chair, with a visual image of something you want to remember.
(When you think of your easy chair you may picture a limber yogi sitting there, to remind you to renew your yoga lessons.) The features of your home can be associated with a countless number of visual cues for retrieving memories later, when you simply take an imaginary walk through the house. If it’s important to recall the material in a certain order, the cues can be sequenced along the route through your house. (The method of loci is also used to associate cues with features you encounter along a very familiar journey, like your walk to the corner store.) As we write this passage, a group of students in Oxford, En gland, are constructing memory palaces to prepare for their A-level exams in psychology. Every week for six weeks, they and their instructor have visited a different café in town, where they have relaxed over coffee, familiarized themselves with the layout of the place, and discussed how they might imagine it occupied with vivid characters who will cue from memory important aspects of psychology that they will need to write about at exam time.
We’ll come back to these students, but fi rst a few more words about this technique, which is surprisingly effective and derives from the way imagery serves to contribute vividness and connective links to memory. Humans remember pictures more easily than words. (For example, the image of an elephant is easier to recall than the word “elephant.”) So it stands to reason that associating vivid mental images with verbal or abstract material makes that material easier to retrieve from memory. A strong mental image can prove as secure and bountiful as a loaded stringer of fi sh. Tug on it, and a whole day’s catch comes to the surface. When a friend is reminding you of a conversation with somebody the two of you met on a trip, you struggle to recall it. She tells you where
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the discussion happened, and you picture the place. Ah, yes, it all comes fl ooding back. Images cue memories.21
Mark Twain wrote about his personal experiences with this phenomenon in an article published by Harper’s. In his days on the speaking circuit, Twain used a list of partial sentences to prompt himself through the different phases of his remarks, but he found the system unsatisfactory— when you glance at snippets of text, they all look alike. He experimented with alternatives, fi nally hitting on the idea of outlining his speech in a series of crude pencil sketches. The sketches did the job. A haystack with a snake under it told him where to start his story about his adventures in Nevada’s Carson Valley. An um-brella tilted against a stiff wind took him to the next part of his story, the fi erce winds that blew down out of the Sierras at about two o’clock every afternoon. And so on. The power of these sketches to evoke memory impressed Twain and gave rise one day to an idea for helping his children, who were still struggling to learn the kings and queens of En gland, despite long hours invested by their nanny in trying to hammer the names and dates into them through brute repetition. It dawned on Twain to try visualizing the successive reigns.
We were at the farm then. From the house porch the grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right to the high ground where my small work den stood. A carriage road wound through the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the En glish monarchs, beginning with [William] the Conqueror, and you could stand on the porch and clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest down to Victoria, then in the forty- sixth year of her reign— EIGHT
HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN YEARS of En glish history under your eye at once! . . .
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I mea sured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three- foot white- pine stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Twain and the children sketched icons for each of the monarchs: a whale for William the Conqueror, because both names begin with W and because “it is the biggest fi sh that swims, and William is the most conspicuous fi gure in En glish history”; a hen for Henry I, and so forth.
We got a good deal of fun out of the history road; and exercise, too. We trotted the course from the Conqueror to the study, the children calling out the names, dates, and length of reigns as we passed the stakes. . . . The children were encouraged to stop locating things as being “over by the arbor,” or “in the oak [copse],” or “up at the stone steps,” and say instead that the things were in Stephen, or in the Commonwealth, or in George III. They got the habit without trouble. To have the long road mapped out with such exactness was a great boon for me, for I had the habit of leaving books and other articles lying around everywhere, and had not previously been able to defi nitely name the place, and so had often been obliged to go to fetch them myself, to save time and failure; but now I could name the reign I left them in, and send the children.22
Rhyme schemes can also serve as mnemonic tools. The peg method is a rhyme scheme for remembering lists. Each number from 1 to 20 is paired with a rhyming, concrete image: 1
is bun, 2 is shoe, 3 is tree, 4 is store, 5 is hive, 6 is tricks, 7 is heaven, 8 is gate, 9 is twine, 10 is pen. (After 10 you add penny- one and start over with three- syllable cue words: 11 is penny- one, setting sun; 12 is penny- two, airplane glue; 13 is
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penny- three, bumble bee; and so on up to 20.) You use the rhyming concrete images as “pegs” on which to “hang” items you want to remember, such as the tasks you want to get done today. These twenty images stay with you, always at the ready whenever you need help to remember a list of things. So when you’re running errands: bun gives you the image of a hairstyle and reminds you to buy a hat for your ski trip; shoe reminds you of being well dressed, prompting you to pick up the dry cleaning; tree reminds you of family tree, cuing that birthday card for your cousin. The rhyming images stay the same, while the associations they evoke change each time you need to hold a new list in mind.
A song that you know well can provide a mnemonic structure, linking the lyrics in each musical phrase to an image that will cue retrieval of the desired memory. According to the anthropologist Jack Weatherford, the preeminent historian of Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire, traditional poems and songs seem to have been used as mnemonic devices for sending messages accurately over vast distances, from China at one end of the empire to Eu rope at the other end. The military were forbidden from sending written messages, and how they communicated remains a secret, but Weatherford thinks mnemonic devices were a likely method.
