implement and it causes the like almost the individual granules of sand to come out, and they just make a line with it. Yeah. And what's important to note about these

is they're not permanent. They're not meant to be permanent. They're destroyed by these same monks. It serves as a reminder that our lives are impermanent. Uh. And the sand itself is rich turned to an urn, which is then that sand is then placed in water. So they see it again going back to what we were talking about sky burial. They see this as a gift that goes

back into the environment, back into the universe. I see some more accidental synchronicity between this episode and the other episode we recorded this week that on Human Bound Human flesh Bound books, because this, the creation of the sand Mandola is an acceptance of impermanence, that anything that we make is just not gonna last, whereas the flesh bound book is more in the tradition of this will last forever, This person's flesh will be will be immortalized in this

this tone well, or it's you know, I know that I'll be gone and I will just become an object at some point. So I want to give the parts of my body uh to be used for other purposes, such as holding these books of anatomy together object permanence. Uh. Now, I do want to point out that the use of art to convey complex religious ideas can be found many other places. Well that the three faced Christs of medieval

art instantly come to mind. These were not super common, but it was only a brief period of time, and the Church eventually decided that they did not care for it. But you have something like the Holy Trinity in Christian Catholic traditions, how do you convey that to the lay person? Well, one way is to have an image of Christ that has three faces, essentially a monstrous Christ. But it tries

to encapsulate something that is very difficult to explain language. Yeah, I'm thinking of these weird monsters from the Transformers called the Quinto song. Oh yeah, I love the U They had the three faces that rotated around. I wonder if there's some connection there. I don't know, but if you see that the picture of the three faced Christ, you can't help but think of those guys, just no tentacles now and then another example from Christian tradition will be

the crucifix and the cross itself. So think about this. The prefrontal cortex as part of the mammalian brain. Uh,

this is responsible for relating symbols and abstract concepts. The unconscious processing prior to perception usually takes around three hundred milliseconds, So it's not that surprising that as a psychologist, Adam Altar discovered Christians tend to behave more honestly, when they're exposed to an image of the crucifix, even if they're they have no conscious memory of having seen it, They're just exposed to it and just the power of the

symbol helped inform their behavior. Literally, the power of Christ compels you, yeah, or at least the power of Christian symbolism. Uh. And in nine there was an experiment from the University of Michigan that found that Christians felt less virtuous after subliminal exposure to an image of Pope John Paul the Second. And there have been some secular experiments with this as well, people tending to think more creatively when exposed to the

Apple computer logo or an incandescent lightbulb. So that's just just a few examples to drive home just the power of symbols, the power of non linguistic information, uh, even into small examples, and if you roll it all up into essentially a meta symbol, as we see in the Mandala, you can see how this does really help to to to form the mindset of the the younger Buddhist trying to learn how to perceive reality. Yeah, I think that this is just a version of that that we here

in the West maybe aren't as familiar with. How to go back to what we said ere there about about maps um the kind of mandol as we were talking about here, it's an organized system that explains the cosmos in terms of the body, in terms of a building, in terms of the physical universe. So they referenced the notion of the Buddhist cosmos as centered by Holy Mount Meru, which is the home of gods and Buddhas, and surrounded

by seven oceans and seven concentric mountain ranges. And beyond these ranges you find another ocean, islands that include human habitation, and finally a great wall of rock enclosing everything. Generally, you know, square of shape because the image itself is question interesting. So a mandola is spatial, it's symmetrical, and it's the presentation of all of these ideas. Yeah, so you've got an example here of sort of how you would build out a mandala from the my understanding, as

you start at the center and you build going out. Yeah, I don't. I think that's or at least that's the way that I feel like we look at them, we tend to process them. So you have a central deity, you know, or Buddha or other figure. You have concentric circles of guardian deities. You have square palace grounds featuring gateways, you know, ways to get in and out, uh circle of create cremation grounds representing the phenomenal world direction deities.

