Louisa's Mind Palace

In BBC rendition of the Sherlock Holmes' story, Sherlock employs an age old memory tactic to keep all his knowledge intact -- "the mind palace". As part of a second-year PSY 260 course, this blog will explore my journey in finding out more about the mind palace (the "method of loci", psychologists call it) both on a personal and scientific level. Enjoy, and don't hesitate to ask me questions!

[louisas-mind-palace]

Hello! I'm wondering, I already have I mind palace wich I mostly use for relaxation. How do I go around placing impotant facts in it. Do I just think it in there or is there a mehod to use?

I did a bit of googling for using mind palace for relaxation; nothing came up! That's such an interesting way of using a mind palace-- how do you do it?

As Hanley puts it, what you're actually putting around your mind palace rooms are retrieval cues, not the memories themselves. The mind palace technique usually has you walking through the room in a specific pathway, and as you go, you pick specific locations where you would attach the thing you want to remember with a memory cue.

For example, if I had a list of cranial nerves to remember:

CN 0 – Terminal

CN I – Olfactory

CN II – Optic

CN III – Oculomotor

CN IV – Trochlear

My path around the room will start with placing the retrieval cue for list item #1, TERMINAL. My retrieval cue could be the train terminal in Harry Potter, 9 3/4. I walk a couple paces forwards (perhaps through the platform 9 3/4 wall), where I see Hedwig waiting for me patiently in her cage (OwLFACTORY). I grab her and get on to the train, to find myself being scanned by Mad-Eye Moody (OPTIC). I walked to the next train compartment, where Neville lies on the floor, jinxed by the locomotor mortis/ leglocking spell (OCULOMOTOR). Walking forward to yet another compartment, it gets even weirder-- there's a TROchL-EAR on the seat!

I used pretty simple memory cues here, where there are visual cues (how mad-eye moody visually reminded me of "optics") and auditory cues (the locomotor mortis spells sounds a lot like oculomotor). 

The trick is to work with the material you need to remember to make cues that will automatically trigger your memory. A few tips on doing this:

Make value judgements-- is the connection you made a pleasant one? (Yesavage & Rose, 2007)

Make visual cues weird. The more atypical the image is, the more likely you'll remember it. I recently created a cue where a vacuum cleaner goes camping but trips and hurts himself so he had to use rubbing alcohol to disinfect himself. 

Make the cues arousing/ disgusting. Negative emotions seem to help people encode things in greater detail. The TROLL EAR mnemonic is still standing out in my mind pretty well. 

Good luck  and let me know if you have any more questions! 

[louisas-mind-palace]

What you're up to is pretty amazing. I've always trusted my own mind on it and never looked into the science - ta for all the compliments btw! This is bloody interesting, keep it up!

Thank you so much! Your message means so much to me, since it was actually your post that circulated around last year that first got me thinking about the science behind it.

The fact that someone actually uses it and has all these tips about how to best use it for remembering things... led the psychology major in me realize that I could probably quantify and investigate the technique. And if I could do it, there's probably already existing research on it, considering that it's such an old message.

So the big thank you goes to you, actually, for inspiring Sherlockian fans out there with your own experiences. 

[louisas-mind-palace]

So do you think it will be possible to use a mind palace in everyday avtivities? Like studying for a exam perhaps.

Definitely! I tried this out for myself on a couple of physiology lectures, and it worked pretty well, as long as the material was "semantic" in nature (i.e., a list of facts). It would be a lot more effort to use the mind palace for remembering how to derive an equation for a physics exam, though, so the type of material really matters. 

I'm sure the mind palace works for every day activities as well! Hanley (anotherboywholived) has a room to hold temporary items, and goes into detail how he uses the mind palace to study for his philosophy exams.

[louisas-mind-palace]

Do u find it's easier to use the mind palace for facts (like for example studying history) or feelings (how to remember someone u chatted with).

That's an interesting take on using the mind palace! I never thought about 'remembering feelings' using this technique.