He notes that the Mongol song known as the Long Song, for example, which describes the movement of a horse, can be sung in varying tones and trills so as to communicate movement through a par tic u lar location, like a crossing of the steppe or of the low mountains.
The versatility of mnemonic devices is almost endless. What they hold in common is a structure of some kind— number scheme, travel route, fl oor plan, song, poem, aphorism, acronym— that is deeply familiar and whose elements can be easily linked to the target information to be remembered.23
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To return to the psychology students preparing for their A-level exams: In a classroom at Bellerbys College in Oxford, a dark- haired eighteen- year- old whom we’ll call Marlys sits down to write her A2 exams in psychology. She will be asked to write fi ve essays over the course of two testing sessions totaling three and a half hours. A-level courses are the British equivalent of Advanced Placement courses in the United States and are prerequisites for going on to university.
Marlys is under a lot of pressure. For one thing, her exam scores will make the difference in whether or not she gets into the university of her choice— she has applied to the London School of Economics. To be assured a spot in a top university in the United Kingdom, students are required to take A-levels in three subjects, and the grades they must earn are published in advance by the universities. It’s not at all unusual that they are required to earn an A grade in each subject. If they earn less than the required grade, they must compete in a diffi cult clear-ing pro cess by which the universities fi ll up their remaining spaces, a pro cess that bears a lot in common with a lottery.
If that weren’t stress-inducing enough, the scope of the material for which Marlys must be prepared to show mastery in the next hour and a half is enormous. She and her fellow psychology students have studied six major topics in their second year of A-level preparations: eating behavior, aggression, relationships, schizo
phre nia, anomalistic psychology,
and the methods of psychological research. Within each of the fi rst fi ve topics she must be prepared to write essays on seven different questions. Each essay must illuminate the answer in twelve short paragraphs that describe, for instance, the thesis or condition, the extant research and its signifi cance, the countervailing opinions, any biological treatments (say, for schizo-phre nia), and how these relate to the foundational concepts of psychology that she mastered for her fi rst- year A-levels. So
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she faces: Five major topics, times seven essay questions for each topic, with a dozen succinct, well- argued paragraphs in each essay to show mastery of the subject. In other words, the universe of different essays she must master going into exams is a total of thirty- fi ve— plus a series of short answers to questions on psychological research methods. Marlys knows which of the main topics will be the subject of today’s exam, but she has no idea which essay questions will be assigned, so she’s had to prepare herself to write on all of them.
Many students who reach this point simply freeze. Despite being well grounded in their material, the stakes at play can make their minds go blank the moment they confront the empty exam booklet and the proctor’s ticking clock. That’s where having taken the time to construct a memory palace proves as good as gold. It’s not important that you understand the intricacies of British A-levels, just that they are diffi cult and highly consequential, which is why mnemonic devices are such a welcome tool at exam time.
Today, the three test topics turn out to be evolutionary explanations of human aggression, the psychological and biological treatments for schizo phre nia, and the success and failure of dieting. Okay. For aggression, Marlys has got the she- wolf with her hungry pups at the window of the Krispy Kreme shop on Castle Street. For schizo phre nia, she’s got the over- caffeinated barista at the Starbucks on High Street. For dieting, that would be the extremely large and aggressive potted plant inside the café Pret- a-Manger on Cornmarket Street.
Excellent. She settles in her seat, sure of her knowledge and her ability to call it up. She tackles the dieting essay fi rst. Preta-Manger is Marlys’s memory palace for the safekeeping of what she has learned about the success and failure of dieting.
Through a prior visit there, she has become thoroughly familiar with its spaces and furnishings and populated them with
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characters that are very familiar and vivid in her imagination.
The names and actions of the characters now serve as cues to the dozen key points of her essay.
She enters the shop in her mind. La Fern (the man- eating plant in “Little Shop of Horrors,” one of her favorite movies) is holding Marlys’s friend Herman captive, her vines wrapped tightly around him, restraining him from a large dish of mac and cheese that sits just beyond his reach. Marlys opens her exam book and begins to write. “Herman and Mack’s restraint theory suggests that attempting not to overeat may actually increase the probability of overeating. That is, in restrained eaters, it is the disinhibition (loss of control) that is the cause of overeating. . . .”
In this manner Marlys works her way through the café and the essay. Herman breaks free of his restraints with a mighty roar and makes a bee line for the plate, practically inhaling the pasta to the point of bursting. “Restraint theory received support in studies by Wardle and Beale, which found that obese women who restrained their eating actually ate more
[inhaled the pasta] than obese women who took up exercise, and more than those who made no changes to their diet or lifestyle. However, Ogden argues . . .” and so on. Marlys moves mentally through the café clockwise, encountering her cues for the boundary model of hunger and satiety, biases arising from cultural inclinations to obesity, the problems with diet data based on anecdotal evidence, metabolic differences related to high levels of lipoprotein lipase levels (“little pink lemons”), and the rest.
From Pret- a-Manger she moves on to the Krispy Kreme shop, where a mental walk through the interior cues images that in turn cue what she’s learned about the evolutionary explanations of aggression. Then on to Starbucks, where the crazed barista and the shop’s fl oorplan and clientele cue her
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through twelve paragraphs on the biological treatments of schizo phre nia.