And then the outer walls oceans, barriers at the very edge of the image. So, in other words, we're talking about a world generated his art so that it might be simulated in the mind. A place where fortresses of bone rise above a sea of blood, where a pantheon of wrathful and serene the ease a symbol and precise arrangement. You've got, you know, multi limbed beings, dancing cyclopean architecture,

mountains that bridge Earth to the cosmos. It's all present and and we're serious about the seas of blood part to Bettan art and iconography makes use of many dark elements such as bone, blood, flamed skin. But here's just to give you a taste of this. This is from Himalayan art dot org uh and it's a description of the mandola of the Yama Dharma. It describes the the

mandola in detail. But the more the most interesting part here is all of this is encircled by a ring of skulls, a sea of blood, and the eight Great Charnel grounds again surrounded by a circle of Vadra's uh, the bright orange flames of pristine awareness. So i am. I go to a yoga studio here in Atlanta called Tough Love Yoga, which is infamous for conducting was called

me a yoga. You do yoga listening to death metal. Um, and the woman who started it there um she has brought artwork like this to the st also because it seems like it's incidental, but it's not. There's lots of skull icronography and blood and things like that, things that we associate with death metal in in artwork that connects to yoga. Then they've got they've got this giant mandola wheel painted on the wall by a local tattoo artist. Is really cool, awesome. Yeah, I mean there's plenty of

very death mentally imagery on this. I mean, what we just describe sounds like it could be a Slayer album covers totally. Yeah. But in looking at these mandal as, you'll find a great deal of complexity. Sometimes there are mandal is within mandalas. And uh Roberty Fisher at one point and his book refers to quote a remarkable visual litany of deities, mostly female, a programmatic sequence that can

be traced back to specific tests. I like that descript and because it really brings the technological and the technological idea that this is. It's kind of like a program that you're loading into your mind. And the study of mandola art is a discipline to itself. But we can explore a little more of their power and connection to the human bind by considering a Western notion, that of the memory palace. Yeah, so let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we're gonna give you

a refresher on the memory palace. There's been a previous Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode on it, but we'll we'll dive into it a little bit and then we're going to connect these two things together. All right, we're back. So yeah, so you in previous host Julie did a Memory Palace episode, is that right? We did, and then we did rerun of it after you and Joe came on board that featured an interview with a memory champion.

So there are two different versions of that podcast. I'll try and link to the interview version the landing page for this episode, because you get to hear from somebody who uses memory palace um and uses the method of Loki uh to a very high degree. Yeah. This came up a lot in the literature of how memory contestants are using this so that they can just memorize vast

amounts of information. But a lot of you out there are probably thinking, well, there's a lot of pop culture examples of this right now, I remember hearing about this from somewhere. Well, uh, it's certainly in the BBC version of Sherlock uh. And as previously discussed on Stuff to Buil Your Mind, Uh, somebody who were interested in the work of Maria Knakova. She has written a book on

how to Think like Sherlock Holmes. She talks about memory palaces. Uh. In the BBC Sherlock it's called a mind palace, which some people think was picked up from British illusionist Darren Brown, or from Hannibal Lector in the novels or the TV series. Now Thomas Harris, who you know wrote the original novels that feature Hannibal lecteror he credits this idea back to Francis Yates, who is the author of the Art of Memory. And Yates traces the idea of the memory palace back

to uh someone named Bruno, a sixteen hundreds Dominican monk. Uh. But that goes even further back down through the Medieval and Renaissance era, back to the Greek poet simon IDEs Uh. And Yates argues that the Seven Deadly Sins, or for instance, Dante's Divine Comedy, the structures within those of Hell and Purgatory and Heaven, those are all versions of memory palaces and in and in turn memories of mindless. Yeah. If I think there's a lot of comparison to be made, uh,

between a map of Dante's Inferno and the model. Yeah, it's just different mythology. The theme of yates work is that the Renaissance, which we view now with some skepticism as superstitious, is actually full of quote, magical beliefs that we now continue on into our scientific revolution. So for instance, go cr two episodes on John d for more on that and what we actually This is a theme that comes up a lot for us, I think, but uh, maybe also a little bit in the book Binding of

Human Skin that we're recording this week. But the same idea here that um, there is stuff that seems like it's uh superstitious or magical in nature that does actually have some purpose to it in our current scientific methodology of thinking. Yeah, I mean it basically the idea of the memory palace. It basically all boils down to employing spatial memory to memorize information by placing it all in an imagine palace, uh, a palace filled with memorable symbols.

