#170: Method of Loci, a Retrieval Heuristic & the Baker/baker Paradox
3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on Memorising Anything
I. Method of Loci
There were no survivors. Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was lucky, though. He had just attended a fancy banquet. When he stepped outside, the building collapsed. The rubble buried everyone but him, rendering the bodies of the guests unrecognisable.
What’s more, Simonides was able to identify the victims by recalling where they sat at the banquet table. The Method of Loci (Latin for locations) was born and became a popular mnemonic device for remembering speeches without using notes.
Today, the method of memorisation is used to memorise vast amounts of information. It has been popularised by the BBC series Sherlock under the name of the Mind Palace Technique. Here's how it works:
Come up with an environment, such as your house or your local park, and imagine a mental journey through it.
Memorise items, for example from a shopping list, by placing them in various locations within your environment.
Recall the items by retracing your route through the environment, picturing the items you placed there earlier.
👉 For a more detailed dive into the technique, check out my essay on Sherlock’s Mind Palace.
II. A Retrieval Heuristic
The enemy of recollection is forgetfulness. Here‘s a heuristic you can use to retrieve lost items and ideas more easily the next time you forget where you put them:
When you are searching for something and you don‘t find it, and at some point you find it, then put it back at the position you first searched for it, not in the position where you found it.
—Achim Rothe, Clerestory Podcast
According to Achim, this not only works in the real world but also in the digital realm. Say you archived a document about memorisation techniques under several tags: memorisation, recollection, method. Years later, you search for it using the tag memory. But without luck. Once you find it, you‘re well-advised to add the tag memory to your document as this was the first keyword that came to your mind when you tried to remember it.
III. Baker/baker Paradox
Do you have problems remembering people’s names? The Baker/baker Paradox explains why:
A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple of days later, the researcher shows the same two subjects the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word.
The person who was told the man’s profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.
When you hear that the man in the photo is a baker, that fact gets embedded in a whole network of ideas about what it means to be a baker: He cooks bread, he wears a big white hat, he smells good when he comes home from work.
The name Baker, on the other hand, is tethered only to a memory of the person’s face. That link is tenuous, and should it dissolve, the name will float off irretrievably into the netherworld of lost memories. […] But when it comes to the man’s profession, there are multiple strings to reel the memory back in.
—Joshua Foer, How to train your mind to remember anything
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Have a great week,
Chris
themindcollection.com