Review: Sherlock's Mind Palace and Mycroft's Russian-in-an-hour?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 30, 2014
If you are a fan of BBC's "Sherlock" with Benedict Cumberbatch, you'll remember he uses a "mind palace" to recall a matrix of facts and observations. And his brother Mycroft learns Russian in an hour or so, to complete a mission. Impossible? Well, yeah, it's fiction. But you can learn the "mind palace" technique" from this book as applies to memorizing Russian vocabulary. I wish I had had this trick in college when I was memorizing vast numbers of formulae for physics and chemistry. It would have been quite handy! (I used flash cards.)The mind palace is organized by room. You picture a building or a place you know absolutely like the back of your hand. I would use my old dormitory from college (East Quad shout-out!) as it's large enough to have many rooms and places to picture in my head. I an also use my house, or my office or where I worked at a large factory. The key is to have places you can picture, walk around in your head and not cross your path. You label the rooms with mnemonics for each Russian alphabet letter, and the surfaces and objects in the room (counter top, cabinet, curtains, sink, toilet, bed, light switch) are where you store the words by mnemonics linking the object to the word.It takes time to set up a mind palace but it's a powerful technique. I'm going to try it on a big exam I have to take next year. I use a mini version to remember to pick up items from a room before leaving (when I walk in the room, I trigger a reminder to get the item by having put it in the room in a mini-mind palace, like shower-shampoo.)If you have to memorize a long list of words, you can use this book and another language, like German or French or Spanish. It's fun!