My answer would be that it's easier to use the mind palace for facts, specifically remembering lists of things, as most of current research on the method of loci really only looks at how effective it is on remembering lists of facts or objects (termed as 'semantic memory' in psychology). From what the research says, the mind palace is pretty good for remembering long boring things (like history, perhaps). 

I think how people remember feelings is associated with how the feelings themselves affect any memories of personal memories (episodic memories). Off the top of my head, I remember that feelings themselves alter the quality of memories that people make as well; you remember things that are negative in emotion in more detail than things that are more positive in emotion. As well, highly emotional things are better remembered than more neutral things. 

Now that I think about it though, you can probably use emotions as another technique to associate an object you have to remember with a location. In a study by Yesavage and Rose (2007), they had people use the mind palace technique, and at each association between object and location, judge how pleasant things were. Those who made this judgement remembered things much better than those who just created a mind palace without those judgements. 

So maybe instead of using the method of loci, more engrained memories of emotional events might help remember other facts in an even more effective way! 

[louisas-mind-palace]

Lecture 4: Blood Clotting

*virtual method of loci -- associating blood clotting material with a virtual space*

I'm glad my random selection of lectures included this lecture. Unlike most of the other lectures within this unit, blood clotting was more process based in a map form. Ironically, this didn't translate as well into the method of loci. Yes, I could have associated each node of the map to a location in either a virtual or a familiar room and remembered the pathway that way. However, memorizing the mind map itself was easy enough a task that putting all that extra effort into creating a mind palace room for this material seemed cumbersome. 

It also shadows why most of the research about method of loci associates it with semantic memory, specifically remembering lists of things in serial recall (remembering a list of items in order). The reason why we use memory techniques is to make it easier for us to remember things in a less effortful way. For serial recall lists, where interference of items occurs both proactively and retroactively (items earlier in the list might affect what you remember later in the list, or vice versa), the method of loci helps alleviate some of those issues. So, despite needing time and energy to create and implement, making a mind palace is less effortful and helps you remember more information than if you were to just tackle remembering a list by brute force.

(energy for serial recall > energy to construct mind palace)

However, the information in this lecture was already presented in a map form, and each concept already has an existing relationships with one another, and arbitrarily assigning these concepts to locations in a mind palace using the method of loci technique would be a waste of energy. 

As a final note, this lecture let me realize that although the method of loci is a pretty efficient technique for remembering material that's organized into lists (as most of this unit's lectures were), it's not necessarily most efficient for other types of material as well. I'm not sure how useful this would be in my statistics class, let's say. 

[louisas-mind-palace]

Lecture 3: Leukocytes

*virtual method of loci-- associating lecture material to imagined location*

Remember how I was so excited to try out the virtual method of loci? (For those of you who have read the science background, remember how Legge et al. (2012) found that there was no difference on memory performance between virtual and conventional methods?)

Well, I've tried out the virtual version of the method of loci, and let's just say:

Hear me out. There were some benefits to using the virtual method of loci. For example, I had great freedom in how I could construct my rooms. I went a bit wild with the pathway for this one (poor spatial planning; I have no future in being an interior designer). In fact, I was able to repeat similar layouts at different points of the room, at the top and bottom right, since both points revolved around the same 4 concepts; yet separating them into two different locations let me distinguish between two sets of points with greater confidence (and distance). Knowing that having a larger distance and consequently greater distinctiveness in landmarks helps create more unique associations (Massen et al., 2009), I actually spread out the 4 points in a miniature version of Sid's Smith Caf. 

On that note, I have to admit that I had to cheat a little. I was supposed to construct a virtual reality, yet instead, for part of it, I just implemented a familiar location in a corner of my room. The concepts where I did this little bit of cheating were better remembered than for the other concepts scattered along newly created locations. I am terrible at imagining new landscapes, which made it much more effortful to create these locations, in exchange for the freedom I had for making associations with anything I wanted. I need a framework to base my mind palace on. 

