Welcome to the Memory Palace

you don't remember. I can have a simple list to go to the grocery with, and if I don't have it written like in the notes section of my iPhone, then I'm not gonna remember everything. Even if it's something vital, like something the thing that I need to eat that night, an important component in the in then the meal, I still will forget to pick it up. I'm sorry, what were you just saying? Now, that's just uh, you know, I have a horrible memory. Actually, I've read something in

our research that compared memory to a Wikipedia entry. Yeah, and they were saying, it's like it's your memory is constantly being altered and augmented and then sometimes pared away. Yeah, and sometimes the stuff that it's being updated with is completely uh, not true. It's horse manure sometimes turns out. Yeah, and that's not necessarily what we're gonna talk about today, but you could actually talk to me about that before,

and I thought it was fascinating. Were you saying that when you have a memory, each time you bring it up, you're revising it in some way? Oh yeah, yeah, Um well we'll we'll definitely have to cover that in an

upcoming episode in more detail. But yeah, every time you you bring up a memory, you're not just removing it pristine from the vault and then returning it pristine to the vault, but you're updating at each time because your brain needs updated information because we live in a world us, as we discussed in our Math podcast, we live in a world and don't have to navigate a world of multiple movable objects and symbols. So we have to be able to fly with that yep. And then hence the

horsemen who are sometimes right right. So people have had horrible memories for as long as we've had to remember things because uh, just as math, as we discussed in the Math podcast, we develop mathematics to do the things that we're not naturally inclined to be able to do with our normal mental faculties. We have to develop systems. But what to do if you're in the Roman Empire, for for instance, just hanging out and you don't necessarily have a ton of books around you or your your

iPhone there? Yeah, well, in this case you turn to something called the memory palace, also known as the method of Loki. Right, that's right, and the the origins of this go back to a particular back to the fifth century BC and a Greek poet by the name of Somonodes of CEOs. And uh, he was attending a party, you know, in the dining hall, having fun around a table with a bunch of a bunch of buddies, and he uh walked out for a few minutes, and the

whole entire place collapsed behind him. Oh, he walked out. I wondered how he survived. Okay, yeah, maybe he went up for smoke or something else. But but he went outside, uh, and everything collapsed. He survives everybody else that's just crushed to just mush, just a smucker's jam. There's no identifying these people. But he was, yeah, with a name like Smuckers. Um, so he goes back in you know, he doesn't go

back in, but they dig everything up again. Smucker's jam everywhere, and they're like, all right, who were each of these people? And he says, well, let me think about it. And he's able to identify each puddle uh as as he's able to that was, and he's able to identify them based on their seating position at the table. He's able to remember where they were spatially and and therefore remember

who they were identified these remains. And this was a big moment for him, right yeah, because then he realized, hey, I could apply this to other things in my life. If I have a list I need to remember, if there's a long list of facts I need to get down, this is how I could do it. And uh and and so this survived for ages. Uh you know, well,

you know, for centuries and centuries and on up through today. Um. One big proponent of this was Dominican monk uh Giordano Bruno, who was actually he was burned at the stake in UH sixteen hundred for heresy, but it wasn't the memory palace method that they got him there though I think some people found it kind of creepy, but his whole thing had to do with he believed that God was

president nature and the universe in life was infinite. Therefore that you know, there might be aliens or something and uh, and so that got him into the hot water. Yeah. The Roman Catholic Church wasn't big on that at the time, though today they have a statue where he where he was burned, and and he's more revered these days. It's

nice at least later on. Yeah. So the basically the the idea here, Uh, if you want to look at just sort of a simple version, if you take these mundane facts and you position them in a spatial framework and you make and you make them interesting, all right, So that the idea of the memory palaces to create a mental house in which to house and organize symbolic images, which then could serve as a queue for information retrieval, right right, Like, for instance, our good friend um, um

simonities here could easily populate this this banquet table with um, you know, a list of addresses he needs to remember if he can come up with a unique way to remember each one and then remember them in order based on where they are at the table. Okay, and um, just a little side fact to Thomas Harris's novel Hannibal. Actually, Hannibal Lecter uses memory palaces for his patients records. He does, I've forgotten about that. I've read that. Yeah, he even

includes music too for the rooms that he's going into. Um. Well, hey, if it's good enough for Hannibal Lecter, you know, it's it's good enough for me, which is why I actually tried this out yesterday. Uh and and I'm going to repeat everything that I imagined the way I built and populated my memory palace so that I could remember a list of five things to get from the grocery store in the way home. Okay, you didn't write a thing down. No,

