Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #4. Stash Things in Nooks and Crannies

Systematically place information in the corners and walls of rooms, and expand the capacity of your memory journeys up to tenfold.

"Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3] explains how to remember information by associating it with places along the way in an imaginary journey. (If you haven't read that hack, please read it now.) But each place on a memory journey contains other places: rooms typically have four walls, four corners, a floor, and a ceiling, for a total of 10 sublocations. In other words, if you have already memorized a journey through a building, you can now make your memory journey hold 10 times as many pieces of information.¹

In Action

Scott Hagwood, the U.S. Grandmaster of Memory, seems to have invented the nooks-and-crannies hack. He used it to break the world record for color-sequence memorization for the electronic game Simon. The previous record had been 14 sequences, but Scott was able to play an astonishing 31 sequences—all that the machine could offer. To do so, he used a memory journey and mentally stuffed the corners and walls of his places with items representing the colors he was trying to remember, such as a yellow sun or green bouncy balls.

Reconstructing Hagwood's system from his interviews is simple enough.^2,3 Hagwood's map for each room looks something like Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. The nooks and crannies of Hagwood's ...