AKA Mental Entrenching 2 Since the second season of the BBC show Sherlock, which is a show that I highly suggest to those who have not seen it, there has been a lot of talk about "Mind Palaces". A mind palace comes from an ancient Greek and Roman memory technique called the Method of Loci, with loci being the plural of Latin locus, meaning location. The idea, for those unfamiliar, is to imagine a place in your mind, preferably a place you know well, like your house, and to imagine a path from one point - or location - to the next that you follow whenever you need to remember a list of information. If you need to remember to buy corn, milk and eggs, imagine a stalk of corn sleeping in your bed, a jug of milk on the stairs and eggs on the kitchen counter and then walk the path from your bedroom to the kitchen. This method of memorization is tried and true as a form of image association, but what we really |
think of when we hear mind palace is a real place full of information that can be stored for long term use; indeed Sherlock Holmes uses his mind palace to store information like a computer: unused until needed. The idea of being able to visualize something such as that, which must be definitely larger than any typical well known space, entails creating a new place and being able to inhabit it conceptually and actually be able to feel it around you to a certain extent. The amazing thing about this is, though, being able to fill an imaginary place with rooms and even details and characters can be easier to our minds than trying to remember the real details of a complex scene that we come into contact with. Because your mind creates the area, it can subconsciously fill in the space that you don’t see until you decide what exists there and can construt details on the fly instead of having to try to reconstruct details that it usually re-writes differently anyways. If you combine this amazing dynamic space – straight out of movies like Inception, with our ability to create and visualize characters (Which I discussed in the first Mental Entrenching article), you can close your eyes and walk into a room of characters, and even entertain the thought of going into the mind of one of the characters and constructing a mind palace in his/her mind. The real limiting factor at this level is how well you can focus. How sharp things seem increases with practice, which leaves patience as the real difficulty.