So you know, theres we've discussed on here before. There are various forms of memory that we employed. There's not just one bucket of memory, and this is essentially a way that we tweak our mind and using spatial memory to to remember often just sometimes numbers or or or unimportant facts. The idea here is that humans have a knack for remembering spatial layouts. Brain scans even show show us that the spatial learning parts of the brain are

used by people who actually win these memory contests. It's particularly useful for remembering things in a sequence or a list, like groceries for example. Uh. It requires a lot of time to establish, but once once you have it in place, you can go back to you continue to walk through that memory palace in order to remember the items and

the order. Yeah. And one of the things that I saw that connects it back to the mandala is that, Uh, someone pointed out that Buddhism uses a lot of sequence and list type information in order to get across its philosophy. So subsequently, the mandola's then translate really well into these memory palaces. Now the origin Okay, so what I just took us through brought us all the way back to Greek poets simonade Uh. But it was first written in the Rhetorica ad hereni Um, which in the eighties b

c e. Was written by unknown authors. Some people thought that it might have been Cicero, but now they think they don't know who it is. Um. Now, this is the oldest surviving Latin book on rhetoric, and it teaches the method of loci, which is the the the idea of the memory palace, or the idea of using imagined, well known locations like your home to remember things. Now, this to me reminded me of my my schooling, and in rhetoric it seems inherently connected to the Aristotelian idea

of the peripatetic learning system. Have you heard about this at all? So basically the idea was that Aristotle, when he was working with his students in his his quote college, his school, that they would learn while they were walking and talking. Uh. And the method of loca is essentially a walk about, so you're be remembering what you learned by going on an imaginary walk. But here's the thing. Other sources say, actually it was invented by Greek poet

Simon IDs uh. And this was real morbid. Apparently, after he stepped out of a banquet hall, it collapsed and killed everybody inside, and he was left to identify their remains. He had to put a name to each body and that's how he invented the method of loci. So he's he's thinking of and stuff. All right. So Jim was seated over there, he had he had the chicken wings, and then and then Joe he was over here. He was to my left, and he's piecing this all together exactly. Yeah. Well, Cicero,

though was involved. He is celebrated as popularizing it. He wrote something down basically because writing something down at that time was expensive. Paper was expensive. Not everybody knew how to write. Uh. It wasn't until the printing press that it basically the method of Look how the memory palace became obsolete. And we've continued to see that pattern as we've changed the ways that we can externalize memory. We have to rely on internal memory less. Now as we

said already, it's employing spatial memory. And it makes sense that humans would have a robust ability for spatial memory because, as I mean, that's what we do. We live in this physical world. And even though most of us have probably have our patterns you know down you know to ultimately you know of just a few varied environments, and you know how to get there and how to get back. You know, we're we're programmed to deal with the broader world.

We're programmed to to to make spatial sense of the world around us, to catalog its storied away. And so this is just taking spatial scaffolding and applying it to a list of facts, to a theological structure, to a cosmological viewpoint. Um. So the memory palace is not a trick. It's it's just how we think about the world, and we're taken the way we think about physical reality, the way we think about spatial environments, and using it to

to remember other organized systems. Yeah, it's almost like these other older cultures had created a learning system around how we naturally adapt to knowledge, how we how we observe knowledge, and then we went and somehow broke that and created this other learning system that, especially for memorization, that's far more difficult and not how our our biology is set up to learn. Uh. And now now we're sort of coming back and we're going, oh right, right, yeah, this

is spatial learning is actually much easier. Yeah, and so again we come back to this idea of the mandola, and to see one of these and imagine it on the wall, it makes perfect sense. You can't just write out everything and have these notes for everybody who's trying to to to learn the system. But you can have someone guiding through it, refer to this work of our and then you look at it, you take it in, and you're able to use this as the memory palace

for the theological ideas. Now, the thought at work here is that memory palaces harness our evolved skill at remembering details of locations because as hunter gatherers we used to recall what was edible, where to find it, or how to avoid what was poisonous because of spatial memory. Modern research backs this up. After people viewed thousands of images for a few seconds each, studies found that, on average, they could distinguish eighty percent of the images from those

that they had not seen. Uh. In addition, people can usually recall objects they've seen after seeing hundreds of intervening ones, showing our capacity for storing visual memories in the long term. This is I I don't know if you've heard this a lot, but when I was in academia it was really starting to become popular with the idea of visual thinkers. I'm a visual thinker. I can't I can't read that text any something visual uh is something that's making its

way through sort of just the education system. Other studies have shown that the memory palace, or the usage of it, it doubles the proportion of people who can remember an eleven to twelve item grocery list. So again, sequences and lists work really well. Students who use it in economics outperformed those who did not when they take an exam, and medical students who used it learned more about the

end of crime system than those who did not. It's apparently also useful for patients who have had treatments that can potentially impair their recall or cognitive function. Hm. Well that makes sense. Like again, they're again they're multiple forms of memory, and if you can cap into another form of memory to achieve the goals of one that's damaged, then then you can find a good bit of success. Yeah.

