
Learn to remember everything: The memory palace technique - RBerenguel
http://www.mostlymaths.net/2011/03/learn-to-remember-everything-memory.html
======
WesleyJohnson
I've always been pretty frustrated with my inability to remember simple
things, while having knack for recalling useless information. I rarely can
remember birthdays, anniversaries, phone numbers, important dates in my
history like when I graduated or the specific date of when my father passed
away. I have hardly any memory of grade school, only can recall two of my
teacher's names in high school, etc. Granted, some of those are less useful
than others but they're things that people tend to remember and I don't.
Instead, I memorize odd things like a Windows 98 CD Key, for example. I
must've reinstalled it so many times that it just stuck in my head. Completely
useless and yet it'll be with me for many more years I'm afraid.

I have found that I tend to remember things more if I put them into a rhythm,
as if they were words in a song. I'm not musically inclined so I kind of find
that odd, but it works. I used to work in inventory for a Best Buy warehouse
and I'd often have to put UPC codes into a terminal for new inventory. I
couldn't see the codes from the terminal most times, so I'd quickly memorize
the code in my head by putting it into a rhythm. 1...2...3 4 5 6...7...8....9
10 11 12. Would be curious to know if that's common?

Anyway, very interesting article and I'm definitely going to try and put it to
use. See if I can create a memory palace for Rubix cube algorithms as I've
recently decided I want to be able to master the 3x3 one. Now if I can only
force myself to forget that Kermit the lettuce head is going to greet me when
I get home by warning me that Kevin Bacon is chasing pigs through my living
room, that someone accidentally formatted my SD card bed and that the sun is
supposed to be extra Orange and juicy today. I think I'll keep around Scarlett
doing her thing with an Onion Ring hula-hoop though. :)

~~~
mquander
I memorized pi to a hundred digits out of boredom in middle school, and I
naturally did the rhythm thing, mostly with triplets of digits, sometimes
otherwise.

The interesting thing is that I can't remember any of it without using the
rhythm to help me; for example, if you asked me "what comes next after the
digits '197'", I have no way to answer that question without going through the
digits until I get to the part that goes "..795 0288; 4-1-9-7-1 693 993..."
and then going, aha, here it is. If you started ten digits in, grouped the
digits differently, and read them off to me in a different cadence, I wouldn't
even recognize it was pi!

~~~
Natsu
I'm the same way. I had to go through all of pi to find the part after 197.
For me, it's broken up like this:

3.141 59 26 53 58 979 323 846 264 3383 27950 288 4197 169 399 375 10 58

So it was even a bit hard to see the 197 in there, because it's "4197" for me.

~~~
NateLawson
3.141 59265 3589 79323 846 264 338 3279 50288 41971 69 399

I liked bursts of 3-digit chunks, combined with 5-digit sets that were
important addresses in the C64 memory map. (41971 in BASIC ROM, 50288 within
the $C000 hidden RAM area).

<http://sta.c64.org/cbm64mem.html>

The computers you use change how you think, permanently.

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ilamont
There's a book by Jonathon Spence called the Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci,
describing the life of an Italian Jesuit who lived in China and was an advisor
to the court (I can't recall if it was late Ming or early Qing, but it was in
the 17th century). Besides sharing advanced Western science and artistic
techniques, another way in which he and other Jesuits inserted themselves into
the life of the court was by using the memory palace technique to learn spoken
and written Chinese, understand the cultural and social aspects of the court,
and impress the court officials with some incredible feats of memory. One
trick I remember involved reciting a long passage of Chinese _backwards_ after
hearing it once, which utterly astounded those in attendance.

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sayemm
Good article. I've been studying Dominic O'Brien's techniques for a while now,
he's the world memory champ - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_O%27Brien>

It takes some time to get the system down, but it's really handy for
memorizing numbers, a pack of cards, or any other structured information.
Basically, I've got a journey with 52 stages memorized along with a person and
an associated action for each two-digit number from 00 to 99. When I was
practicing regularly before I was able to memorize a pack of cards in 3
minutes. It may seem weird practicing this, but it turns out to be a pretty
good gauge of your concentration and mental focus, just like how being able to
run a few miles is a good measure of your physical fitness.

Highly recommend Joshua Foer's book, "Moonwalking with Einstein", to learn
more.