did not write a thing down. It didn't put anything in my in my phone and uh and so these were the things. Just it was a soy creamer, ingle Hoffer's mustard, aunt traps, frozen fruit, and toilet paper. So, um, you know, just this is a standard run for me. Um, alright, what what does your memory palace look like? So I decided to for the space. I decided to use the space that I'm occupying right now, the house, stuff works,

podcast room, slash podcast chamber. Okay, so this is the way I pictured it all right over here behind you is our sound booth, and inside it I pictured a robot cow drinking coffee for my soy milk, all right. And then seated where you are, you're not here, but instead there's a large German man uh in in a later hosen, big mustache going on, and he's got big clumps of of of spicy hot mustard in his mustache. And that's the the engle Hoffers mustache, because it has

a little German man on the lap. Uh. Then in this seat between us, because the table that we record at has a third chair that is never occupied by an actual person. Um. But in in my memory palace, it is occupied by a large pile, like a human sized pile of frozen fruit. And it's just gleaming in the light, smelting a little bit, smelling sweet and uh. And you know I can see strawberry and mango and all. And because this is an important part of the memory,

cost to add some details to it. You know, you're not just thinking the word um. You know, you're not just thinking the word frozen fruit. You're picturing it. Uh. It is existing in space and not just a concept, all right. And then if I were to poke my head out through these curtains where Jerry is setting uh our producer, I would see a giant ant and that Aunt is dressed in Maria von Trapps dress from the Sound of Music, because I need to remember Aunt Traps. Yeah.

And then the fifth item, standing at the green screen behind Jerry's seat, there is a toilet paper mummy going through a number of sexy poses for the camera. They're sexy poses. Yeah, yeah, so and I So anyway, it worked. I was able to remember I know only five things. That's kind of puny, but I was able to remember

these five things. Now you can also say that while I was doing this for the podcast, I was applying more thought to this than I would normally apply to the list that I of things I need to pick up. And it's also worth noting that even though this is an abbreviated version, one can use use people use this for hundreds of items, right and in fact, in each room you could have five ten different items that are

living there. It's just a matter of placing the object, right. Yeah. Well, how about you, do you have a memory pale constructed? I do, and I'm not going to actually share it um because I don't think it's I'll share one on my on my list, And basically I need to mail my f S a reimbursement right flexible spending account. So at my front door, I just pictured angry chirups with wings made out of dollar bills greeting me at the

front door with a pile of mail. That's good, right, like you, And they're angry because they're like, you don't send the stuff in my wings are going to fall off or whatever. I don't know, but I do have other rooms, but just for brevity's sake, I won't I won't tell. But what I love about this is that it quickly becomes very similar to the surrealism that I don't know about you, but for me, that I experienced

in my dreams. Yeah, right, like all of a sudden, there's these incongruent things going on and they're they're wild and they're fantastic. And that's I think why we remember our dreams sometimes, right, because they're so extraordinary. Yeah, we were honest at least, Yeah exactly, I mean we were. We were talking about about this, how we make something mundane and we turn it into something crazy and memorable. In the same way that on this trip from New York.

We we both just came back from attending the World Science Festival in New York City two thousand eleven. It's gonna be back in two thousand twelve. Highly recommend anybody's big into science and lives in New York to give it a go. And and that's actually where I attended uh A. I was an audience for a panel on memory and that's where I get really excited about the

concept of the Memory Palace. But while I was waiting to go into one of these events, my wife and I we were waiting out in this little courtyard area and we saw this man walk up with a box, like cardboard box under his arm that said Trout on the side, like I don't know, like a beer cart, like a box that like beer would come in or something, but he just said Trout. I don't know what the

brand was. But anyway, he he's standing there there, puts his box down on the ground and he gets a handful of of like bread or crackers out, and he starts feeding the pigeons, which I don't think it's technically illegal, but he's doing it anyway. So he's feeding the pigeons.

