From the archives #1: How to build your “Mind Palace”
By: Content For Pragyan
Tags: Self Improvement, Learning, Archive, Sherlock Holmes, Students

This article was written by Shruthi Srinivasan in 2015, for the original Pragyan Blog hosted on WordPress. The present editors have taken the liberty to make minor changes, without changing the meaning of what the author intended to convey.

The human brain has a storage capacity of nearly 2.5 petabytes (a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes, or 1,000 terabytes). Yet, remembering where you put your keys, or the last digit of your ATM pin, may seem impossible at times. If it’s necessary, the mind can analyse any amount of data, listen with the keenest interest and remember the earliest dreams. However, it plays tricks on you too! Like, how you’re unable to remember all that you crammed into the late-night study session on the eve of your exam, right?

Right.

Perhaps.

That brilliant and mesmerizing brain of ours is a massive storehouse, powerhouse, etc. One technique of tapping the brain’s indispensable capacity and capability is the Memory Palace, popularly known as the Mind Palace. Also called Method of Loci (MoL), it’s a method of memory enhancement which uses visualization to organize and recall information.

The Method of Loci — visualized. Source: Neurofantastic

The acclaimed Sherlock, in the third series, revealed the unbelievable power of a Mind Palace in solving crimes, while the criminal mastermind, Magnussen, used this method to store vast amounts of information in the safest place, the Vault (read, “his mind”). We may have felt that this superior capacity of Holmes or Magnussen was surreal, or even non-existent.

But the technique in real exists.

We can only use 10% of our brain. So, this technique couldn’t be possible for a person with an average IQ, right?

Wrong. First of all, it is a myth that a person can use only 10% of the brain. During the entire course of the day, an average person ultimately uses 99–100% of the brain’s capacity. The Mind Palace has little to do with intelligence, but more with the technique of using regions of the brain that deal with spatial learning. It allows you to establish, order, and recollect memorial content of related or unrelated information. Anyone with patience and perseverance can master this technique.

How useful is the Mind Palace going to be?

What exactly is stored in a Mind Palace is up to each individual. It could be your thoughts, random trivia, facts, figures, images, ideas, conversations and a whole lot more, all in an ordered manner. Imagine the prospects of building a mind palace? It would be great. You would be unlocking your brain’s maximum potential to remember just whatever and whenever you want to. Something like categorizing your contacts list. It would give you immense control over your mind and yes, even your contacts.

So, even the smallest detail won’t go amiss. Your memory can never fail you. Even the most influential personalities from CEOs to scientists use this methodology to remember their employees’ birthdays to a super complex equation.

Go crazy on the conceptualization of your own ‘Mind Palace’. Source: CNN

Another remarkable feat achieved by a memory palace is the fight against depression. This works by shunning away the traumatic memories and only remembering the happiest ones. According to research, those trained with MoL, easily retrieve almost every single one of their happy moments.

Another prospect for mind palace architects, are the annual World Memory Championships. The competition needs committing to memory and recalling sequences of digits, two-digit numbers, alphabetic letters, or playing cards. In a simple method of doing this, contestants deposit the image that they have associated with each item at the loci in their heads.

How to build this Memory Palace?

Even though MoL is different for every individual, the overall technique remains more or less the same.

The basic steps involved are to:

Decide the place — It could be a familiar building, route or space.

Define a set route — There may be many stops on the way, so keep some landmarks in mind.

Location and Placing — Store different memories in different locations like shelves, rooms etc.

Draw, be Sensitive, use colors and symbols — Finally, commit to your memory by drawing using bold and colorful hand symbols. Or else write it out in a list form.

Follow these steps to start building your memory palace. Source: LearnPick

The Memory Palace could be a library with you walking down the aisle searching for the right book representing a particular memory. Or it could be a newspaper with each headline or each paragraph signifying a memory. For those of you who can’t keep things simple, perhaps you could create towns and cities where perhaps the Eiffel Tower is your memory of travel experiences.

Depending on the creativity of each person, the mind palace would be a fascinating abode to everyone.Try practicing the Method Of Loci and it could change the way you learn and read. Definitely, it will give you a chance to free up your mind and give you the much needed space to think and have some peace.