June 23, 2011 • 28 mins
Stroll into the memory palace, an imagined location that just might expand your brain power. In this podcast, Robert and Julie discuss the Method of Loci, a mnemonic device that allows mental athletes to perform astounding acts of recall.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julia Class and
Julie I don't have the best memory in the world. Um,
I mean, maybe it's an average memory. I'm not saying
I'm I have problems with my brain or anything, but
(00:26):
I often forget that. I think everybody has this where
the really boring stuff you need to remember sometimes uh,
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,
(00:48):
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,
(01:12):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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,
(03:23):
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
(03:43):
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,
(04:04):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:32):
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
(05:54):
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
(06:15):
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,
(06:37):
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.
(07:01):
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
(07:23):
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,
(07:43):
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
(08:05):
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.
(08:28):
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
(08:48):
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
(09:09):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:51):
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
(10:13):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:33):
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
(14:54):
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.
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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
(16:17):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:01):
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
(17:23):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:07):
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
(18:29):
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.
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:37):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:04):
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,
(22:25):
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,
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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.
(24:11):
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,
(24:34):
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
(24:57):
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
(25:18):
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
(25:40):
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
(26:01):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:28):
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,
(27:49):
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
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julia Class and
Julie I don't have the best memory in the world. Um,
I mean, maybe it's an average memory. I'm not saying
I'm I have problems with my brain or anything, but
(00:26):
I often forget that. I think everybody has this where
the really boring stuff you need to remember sometimes uh,
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,
(00:48):
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,
(01:12):
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
(01:33):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:14):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:58):
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,
(03:23):
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
(03:43):
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,
(04:04):
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
(04:27):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:08):
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,
(05:32):
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
(05:54):
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
(06:15):
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,
(06:37):
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.
(07:01):
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
(07:23):
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,
(07:43):
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
(08:05):
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.
(08:28):
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
(08:48):
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
(09:09):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:51):
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
(10:13):
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
(10:33):
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
(10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
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
(11:57):
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
(12:23):
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
(12:46):
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
(13:08):
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
(13:29):
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
(13:50):
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
(14:10):
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
(14:33):
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
(14:54):
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.
(15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:57):
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
(16:17):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:01):
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
(17:23):
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
(17:44):
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
(18:07):
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
(18:29):
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.
(18:51):
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
(19:13):
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
(19:33):
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
(19:54):
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
(20:14):
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
(20:37):
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
(20:57):
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
(21:19):
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
(21:42):
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
(22:04):
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,
(22:25):
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,
(22:45):
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
(23:07):
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
(23:28):
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
(23:50):
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.
(24:11):
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,
(24:34):
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
(24:57):
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
(25:18):
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
(25:40):
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
(26:01):
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
(26:25):
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
(26:46):
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
(27:07):
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
(27:28):
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,
(27:49):
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
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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