Three of them end there and they're just standing there eating, and then slowly he starts raising his hand up, moving his hand forward, and then he reaches down, snatches one of the pigeons, stuffs it into the cardboard box, and then walks off with the cardboard box full of a pigeon. And so you told me that, And I don't think I'll ever be able to look at a pigeon without thinking of that poor pigeon's fate. Yeah, or or or wondering again why the side of the the the cooler

said trout. Yeah, yeah, so that it's Yeah. I have no idea what he was doing with it, what the purpose was, if he was an official pigeon catcher, if he was gonna eat it for dinner, Uh, you know who knows. But it was memorable because it was so weird. And so the memory palace is is kind of like, let's make the mundane fact, let's make the soy creamer that I will inevitably forget. Let's make that into something memorable so that I can't forget it, at least for

a short term. Um, and then you can you can use this this uh, this memory palace and you can populate it with hundreds of items, so you can we can remember a list in order of hundreds of items, and that's what mental athletes do. They're called mental athletes, and we'll get to them in a bit. Um. Yeah, after this quick break. Yeah, this presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow and we're back. Do you remember what we were talking about everyone memory palace

at Robotic Cows. Yeah, yeah, well that that was part of it. That was how we remember that. Yeah. Well, let's just walk this really quickly, just like sort of four easy steps on how you can create your own memory palace. Um. So we've already talked about the first step, which is create a physical location that you can clearly visualize right now. And that's why I went with the podcast chamber for me because I see it all the time.

I'm very familiar with the with the locations, and I can can imagine it instantly, right And you can make up your own palace, you know, just as long as you can, um get a clear beat on on the detail of it. Might I recommend like maybe the command deck from one of the Star Trek shows. There you go, that's a good example. Um. And step two is to

establish a memory route through the location. Right, So if you're gonna use say your childhood home, then you want to go through the front door, and you know, pick a route that say you go left to the kitchen and then down the hallway or so on and so forth. Um, you want to keep that same route all the time?

Am I right about that? Yes? Okay? Yeah. Joshua four who wrote a book about all this called The moon Walking with Einstein, he actually did a short video for the World Science Festival and uh, and it was shown during this memory panel that I attended, and uh and he he was he actually did it in a garden, like in a like an' really garden. It was more like a gardenery of a park or something. And he was he actually, you know, he's like, all right, here is going to be And it was something crazy like

you know, Einstein moonwalking, that's the title. And then he walked through it and he was able to do like a list of a hundred and ten thing. Yeah. And as he's walking through it, he's placing the checks. So this is really important. So once you're you establish your route, you want to put your objects that you want to remember your things or your concepts they want to remember in that room. And the reason why you want to

do this is because it becomes what's called a memory peg. Okay, so that's important for step three is you need to now peg the memory to the object. So that's when you start to think about these really bizarre associations. Right, the more bizarre the better. If you want to remember to pick up bananas, then can visualize your front door as a banana dacary portal with Carmen Miranda greeting you or something along those lines. It helps if you're kind

of silly. I think silliness definitely. Yeah, And you can add a song or a set to the memory, especially if you're Hannibal elector right. And then step for is just to repeat the visualization until you've cemented the objects to memories. You really pick those memories, right. So it's a fairly simple process. So we should probably talked about the research part of this, which is pretty cool, and and actually talk about these mental athletes. So there are

many types of memory. We don't just have memory in the human brain. We have just to give you a brief idea, we have sensory memory. We have short term, long term, explicit, implicit, procedural, declarative, episodic, semantic, and uh. And we also have spatial memory. And the spatial context is extremely important. Like it because again at a at a very basic level, we are navigating a world, a physical world of movable, numerous objects and simples. That's right.

And now I've talked about this before that when you walk into a room, that what you're perceiving isn't necessarily coming through your eyes, is coming from the associations that your brain is making spatially. So you're whether or not you realize that you're you're judging the height of the

ceiling or the doors, and so on and so forth. Yeah, I mean, and if you look back at our evolutionary history, you know there's a time where you need to remember the field where you you know, killed the monkey that you're gonna eat or something of that nature. You know, where does it laying? The field? Has it moved? So every we end up having this spatial scaffolding upon which we make sense of our entire lives. Just think of a calendar or think of a timeline like these are

these are spatial scaffolding systems. That we use to understand what's going on in the world around us. Yeah, and I especially like the evolutionary example because if you and why you would need the spatial memories because again, think about like trying to find food sources and mapping that out in your brain, or trying to figure out where that dentif lions are, how past to avoid them. Yeah, so it's really important to stress here that the memory palace is not a trick. It's not really a trick.

It's not something and when you have people who can who can use it and use it to impressive degrees, not just for five items at the grocery store that uh, they're they're not doing anything out of the ordinary. Like the spatial way in the way that we use spatial memory in the memory palace is just how we think. It's how the brain works well. And also these mental athletes that compete, right, they actually have very average memories.