~~~
arkitaip
Is there a book that you could recommend on O'Brien's techniques?

~~~
georgieporgie
I've been listening to his Quantum Memory Power audiobook. It covers a huge
range of memory techniques: memory palaces/journey method, mnemonics,
visualization of numbers, etc. Some of his pop-culture references are a bit
dated, but otherwise I find it to be a great system.

[http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-
Champion/...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-
Champion/dp/0743528662/)

~~~
sayemm
Funny you mention that, I listened to those audio CDs as well! I think that
and "How to Develop a Perfect Memory" are the best resources on him, he's the
man.

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tom_b
I'm interested in combining the memory palace and peg techniques, specifically
for sw dev.

Assuming you understand the fundamentals, I think there is a subset of any
programming language, data structures, and algorithms for the programming
paradigm you are working with where memorizing some of your "working" tools is
a good idea.

From my viewpoint, this might be helpful in a couple of different ways. First,
if you are hacking away in a prog language, you need to have some decent set
of it "embedded" in your mind. Memorization might help me for those languages
I don't get to touch every day, but would like to keep handy in my toolbox.
Second, the data structures and algorithms part would be nice to flash against
new problems. E.g, here is a prob, can I quickly flash it up against my set of
memorized data structures and algorithms to see if something "fits."

I wonder if by the time you come up with an appropriate internal visualization
for most data structures and algorithms, you'll probably have enough of a
taste for it that memorization isn't useful anymore.

As a side question, I think it might be useful to think in terms of how much
code you can write without needing to rely on autocompletion in your IDE or
without referring to an outside reference. Just curious if other HNer's have
opinions about that kind of prog lang command as a measure of skill . . .

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slevcom
A few years ago I got decent at a similar method so I could memorize a list of
20 items pretty quick. I thought I was the cat's pajamas for awhile until it
dawned on me that I had never used it once outside showing off the trick. I've
since lost the skill from non-use. Not to troll against the post or the
poster, just my personal experience data point. But hey, I love seeing and
learning new party tricks, so don't let me discourage anyone from trying out
interesting things.

------
zach
I keep waiting for someone with more spare time than myself to bring the
memory palace idea to an augmented reality app.

I have a feeling medical students will pay a decent amount of money to walk
around their apartment with an iPhone held out in front of them.

Also, the effectiveness of this idea implies that museums without a single
artifact in their collection can be extremely educational by wisely creating a
spatial environment.

A tour led through a "Garden of Presidents" or a walkable map could help
students on field trips actually retain much more knowledge than in the
classroom.

~~~
daralthus
I actually pulled this up on last weeks startup weekend and we made some
prototypes.

We tried it first with streetview, where you walk around and learn new words
on a different language. We have the best results when we combined it, with a
special spelling where the letters were objects also. (like in elementary
school, for example "A" is for Apple) Like that you will remember the objects
and not just some random characters.

The "let's go for a walk" and the "stay in this room" mobile versions are
still in the pocket, so let me know what do you think about this.

~~~
RBerenguel
Where can I have a look at them? (I don't know what you refer as "pocket")

~~~
daralthus
I am sorry they are not online now. By pocket I mean ideas we haven't tried
out yet. I imagine the mobile app version to have 3 separete functionality,
and we only covered 1,5

1\. "I would rather sit" Is a streetview walkaround with predefined routes.
2\. "I want to stay in this room" Is an AR version where you walk around in
your room and place the words where you want. 3\. "Let's go for a walk" Would
give you new words when you stop somewhere in the city.

Of course there are other task and opportunities, like testing, spaced
repetition, linkwords etc and unfortunately the team got separeted now (both
in space and in thinking) so I am not sure if I would make this project hight
priority...

Still I would love to hear your toughts.

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JosephHatfield
A new book called "Moonwalking with Einstein", by Joshua Foer covers the
Memory Palace technique and others.

Check out the review at the New York Times.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-
review-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/books/review/book-review-
moonwalking-with-einstein-by-joshua-foer.html)

~~~
tom_b
I like "Your Memory : How It Works and How to Improve It" by Higbee in
addition to the Foer book. It is a little more pragmatic and thorough in
description of the techniques discussed in "Moonwalking with Einstein."

