Here is a shopping list. Chocolate, tomatoes, cucumber, milk, buns. Five items only, and still, how many times have you reached the shop and come back without the milk?
The ancient Greeks had a simple answer. Their orators had to speak for a long time without notes, so they used a method that is still called the Method of Loci. Loci simply means places. The idea is to store what you want to remember in places you already know very well.
The method in three steps
- Picture a series of places in a fixed order that you know well. The rooms of your house will do.
- Make a clear picture for each item on your list.
- Put one item in one place.
Now try it with the five items. At your gate, the whole gate is made of chocolate. In the garden, the plants are full of tomatoes, and in the middle there is one huge cucumber. In the driveway, a cat is sitting and drinking milk. Inside, on the sofa, the cushions are made of soft buns.
When you want the list, you do not search your memory. You simply walk in through the gate. Gate, chocolate. Garden, tomatoes and cucumber. Driveway, milk. Sofa, buns. The places remind you of the items, and the order comes free.
Choose your route with care
Everything depends on the route. It must be a path you know so well that you can walk it with your eyes closed. It can be your house, or your walk from home to college. A student can use the entrance to the campus. The first stop is a big iron gate. The next is the front of the main building. The next is the statue you pass every single day.
The number of stops depends on how many things you need to remember. Spend some time fixing the stops in your mind. Walk through them slowly and see each one clearly. This small investment of time pays you back many times, because you can use the same route again and again.
A longer list, a longer walk
Take this list of eleven items: coffee, salad, vegetables, bread, kitchen paper, fish, chicken, shoe polish, soup, fruits, bath tub cleaner. Let us use the walk from home to a supermarket.
- Front door: coffee is spilled all over the doormat.
- Front garden: someone is cutting and making a salad right there, from the garden plants.
- Your car: potatoes, onions and other vegetables are sitting on the driver's seat.
- End of the road: the whole road is spread with loaves of bread.
- Road turning: kitchen paper is rolled out across the turn.
- Under the railway bridge: fish are swimming in the air under the bridge.
- Traffic signal: chicken is being distributed to the people waiting.
- Temple: people are polishing shoes outside the temple.
- Office building: the whole building is flooded with soup.
- Office room: the room smells of fruit.
- Bathroom: the bathroom is full of bath tub cleaner.
Read it once, close your eyes, and walk. You will find that the picture of a stop is easy to recall because the stop itself is familiar. The stops are the hooks. The funny pictures are what hang on them.
Why different lists do not mix
One good thing about this method is that each route is different in place and form. A list you stored in your house will not get mixed up with a list you stored on the road to college. You can keep many lists at once, each on its own route.
Test it yourself
Do this small experiment. Ask a friend to read ten unrelated words to you, about one word per second. Do not use any technique. Just listen hard and see how many you can write. Write down your score.
Now spend a few minutes fixing a route of ten stops. Walk through each stop in your mind until you can see it clearly. Ask your friend to read a different list of ten words. This time, put each word at one stop with a bright picture. At first the pictures may come slowly. That is normal. If you find it hard, practise on two or three more lists. Soon you will be remembering far more words than before, perhaps all ten.
After that, try it on something real. Take one chapter from your textbook, pick out the main points, and place them along your route. When you walk the route before the exam, the chapter comes back in order.
This is one chapter from my book Train Your Brain.