They've tested them. Yeah, these are not superpowered brains here, these are normal brains. They're using um just to tie down what's happening in the brain. And there's a lot going on in the brain with memory. But uh, spatial memory is tied in the hippocampus, which is located in the temporal lobe, and it kind of looks like a long,

gummy worm kind of thing in your brain. And it's also worth noting that at the head of this worm you have the amigala, which is tied to emotional memory, which again kind of look at the head of the worm, and underneath that you have the pair hippocamp bulk, which is tied into details, memory recoding, and memory retrieval. But the hippocampus that's spatial, and that's the area that really fires up when these mental athletes start using the memory

palates to exceptional degrees. That's right. In a study of eight top ranking mental athletes, they are asked to memorize three numbers and black and white photographs of people's faces

and magnified images of snowflakes. Researchers found that in comparison to the control group of non mental athletes, the mental athletes were using a lot more of their spatial memory in that himple campus region that you talked about, um and again, it's because they're using that spatial reasoning to peg a blueprint of all the objects that they're memorizing. So UM so we're talking about these mental athletes. Let's talk specifically about one of the more famous ones. I

suppose by now, um Joshua four. Yeah, this is the guy who wrote Moon's Moonwalking with Einstein then I mentioned earlier. Um, Yeah, he became interested in these individuals, um, and and he's just a journalist, right, I want to find out more about this. I mean, he became interested in the US Memory Championship and he went there expecting to interview a bunch of savants and uh and just you know, mental giants.

And and they they kind of laughed at the notion when he when he asked them the questions because they're like, no, I'm just you know, a normal dude, and this is not that complicated at it. And so he kind of took it on as a challenge to like, well, let me see what I can do. Let me try out the memory palace, let me let me see what I

can do with the method of Loki. Yeah, and he spent a whole year, this was just pretty incredible with memory champ ed Cook um literally just so he could improve his mental acuity, right that that was his the first thing that he wanted to try to do. But he became really obsessed with becoming a mental athlete himself, and he went on to compete in and win the US Memory Championship, and each morning during this year, he would spend fifteen minutes memorizing a new poem or memorizing

the names in an old yearbook for instance. Um, but that's not that's not where it stopped. And he again he was obsessed with us. So on the subway he would start to memorize random numbers, or he would keep a deck of playing cards with him and memorize those. And he began to catalog everything in his existence and

constructing like basically like condominiums of mental palaces. Cook the guy that he he interviewed, he actually did a like a Ted talk or Ted x talk or something, And I'll have to embed that in the blog post that we do to ac company this, uh, this particular episode, because he goes into how he would he uses the memory pal system. He's memorized things like Chinese characters, you know, basically learning bits of another language via the memory palace. Yeah,

and he has some really good visual representations in that video. Yeah, super silly Joshua for yeah, completely obsessed. He even bought a pair of goggles and spray painted them black, and then he cut out eye holes in them. And this is all in an effort so that he could better concentrate on his memory skills. Yeah, so it looks like that part of it sounds like, you know, Jedi master training,

some sort of you know, far Eastern like thing. But then in his mind he's thinking about goofy things like, uh, you know, like Katherine Hepburn juggling frogs or something I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, And there's a great New York Times article called Secrets of a Mind Gamer, and in it, uh Cook says to the reporter there that photographic memory because because the reporter brings up, well, isn't this just photographic memory? And yeah, and he says, no, photographic memory

is a despicable myth. It doesn't exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have quite average memories. Okay, So this is coming from the guy who could recite most of Paradise Lost by Heart as well as like two fifty two random digits he could commit to memory in like five minutes. So I mean, these really are incredible feats that these guys are doing. And indeed, and actually, um, you know, this is a

competition that they have among themselves. But Cook says that it's also an attempt for them to rescue a long lost tradition of memory training, because again, we don't necessarily need it these days, right, except that we still have these crazy, failing memories. All right, Um, just for the most mundane things, like I've mentioned to you that, um, I think a lot for some reason about Quentin Tarantino movie, but inevitably always forget his name. And yet it's something

that you know, I reference a lot. How would you use the memory palace to remember? Okay, The reason why I can even say Quentin Tarantino now is because now I think about going to San Quentin and going to the Commissary, and in the Commissary Mario b Tali is fixing ten thousand plates of Tarantino pasta. We'll see that, well, see, and that makes perfect sense within the architecture of your mind. But I would have to use quent Quentin Tarantino to