------
gwern
More general and useful is spaced repetition:
<http://www.gwern.net/Mnemosyne.html>

------
phpnode
This is an awesome technique and I can't believe it's not taught in schools.
It's better to think of a previous home rather than your current one though,
otherwise things can get confusing.

~~~
RBerenguel
As you say, it is better to use not-often used places. I use my home for
grocery lists, as they are usually short-lived lists. For longer lasting stuff
I use older places, or not-frequently visited.

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arnorhs
Great article Ruben. I've been trying your method out for the past days, but
the problem is I don't often have to remember things. I wonder if methods like
this one are getting irrelevant in the days of computers and smart phones..

Probably the most useful use case is when you have to shop for groceries in a
supermarket. My SO, Helga, usually tells me what to buy and I usually forget
everything. But lately I've just been typing everything into my phone and that
works. This method might work for that as well - Memory Supermarket, anybody?

~~~
cicero
Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, in his book _Why Don't Students Like
School_, says that memorizing facts is important for developing higher level
reasoning. Think of it as building up a large processor cache. If you have the
relevant facts in your brain, you can piece them together much more quickly to
build up higher knowledge. Always having to look up things on Google is like
disk thrashing.

~~~
regularfry
Surprisingly few people grasp this concept, and from my point of view the idea
that rote memorisation is a waste of time is remarkably dangerous.

~~~
shasta
I don't know that this technique is a big win for this kind of memorization.
For example, multiplication of digits probably needs to be in L1 cache. You
don't want to have to search for the result in your memory palace, which seems
more like main memory.

~~~
RBerenguel
Indeed! There are some things that you need to force feed, and others that you
can place in a memory palace or use in an associative array of thoughts. I.e.
multiplication tables or foreign basic words need to be in your L1 or L2, but
the causes of the First World War (unless it is something you are deeply
related to) can perfectly be outside it.

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vixen99
I used to use this technique as a kid to win money off friends, betting I
could instantly remember the order and nature of 50 objects read out to me. If
you'd prepared properly it was embarrassingly easy. Recalling the list a week
later was trivial for me but astounded everyone else.

The author's place method is much superior to my idea then of using an
arbitrary list of objects which I'd previously memorized and then associated
with the spoken items by using outrageous mental pictures, Memory Palace
technique is to be recommended.

------
Tycho
We played a memory game at school once where everyone sat in a circle and said
their favourite activity. For years and years after I could remember the
entire sequence. I could probably regurgitate the whole thing now if I had a
few hints. Another one that works short term for exams and such is
'definitions , lists and diagrams.' On left page of notebook write say
'definition of Agile development' followed by a dash for each point on the
agile manifesto, followed by 'diagram of [something agile related. Textbooks
always have diagrams]. ' on the right page write the actual definition,
followed by the actual list, followed by the actual diagram, _but use your own
words, not the textbook's_. Glance over it, then cover it with a piece of
paper and write the entire thing out again from memory. No peaking but at
least you can count how many list items are required from the other page.
Check you got it right, reread any mistakes, and then you'll find that after
having written it out twice you can easily remember the whole thing when the
exam comes. I find any sort of thoughtful reinforcement makes memory very
effective.

I wanted to ask though, do you guys memorise APIs and keywords and other
programming mattered, rather than just picking up or looking up as you go?
Does it help you program much faster? Of course it's a lot to remember
considering all the rules and contexts and parameters.

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d2
Lettuce, Bacon, onion rings, SD card, oranges. This is weird it works so well.

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atlantic
The standard work on the ars memoria is Frances Yates' The Art of Memory,
which covers Renaissance practitioners (Lull, Bruno, Fludd, etc.) in some
detail. These techniques date back to the classical art of rhetoric, which
cultivated the capacity to memorize long speeches or poems.

~~~
tumba
More recent scholarly work has been done by Mary Carruthers. I have found her
books, "The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture" and "The
Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200",
to be more engaging and useful than Yates.

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swah
This works, but I don't know if its web scale.