As I was doing the research, I immediately thought to myself, if as I become older, I start experiencing memory loss and or dementia, gonna have to turn to a memory palace and just really develop one. So we've already had a number of the parallels here between the memory palace and the mandala um, and you know, a number of the parallels are just obvious. Again, it's all about using um our spatial memory to to internalize either you know,

a long list of data or a theological system. Yeah, and it's all really brought together here for us by an East Asian scholar named Dan o'huigan uh, and he provides interesting commentary on the concept of the mandala being like a memory palace. He argues the mandalas serves the same purpose as memory palaces that Roman orders used. Uh.

For instance, they used it to help monks organize their knowledge. Now, keep in mind that in both instances, these people had to rely on their memories more than we do, right, um, they didn't have paper, they didn't have flash drives, they didn't have smartphones. His primary example is Quintillion's use of placing some Bolck items in his home to help him remember things about law and the courts. And then people like Robert flood Are Giordano Bruno who I mentioned earlier.

They went on to visualize memory palaces as imagined spaces more similar to the mandola. Ohuigan though he thinks that these techniques were developed independently from one another, even though they're extremely similar. Uh, and the mandola allows them to visualize something colorful to help you remember what's going on. And it's similar to how Buddhism uses lists to help you remember its tenants, so mentioning earlier. Yeah, and you see this in in in really a number of different

Asian religions. But all of these various gods and artistic motifs, like every detail of it is important. You know, what is what is the deity or the Buddha holding, what position is their their body in? Like all of it tells you something. If you know what the symbols mean. Yeah, if you can recall that visual then you can sort of race your way back through what what Lesson is

trying to teach. Yeah, and you'll see descriptions for these where they're like, all right, well this particular Buddha, Bodhist for God, or their hand is like this that means such and such they're holding this weapon or that and this too is a symbol. So it all comes together. It's not just pure, you know, artistic entertainment. So Huigan points out that new monics and memory palaces are now

replaced by libraries, computers, and paper uh. And these function as extensions of our brains, so we don't need tools like mandalas or memory palaces anymore. And he he goes so far to argue that this is an area where he says, quote humanity scholars can justify their existence by contributing something useful to the knowledge of our culture. So he has a little bit of a lower esteem for the humanities, uh just throughout the piece, and generally is

kind of dismissive of academia. That's okay, I get that sometimes too, but uh so, anyway, he started bringing these together, but at the ultimately at the end of the day, he says, I don't think like there was some kind of like hidden connection that we haven't discovered yet where these cultures came in contact with one another and we're sharing information like this. It's just naturally how these different

cultures of humanity developed. Now, in the past, Mandela creation has been limited by human thought but also by the limits of art and construction. So certainly we've seen some epic attempts to reflect Mandala schema in architecture. But modern technology makes something even grander possible. A complete simulation of the Mandola of virtual world based on the Mandola which I think is kind of beautiful because essentially the Memory Palace.

Take come, the mandola is a simulated world, a world you simulate simula in your head, and you make the world in your head conform uh to the the shape in this other individual's head, and the virtual word old is is the potential to do that in this this third mind, the mind of the machine. Yeah. I couldn't help but imagine that when Second Life was really at its high, there must have been somebody in their building a mandola within the virtual world there that somehow represented

multiple things. Yeah, I mean, because there's certainly have been a several different virtual mandala projects creating three D simulations of these meaning laden medicymbols. Yeah. One example I've got here is from cal mel Chen's mapping Scientific Frontiers The Quest for Knowledge Visualization, and he talks about virtual environments being created that are based on the mandala and using it as an organizing metaphor for shared cyberspace. He connects

this to the idea of the Memory Palace. Up there we go. So there's another person who put them together, and he says Cicero was the most authoritative advisor on that subject. But basically Lee. He says, you know, you want to begin by imagining an very well lit place. Then once you get to know, then you store and retrieve objects there. So I can see how you would both do that within your imagination and within a virtual world.