remember that other stuff you were talking about. I mean, Quentin sat Sam Quentin. I know. But who's the guy Mario Batali? Who's that? Oh man, he's this great Italian chef. And and you don't have to see the red headed dude. Yeah. Yeah, he's pretty outrageous in and of up, so if you don't really have to do much to him, like you know, you don't want to gild the lily there, Okay, yeah, but yeah, anyway, I mean, this is this is stuff

that you can do. Um, but it's pretty amazing to look at this, uh Joshua for character and Ed Cook and see them in acttion and um. In that video that Ed Cook has um from the ted X, he says that you should use your memory in a playful and enjoyable way, and you should experience it as a gift rather than a boring an annoying thing you'd rather park away in your iPhone. Yeah, because that's the thing

they're enjoying, these memory games. And I have to say learning that little list was kind of it was kind of fun. So the five measly five things I had to remember the grocery store. But I don't know, Maybe I should play with it more and and see how it goes. And I certainly encourage anyone listening to to give the Memory Palace a go to to try using it, even if It's just like, you know, the next time you need to do a grocery list of just a few items, don't write it down, don't put it in

your cell phone. Try constructing a memory palace out of it, and I think you'll be surprised at how well it works. Yeah, and I would love to hear too if if you have any other emnemonic devices that you use. Yeah, yeah, because I think we've all, like I used like poems at one point, like when I was in junior high. In fact, I believe I Yeah, I got kicked out of ap history for writing a raunchy poem to memorize something about the the original thirteen Colonies. I love it.

What a tawdry pass, I know it was. It was quite the scandal at the time. Uh. But but yeah, if you have any other weird methods or or you know that you employ to uh to sort of tweak your brain into uh doing things it wouldn't normally do, like remembering cinsul statu let us know. Indeed, well, hey, I have some listener mail here, let me you know, bag here and see what we have. Ah, here we go.

Here's a good one. Uh. This was from Katie and Katie's were responding to our cyber immortality podcast that we did uh about a month back. She says, Hey, guys, love the podcast. Sorry this response is a little delayed to the podcast day um and by all means don't ever worry about that sending us mail we'd love to hear about. So you know, anything you have to say about past or currently, time is relative, she says. But I don't get them every weekend. I have to listen

to them in blocks as you will. I was listening to the podcast on cyber immortality and heard the comments of the thirty year olds about the thirty year old self meeting another's thirty year old self, and the idea of living on by downloading your consciousness into a robot. I was just wondering if either of you guys had heard of a television series called Dollhouse that aired a couple of years ago. It was on for two seasons and was a Jaw Sweden creation. If not, you can

netflix it on in streaming. In that series, a group of people voluntarily signed their bodies away for five years for neurological experiments. The Dollhouse is a place where they download your consciousness onto a hard disk and stick it in the self in the self shelf. They then use that person's body as an empty shell called dolls, where they imprint or download personalities into these bodies and send them out on engagements missions that range from prostitution to

bank robbery to surrogate mommies, et cetera. Then, as the series progresses, the powers that be in the corporation get greedy and decided to start giving away the bodies down loaded with a paying customer's consciousness to be to be the now dead customer's new body. Uh So it becomes a kind of immortality, and uh, of course all sorts of chadek things ensued on the civilized life, security, and

personal liberties. I thought you guys might want to check it out since it follows that awful eyed chain of thought as to what could happen. All of these things start out as noble little steps for the betterment of man, but become monstrous terrors in and of themselves. Thanks for the podcast, m all right, I'm gonna check it out. Yeah, well, I've actually seen all the episodes that I should I should have mentioned in that in that episode, I guess

because even though I'm I was. I think, like a lot of people, was less than satisfied with the show as it actually come together. It was they tried to do some interesting things that they really did tackle a lot of these ideas that arrived from cyber immortality. You know, what if you could what if you could store human human's mind, human's identity on a on a disk. What if you could switch them around? Um, you know, could

we live forever? What would happen in personal freedoms? So it does explore a lot of those ideas and uh, and it does get your brain going. But but I wasn't completely pleased with But yeah, check it out. Yeah, Well Weed is great. I love Firefly. You just had

high standards. That's all which you can do. Well, Hey, if you guys have any thing to share with us, If there is there any bits of science fiction or pop culture that tie into something we've talked about that we haven't mentioned or are not aware, I'll let us know because we'd love to hear about them. And you can find us on both Facebook and Twitter as Below the Mind, and those are great ways to interact with us, and you can also email us at blow the Mind

at how Stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join Houstaff Work Staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. M