I found that having to make arbitrary links between existing things in the environment with the material I had to remember actually made for more interesting and unique connections that I remembered better. This added elaboration probably worked like the added judgement in using the method of loci in Yesavage and Rose's (2007) experiment; the conjunction of a local memory technique at a specific location in your mind palace, then organized by the method of loci into neat locations, was more effective than purely associating things with locations alone.

I have one more lecture to go for the personal investigation! Let's see if giving the virtual method of loci another try might improve how good I am at it? 

[louisas-mind-palace]

Lecture 2: Introduction to the immune system

*conventional method of loci/ mind palace technique --> associated lecture materials with locations in my living room*

I found this second lecture more effortful to associate with the living room. There's much less detail in my living room, compared to the many small items I have in my room that could easily be associated with different things. To resolve this issue, I had to imagine that a number of things exist in this room.

For example, I start out this lecture by associating three purposes of the immune system to rubbing alcohol, binoculars, and a vacuum cleaner. In reality, only the vacuum cleaner exists in that corner, so I had to imagine that the vacuum cleaner had to go camping (binoculars) but tripped and got hurt and his to disinfect himself (rubbing alcohol). The uniqueness of this image makes it pretty salient in my memory. Like Yesavage and Rose (2007) mentions, using a conjunction of strategies with the method the loci enhances the strength of the encoding.

This lecture also had the added bonus of having not so many subpoints. You can see that at the centre of the room, I encoded the 5 ways that the innate immune system works at the circular table I have in the centre of this room. I remember this representation much better than the "constituents of blood" representation much better, because the "constituents of blood" representation had subpoints upon subpoints upon subpoints. This might be similar to how Massen et al. (2009) found that participants remembered a list of things better when they associated the items to the way to work rather than a path within the house; they suggested that the way to work had greater distance and therefore distinctiveness between landmarks, than you would within a house. In my scenario, using the method of loci on equally important in lecture 2 was less effortful than encoding things in lecture 1 that had many subpoints, since I could encode the material in lecture 2 with greater distance and distinctiveness. Extra effort in lecture 1 had to be made to differentiate between closely situated memory cues (the 5 colours of pens, for example). 

With that being said, I'm excited to try out the virtual method of loci, because with a virtual location, you have control over the distances and objects and layout in the room. 

[louisas-mind-palace]

Lecture 1: Blood Constituents and Functions of Blood Plasma

*conventional method of loci/ mind palace technique --> associated lecture material with locations in my own room*

First lecture done! These are the rough notes I made while constructing associations between lecture 1 and my own room. Since this is my first experience with the method of loci/ mind palace technique, I'm going to go through part of the process in detail, and what I thought about this technique. My drawing skills aren’t exactly the best, so I’ll orient you to what’s going on in the diagrams. 

From the bottom right of the map, I have a door, where I enter my own bedroom. The first thing I see is a ginormous stuffed dolphin, associated now with the 5 functions of blood. I grouped the functions so that the two fluid-related points (#4: regulates composition of interstitial fluid, and #5: prevents fluid loss by clotting) towards the tail, which basically propels dolphins within a fluid. I also grouped movement-related points together for the fins (#3: transports proteins, #2: defends against pathogens). I labelled the snout for “regulates body temperature”, which I associated with the motion of petting a dolphin’s snout as a sign of warmth and affection. I found it interesting that the semantic elaboration (the snout- warmth association) worked just as well as visualization techniques used for the fins and the tail.

