How to have an Olympian memory

“Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.” But how do you do it when time’s ravages seem to include a diminishing of our ability to remember things? And when you are older, chances are you have more to bookmark and make sense of. How do you retain or even gain more capacity for memory so that you know that you are not being shortchanged by your own mind? Both the ancients and modern scientists have confirmed you can do it by creating a “memory palace.”

A memory palace is a familiar space in your head that you can mentally travel that will hold your memories. How familiar? It should be a place whose nooks and crannies and orientation you are so used to navigating – like your childhood home or backyard or school. How will it hold them? You will put your memories there.   

This is how it works. Stay with me because it may seem so bizarre at first and you may start thinking I have lost my marbles. One day, I probably will, but not today.

I imagine entering my childhood home and I see the Greek poet Simonides having a feast with so many other people on our dinner table and holding a seat plan of the event. Then I go to the refrigerator and I touch a refrigerator magnet shaped like a brain scanning machine that has the number “23” in it right next to a bigger magnet shaped “50.” I go to the hallway where all our shoes are lined up and I notice that the last pair at the bottom had a tag that said “72” with the left shoe lace ending up with a tag that said “62” and the right shoe lace bearing “71.”  I also saw a badly worn pair of sandals that had a sticker with “26” printed on it.

And then I go to the room I shared with my sister and she is on her bed which is shaped like a giant hippocampus but with squares in it. I go to my bed had a sheet with “DLPFC” printed on it and noticed that it is connected to her bed. Then I go to the next room, connected to ours, where my grandma used to rest and my little brother is there making play noises that could disturb her. I get called to leave and my mom emerges to say she expects to see me again in “4 months” holding a candle with “48” candles. It is a bizarre dream-like painting but the weirder it is, the more effective it will be.

This is the memory palace I created to remember all the details that I need to anchor this piece of writing.

Simonides of Ceos is the Greek poet who apparently came up with this method of “loci”. In the story that has been passed on, he happened to have just left a feast when the hall collapsed and he was the only one who was able to identify the mangled remains of the guests because he held a seat plan in his head.

The brain scanning refrigerator magnet is the fMRI technique that was used in the recent experiment to see what is happening to the brains of memory athletes and those who are not memory athletes but are undergoing the same technique. This technique, fMRI, is a way of looking at which parts of your brain are active while doing certain things. The number “23” is the number of memory athletes and “50” is the number of the top memory athletes – the pool from which the “23” were recruited.

The “72” tag was the number of words that the subjects had to memorize in the experiment and the “62” and “71” were the number of words that the novices and the memory athletes memorized out of the 72, respectively. And the “26” were the relatively measly number of words retained by those who did not have the loci memory training.

My sister’s bed represents the hippocampus which has grids because it also houses “place cells” that hold “place maps” which plays a major role in processing the place-based patterns of information I have. My bed’s “DLPFC” print reminds me of the dorso lateral prefrontal cortex which is linked to the hippocampal regions when the memory athletes and novices were undergoing this kind of memory training.

My grandma sleeping and my brother playing reminds me that the current study also looked at the brains of the memory athletes and novices while they were encoding and not encoding memories. They saw that there was a lot of interlink network connectivity between brain regions when at rest and a lot of connections within brain regions when bookmarking memories. My mother saying that she would see me in 4 months is how long the novices retained their super memorizing abilities after the training and “48” was the number of words they still retained after those 4 months.

Scientists think this method works because we are making use of an ancient, i.e., deeply hard-wired mechanism in our brains that holds on to places. “Places” are vital to our survival since not knowing where you are or where you should go endangers your life. By using that map which seem to be permanently etched in our minds, and using it as repository of details that we can make as bizarre and memorable as possible, we are then able to remember much more than the “7” items that the regular mind can remember at a time.  

This confirms yet again that what you were born with not need be what you have to live with. We are all born with a brain but what we do with it shapes it – which is our minds. Experience sculpts the brain to give us our own minds. The memory palace offers us a way to sculpt our own curated memory museums. – Rappler.com