Like, do you use the memory palace at first, and later it just fixes into
unconsciousness? Because there is no way greeks really had hundreds of memory
palaces where they structured all their knowledge, right?

~~~
RBerenguel
We can't be sure about the greeks, and I still don't know how well it scales
personally. Memory champions claim to have quite a lot of palaces and ways to
cram information in them (for example, for memorisation of digits of pi), but
my personal experience is not that big as of yet.

As a matter of fact, an informal list of places I can use as memory palace, as
I know them from memory ranges around 70 "palaces" with between 4 and 15 rooms
each. If you cram 3 items per room its around 700 things to remember. But you
can get better.

You can also use association (I am about to write a post about it) to get
facts about books, people, things without using a new palace for each kind of
data type.

~~~
akheron
I've also found it quite hard to "overwrite" memories. At least, you need to
let the pegs rest for a while before reusing them.

~~~
ErrantX
When he writes about this sort of thing Derren Brown (British mentalist)
mentions that once you get to a decent level of skill with this you can just
make up new rooms in your head; he talks about "dropping" overused rooms and
starting fresh ones.

------
Apocryphon
The only drawback to this method is that it makes it easier for dream-
spelunking thieves to commit a heist in your mind.

------
johnwatson11218
When I work on a large piece of software I use techniques like this to build a
model of the software in my mind. The various layers seem like physical
objects or places in my mind. It is a hard point for me to articulate but when
I know a software code base really well I am able to immediately answer
question about whether certain things are or are not possible. I always
thought of this as the "topology" of the solution. I know that is why I have a
preference for certain design decisions. Some software seems like a well
designed house with layers that do one thing really well and can offer strict
guarantees about the state of the system.

Sometimes I am asked to do things to the software that conjure up images of
mobius strips or klein bottles and I cringe. Only because of what it is doing
to my mental model.

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codeslush
I'm curious if this has any negative impact on the accuracy of long term
memory recall. For example, I can imagine that I would place these exaggerated
items in a friends house...then, years later, in a discussion with said
friend; "Hey, do you still have that SD card bed?"

~~~
blauwbilgorgel
You need to also learn a way to empty out your mental palace, or learn a way
to build new rooms. After learning about this technique over 15 years ago I
stored 3 things that I, to this day, know by heart. After learning Derren
Brown's technique I still have these items in my mind, probably to the day I
die.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhZcHoU-QR8> (6 minutes Derren Brown
technique)

I like how this skill is innate. You don't get born with great memory, you can
learn it (not photographic memory). When mastering the memory palace
technique, one could store and recall the order of 20 shuffled card decks.

------
andrewtbham
Here is how i remember stuff, with mnemonics

[http://seriouslackofdirection.blogspot.com/2008/08/rememberi...](http://seriouslackofdirection.blogspot.com/2008/08/remembering-
things-5-examples.html)

------
regularfry
There are a bunch of other techniques like this (which I've used with
occasionally surprising success) at <http://www.ludism.org>.

------
arctangent
I recently wrote an article for my company's in-house staff magazine about how
Google was my favourite web site because it freed me from having to remember
facts.

I think it's a waste of effort to devote time to memorising mere details, when
these can readily be looked up. I think it is much more sensible to remember
connections between facts (i.e. to theorise and systematise based on
experiences) than it is to just store the facts themselves.

~~~
RBerenguel
The problem is that, unless you know a lot, you can't relate facts. I also
prefer associative memorisation (i.e. I can think of subject A, which is
related to subject B, caused by subject C and leading also to subject D), but
you need to know your stuff, too.

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Vmabuza
I wish this post was around when i was in the 9th grade so i wouldnt have
spent so much on Kevin Trudeau's Megamemory just to learn this.

------
methodin
I still remember the 5 things in this list and I wasn't even trying to... I
wonder if it works with bland data?

~~~
RBerenguel
What do you mean by bland data?

------
MrMan
4 hour memory

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dennisgorelik
Why learn tricks to remember stuff if there is paper and pen (or portable
computers)?

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dublinclontarf
broswer broken, leaving comment to find later

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VB6_Foreverr
There is another memory technique where each item is like a member of a linked
list. Say you have to remember bread, milk and sugar. So you imagine a loaf of
bread that when you cut a slice off a cascade of milk comes gushing out and
topples a dam made of sugar cubes. Then you discover that you already have
milk, so you alter the image to a colossal slice of bread crashing down onto
the sugar cube dam. I'd like a technique analogous to this where you start
with 52 cards in your list and as the cards are drawn from a deck they are
also dropped from your list. It would make it easier to see what's left

