Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #3. Make Lots of Little Journeys

Making mental journeys (also known as "memory palaces") is a useful way to remember sequential information. If you have several familiar short journeys handy, you can be ready to remember whatever you need to, at any time. Here's how to start with the layout of your own house or apartment.

Practically every system of mnemonics relies on a series of pegs on which to hang information. For example, "Remember 10 Things to Bring" [Hack #1] associates the numbers 1 through 10 with rhyming objects (one = gun, two = shoe, three = tree, and so on) and then hangs the things to remember (such as medication, keys, and cell phone) on these mnemonic pegs by putting the peg objects and the things to remember in the same vivid mental picture.

An even older mnemonic technique—perhaps the oldest—uses places as memory pegs. By places, I mean ordinary, concrete places, such as the rooms of your house or apartment. If you mentally organize these places into a sequence that is the same every time, you will be able to walk through the places in your mind and retrieve the information you have stored there.¹

The Renaissance practitioners of the ancient ars memorativa (art of memory) referred to such journeys as memory palaces. Orators in classical times would prepare their speeches by stashing complex images that represented the things they wanted to talk about in the loci (places) of a remembered or imagined building, such as a palace. In fact, this practice is said ...