Written by Lynne Kelly, PhD, the author of 18 books including The Memory Code and Memory Craft
Just because you have a bad memory doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with it. There are numerous techniques which can make a tremendous difference to your ability to remember.
All my life I have battled an appallingly bad memory. It was only in my 60s, as I learnt to apply indigenous memory methods, that everything changed. Approaching 70, and my memory is the best it has ever been.
Indigenous peoples all over the world were dependent on their memories for everything they knew. They memorized vast amounts of information: details of thousands of plants and animals, hundreds of miles navigation, weather indicators, complex genealogies, land management, astronomy, history, laws and ethics, and the list goes on and on.
So how did they do it?
The most effective method is associating information with places. Native American pilgrimage trails, Australian Aboriginal songlines and Pacific Island ceremonial roads are just a few examples. Often referred to as a memory palace, the ancient Greeks called it the method of loci. All contemporary memory champions use this technique. And recent neuroscience has indicated a perfect match with the way our brains work, especially for long term memory.
The technique involves using somewhere very familiar to you and attaching information. Your home or place of work is a perfect starting point.
Say you wanted to remember all the countries and independent protectorates of the world starting from the one with the highest population, China, to the smallest, the Vatican City. Let’s start at the front door. There you associate China. You might imagine smashing a china plate or a Chinese meal being delivered. Revise that a few times and your brain will make that association forever.
“We’ve gained a great deal with the spread of writing and technology, but we have also lost the ability to use our memories to even a fraction of their potential. ”
We’ll put five locations in every room. Moving in sequence around the room from the front door, which is now China, you reach the second location. Here you want to associate India. I have a bookcase here and imagine an entire Bollywood production happening underneath it. I once lay down on the floor to try and see it. Doing something so silly just makes it more memorable.
You need to add the next three countries in that room: USA, Indonesia and Pakistan. Then you go to the next room. At the door you have Brazil, then Nigeria, Bangladesh, Russia and Mexico. Already you may be surprised. Did you expect Bangladesh to be so high on list?
The beauty of a memory palace is that it lays down a foundation for whatever topic you want. You can then layer even more complexity on top, seeing patterns that will not have been available to you before. So once you have the countries in place, you can then add all sorts of other information like capitals, geography, recent events, history or significant people. You will always find something around that location to hook on new facts and ideas. The capital of Indonesia is Jakarta. I have a child I know called Jack with his cart on the low table which represents Indonesia.
Try this for yourself. You will be astounded how well the information sticks. The more fun you have with making up associations and the more vivid your imagination, the easier it becomes.
I have over 1000 locations in constant use. I play with this memory game during my daily walk. My various memory palaces are the streets around my home. Every house and shop, side street and parkland has an association. My landscape is vivid and alive, just the way indigenous people describe their country. I could not bear to move house now!
That this is only the starting point of what we can learn from indigenous cultures about memory. How often do you get a song stuck in your head? Indigenous cultures don’t sing about romance all the time. They sing their knowledge. Each of the locations in the landscape will remind them of a song. They will probably dance as well which makes it even more memorable.
Then there are stories. By adding characters to anything you want to learn about, you can make up stories which encode information so much more memorably. That’s why the sky is full of characters like Aquarius and Leo. It’s why the ancient Greeks had Grammatica to teach punctuation and spelling. And it is why indigenous cultures have hundreds of characters populating the stories about all the practical information they need to survive both physically and culturally.
Every indigenous culture I researched also used handheld objects as miniature memory palaces. For example, the African lukasa is a piece of wood covered in beads in shells, each representing location. Similarly, Native American birchbark scrolls and song-boards are adorned with symbols, each one representing a song or bit of knowledge. I have used my own version of a lukasa to encode the 412 native birds of my state. Each bead or shell represents a family and then I use stories to name every bird in that family. My stories become more and more elaborate as I learn more about the birds. I would never have believed this possible had I not tried it.
In mediaeval times, books were very rare and so they were memorized. That’s why they were decorated so elaborately to make each page look completely different. Studying from typed notes, every page identical, makes your task so much harder.
Art was used as a powerful memory aid in all indigenous cultures and right up to the Renaissance in Western societies. Music and art can be used to tell memorable stories about important knowledge. It is only in the last few hundred years that these methods have not been taught in schools and used throughout life.
We’ve gained a great deal with the spread of writing and technology, but we have also lost the ability to use our memories to even a fraction of their potential. Exercising your brain, like every other muscle in the body, is essential to maintain your memory into old age. And it’s fun.