Use Your Brain Like a House

Chet is driving home from work, and traffic, for a change, is not so bad. His usual thirty minute commute might only be 20 minutes today. It’s sunny outside, unusual for this time of year. And the local alt-rock station is finally playing something decent. 20 minutes should go by quickly.

The song on the radio ends, a few ads come on. One of them is for a concert this weekend, a local band that Chet’s been meaning to check out. He reminds himself to look up ticket prices on the web when he gets home. The next ad is for cut-rate mortgage loans, which reminds Chet he needs to send in his home insurance payment . He adds that to his mental to-do list. As his mind wanders, Chet thinks about other things he should do when he gets home: call his mother, collect the recycling for tomorrow’s pick-up, set the DVR to record the baseball game, take some chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

Even though he’s driving, can’t take notes or use an app on his mobile device, Chet has no problem remembering all these things. When he gets home, everything he needs to do is as fresh in his mind as if he’d written down. You see, Chet uses a mnemonic device called The Method of Loci.

As he was driving, Chet imagined a rock band, complete with guitar player, keyboards and drums, performing on his front porch. Behind his front door, on the bench where he puts on his shoes in the morning, he pictured an enormous checkbook with the word “house” written on it. In the hall leading to his kitchen, he imagines a large photograph of his mother. On the kitchen table, he pictures a tall, teetering stack of tin cans. Continuing his mental walk, he places a pile of baseballs on his dining room table. Finally, in the living room, sitting on his couch is a giant chicken, wearing a scarf.

The Method of Loci, memory palace, or journey method, has a long history of usage, dating back to ancient Rome and Greece. In modern times, memory champions use this technique to quickly memorize random digits or sequences of shuffled playing cards.

For those of us who want a more practical use, the Method of Loci is very easy to use. Simply think of a path with which you’re already very familiar—walking through your house, or your office at work, or a favorite route through the city with stable landmarks. Then associate each room, or piece of furniture, or landmark, with an object that represents what you want to remember.

You’ll find that remembering 10, 20, or even 30 things is as easy as deciding where to put them. Be creative—the more interesting, or “novel” you make each image, the easier it is to remember.

Say It, Squeeze It, Chew It

Chew some gum, clench your fists, read your grocery list out loud, improve your memory.

Given that the brain controls, from one place, everything we do, it stands to reason that some areas will overlap and even assist one another.

In a simple experiment, Dr. Ruth E. Propper and associates at Montclair State University tested how clenching a rubber ball assisted memory storage and retrieval. Subjects squeezed the ball in their right hands while memorizing a list of words, and then squeezed a ball in their left hands while trying to recall those words. A control group only held the ball without squeezing in their hands. The result: out of thirty six words, hand squeezers were able able to recall more than twice those in the control group.

It’s worth shot, right? Use this technique next time you’re heading to the grocery store, and be sure to add chewing gum to the list.

A study led by Dr. Andrew Scholey at the University of Northumbria (UK) found that test subject who chewed during memory tests performed better than non-chewers. There are a few theories as to why this happens: the rhythm of chewing and sympathetic rhythms in the brain, slightly increased heart rate, or insulin receptors in the hippocampus. But you don’t need to know how a motor works to drive your car, so whatever the reason, popping a stick of gum in your mouth can help with memory.

And even if you don’t have a ball to squeeze or gum to chew, chances are you can still speak out loud.

A handful of scientists reporting in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition described an experiment to test “the production effect,” and found that “producing a word aloud during study, relative to simply reading a word silently, improves explicit memory.” They key, it seems, is not to read the whole list aloud, but just the important parts.

Of course, one man’s important is another man’s easy-to-forget. But if you want to be sure you especially don’t forget squeeze balls and chewing gum when you get to the store, read those parts out loud as you go over your list.