Moving on from the dolphin to the top right corner of the map, I associated the constituents of blood to the items on my desk. This topic in the lecture had a lot of subpoints, which I accommodated for by fine tuning the pathway into even smaller things. For example, once I’ve reached the table, as a right handed person, my reaction would be to clean my mess of a desk (a reality). I previously associated “formed elements” with a neat stack of books to my left, leaving “plasma” to be represented by the mess. Going into more detail, to remember what was in plasma, I would pick out 5 gel pens in the mess, and in rainbow order, each of them is associated with a constituent (pink for trace elements, since that pen is running out and only has trace amounts of ink left; orange for organic molecules, alliteration; green for gasses, also alliteration; blue for water, colour-association; purple with ions, thinking of purple iodine). I ran into a problem here because the orange pen, associated with organic molecules, had to be broken down into 5 other subpoints. I resolved this by imagining a pen where the cap was made of meat (proteins and amino acids) and the pen itself had bacon (lipids), lollipops (glucose), and a wastebasket (nitrogenous wastes) design. The subpoint of “proteins” further breaks down into albumin, globulins and fibrinogen, which fortunately I already had a mnemonic for. I found this process cumbersome if the lists I had to remember had multiple levels.

I repeated much of the same process for the rest of the material, associating the topics of where red blood cells come from, what regulates hematopoesis (red blood cell production), causes of jaundice, anemia and polycthemia to my bed, my other desk, a bookshelf, and my closet respectively. Aside from having to "zoom in" during parts of the pathways because there were so many subpoints, I kept the pathway as simple as possible, making just a simple circular pathway through my entire room.

After this first attempt, I can say this method was pretty effective for me. Compared to other methods, I could basically remember the entire lecture rather than odd lecture slides that seemed to pop out to me most. This is phenomenal, because I used to face proactive and retroactive interference when studying. (For those who don't know what interference is, in psychology it refers to how encoding/recalling memory of one thing inhibits the encoding/ recalling of another memory. For example, if I was supposed to remember a list of hormones that initiated two different processes, vasodilation and vasoconstriction; if I memorized the list for vasodilation first, I might accidentally 'remember' those hormones as coming up in vasoconstriction as well because they sound so similar). With the method of loci, I could organize concepts into neat piles that wouldn't get mixed up with each other. 

No wonder genius characters in fictional stories are often associated with having a mind palace! Even as an amateur, I was able to memorize an entire lecture's worth of material, and retain it for at least a week or so. Imagine the power of someone who honed this skill and used it to remember vast amounts of interesting things. I'm starting to wonder if Hermione from the Harry Potter series used this technique as well!

Stay tuned for the next lecture!

[louisas-mind-palace]

How did you create your mind palace?

I blended the technique offered by anotherboywholived  with how Legge et al. (2012) had some participants virtually construct their mind palace while others used familiar surroundings to do so.

How would you construct a mind palace? Simply put, you find a pathway through either a familiar or imagined location. As you move along your pathway, deposit one item on your list of things to remember and associate with something (usually visual) in your surroundings, repeating the procedure and continuing to construct the pathway until everything has been associated with something. When you want to recall the items one after another, just walk through that location again, in the same order, and let the cues you left there trigger the list of things you were supposed to remember.

How am I going to try this technique out? I'm going to construct two pathways with familiar rooms for the first two lectures n my blood & immune system unit in physiology, and compare it with constructing two pathways (last two lectures in the same unit) with rooms that I've imagined completely from scratch.

Stay tuned! 

Have a question?

[louisas-mind-palace]

The Science Stuff 

I was originally interested in how the different topics of hippocampal activity, neurogenesis, spatial/ episodic/ semantic memory and the method of loci technique tied together. To organize my thoughts, I organized the research into a mind map.

For full analysis, see this page.

References can be found here.

[louisas-mind-palace]

Hello All!

I'm Louisa, a second year university student currently in a course called Learning and Plasticity. As a final assignment in this course, I was allowed to explore an aspect of memory / learning that personally interested me and present the information and process in an interesting way of my choice. 

Of course, being an avid BBC Sherlock fan, I chose to investigate the Mind Palace (a.k.a the Method of Loci) that really depicted the genius within Sherlock. 

This is where I'll be documenting thoughts, learning process, and the fun science behind why the Method of Loci!

Please don't hesitate to chime in at any time to ask questions, reblog with comments, even create original posts tagged with #louisasmindpalace. I'll do my best to answer them all!