Transcript

TITA BEAVEN

Imagine a place you know well, such as your house, your office, or your street. Now walk around that place in your mind, and select ten specific spots in that place in the sequential order you would see them if you walked around it. For instance, in my house, the first room is the sitting room, where there is a sofa, the fireplace and the piano. Then there is the corridor, and a small toilet on the left. Then there is the kitchen, where I can see the dining table, the fridge, the sink and then the hob, etc.

Now if you make a map of that place and identify those specific points in your map, you can use them to remember things. So for instance, here’s a random list of elements:

mouse

bottle of white wine

strawberry

birdcage

stool

biro

shampoo

lorry

The way you would remember those words, in that specific order, is to place each them at a station of your memory palace, and to do so in such a way that each one represents a memorable image:

So, using my memory palace of my house, I would imagine a mouse sitting on the sofa, reading the Sunday papers, then a bottle of white wine inside the fireplace, with a label on it saying ‘drink me’ and then a giant strawberry sitting at the piano playing the tune of Strawberry fields forever. As I go down the corridor, I can imagine seeing a giant birdcage and having to squeeze through the bars of the birdcage in order to get to the kitchen, where the kitchen table has been replaced by a stool, and we are sitting around it trying to make room for our tea on the tiny surface of the stool…. You get the idea…