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.

Your Brain Already Hashtags

Mnemonics are just a way for you to remember things more easily. They’re little tricks, like “Every Good Boy Does Fine” helps you remember EGBDF, the notes on the lines of a treble clef. Mnemonics are powerful, because they can help you remember a music lesson from 2nd grade, even if you’ve never used music theory ever in your life.

But, not to put too fine a point on it, Mnemonics are actually helping you with retrieval. You learned the notes on the lines, and memorized them-- its getting access to those memories that sometimes requires tricks.

And when you think of the internet as a sort of melding of minds, what tricks can be used to retrieve those “memories?” Lately, the trick has been the “hashtag”

Hashtags were invented by Chris Messina in 2007, as way to manually index the content of blogs and social media. He came up with the idea of prefacing keywords with the # symbol, borrowing from the method programmers use to make comments in their code. The concept was eventually picked up by other users on Twitter, became ubiquitous by the time of the SXSW event. Since then, hashtags have allowed people to add their thoughts to the latest zeitgeist as it happens.

Of course, the latest zeitgeist is the #hashtag, a self-referential usage that is best explained in the Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake sketch. As funny as it is, it nevertheless shows exactly the power of hashtags.

By using them, people on the internet are creating a internet-memory mnemonic to help retrieve just what they’re looking for. But is it making the internet “smarter?” That’s up to you to decide.