One of the things that I'm interested in as we reach the end of the discussion here is we're at a current place where we have, as we said, we've we've we've gotten to abandon these memory palaces for the most part. We've gotten to the point where we can abandon mondolas and other religious uh paintings and and and meta symbols that give us this information. Instead we just we go online, right, or we go to the book UH, and we can find lists, we can find all the

data spelled out for us. But as we get more and more into a virtual reality age, and I'm trying to to say that not in a like mid nineties law and more Man sense, right, but but looking at some of the very real virtual reality applications that are going on out there and trying to imagine a near future in which the virtual use of cyberspace is more ubiquitous, are we going to see a sort of return to some of these what we see, for instance, could we

see spatial memory employed more as an educational tool maybe. I think that what you might see before that is creative types maybe trying to use the medium of virtual reality or augmented reality in such a way that it's representative like a mandala is uh So that like it takes you through a virtual story and you you you

learn as you go through it. I mean, we're so, I'm going to south By Southwest in a couple of weeks, and I was just looking at the program schedule and I can't tell you like probably like of the panels there are about virtual reality and augmented reality. Uh So, it is definitely something that's coming down the road. We know Facebook is heavily invested in it. Our other colleagues here at how Stuff Works have covered this at nauseum.

But the Oculus rift and Palmer Lucky and all the work that's gone into that and Facebook buying it up and stuff. So yeah, I think that that's going to be like a new palette for people to create on. It's gonna take a while, though, I think for education to catch up to it, especially when you think about it, like education hasn't really even figured out yet, Hey, maybe we should return back to the spatial learning system that

seems to work so well for our spatially inclined brains. Uh. There, we have a friend of the show, uh goes by p K who runs kingle Lux Records out of Canada. Yeah, he's involved in a project to build a virtual space station for like, you know, for sort of artistic musical purposes.

And he'll occasionally seen send me some some videos or some information on the project, and I see those and and some of the really beautiful imentry is going on there, And as much as I can tell without being like hooked into some sort of VR rig, it seems very immersive to whoever is controlling these characters. So so those those videos, when I when I view them, it does make me think about how we're going to make use

of that territory. And I feel like maybe we're gonna make use of that territory in ways that we can't connect to all that much now, but we can look back to our use of purely spatial memory in the past and see and see some sort of hint of where we're going. Yeah, I think it would be nice to see your return to that. I remember when I was working at the university, I worked out here in town.

There was maybe like a six month window there where they were super hyped up about Second life, and they built an actual like version of the university in second life where students, because they thought second life was going to be like the next big thing, uh, they had like, you know, students could go there and like interact with

f a Q forums and stuff like that. But not only that, but they had like a Greek lecture hall set up where theoretically a professor could come in there with their avatar and give a presentation to all of

the second life avatars of students that were there. So if you get that far and you're sort of just taking the real world analogy and applying it into the virtual world, I would imagine then when you get to the spatial reasoning, uh, that you would say, hey, this is actually here's a far better way for us to do this. Let's build the university as a memory palace rather than just like you know, have your little avatar go and sit down on a fake bench or something

and watch an avatar deliver a presentation to you. Well, you know, uh, we only have a limited knowledge of virtual worlds out there. But I know that listeners of the show have been out there explore worring. Perhaps that you have some examples of of the of the Mando law or other constructures that have been recreated in the virtual world, maybe even in Minecraft. I didn't even think about Minecraft, would be perfectly right. Yeah, you're right. Um,

that's interesting. So we would love to hear about any of those examples or just your general thoughts on Tibetan art, virtual reality, or the Memory Palace. Really, this is an episode that opens itself up to various interpretations and tidbits from your personal life. Yeah, you can hit us up with information about that on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or Instagram, and you can always go and visit us at stuff

to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we've got me and everything, all of the podcasts, all the videos that we've done, blog posts galore. Uh, it is full

of stuff, including links back to those social media accounts. Yeah, and I'll make sure the landing page for this episode includes links to some of the bits that we've talked about here, including sky Burial, the previous Memory Palette episode, and in any other little bits of related information in the pop shop over the years, and as always you can email us at Blow the Mind how Stuff Works for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff Works dot com