Taking a Walk Down Memory Lane

‘A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use.’
‘THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS’
This memory method relies on your intimate knowledge of a place and is particularly useful for memorising a lot of connected information, such as a
list. Once you have mastered it, you should be able to recall a list of items far longer than the traditional seven or so.
This technique goes under a number of different names. Some know it as the Memory Palace, others as the Method of Loci or the Roman Room
Technique, to name but a few. Underlying the system is the selection of a place that you know really well such as your current home, or one from
your childhood, or perhaps the local high street or the office (especially if you’re a workaholic). You could even focus on a single room if it has lots of
elements in it that you are familiar with.
Let’s say you’ve opted for your childhood home. You then need to fix firmly in your mind a route through the house. Start with your key in the front
door. Open the door and step into the hallway. Plot a path taking in all the different rooms, upstairs and downstairs. Once you have the route
established, you can use it again and again, every time there is a new list of information you want to memorise.
If there are more things to remember than there are rooms in the house, consider developing the system so that as you walk your route, you take
in several features in each room. For instance, rather than associating only one thing with the kitchen, you could picture your fridge, the kitchen
table, the toaster and the sink. That’s space for four new things.
Each of the familiar elements on your route is known as a ‘memory peg’. The job now is to hang each item you wish to remember on a different
peg. Let’s say you are off to the shops but you can’t find a pen so you need to carry your shopping list in your head. The first item is a bottle of milk,
which we’ll place on the front door step. The next is a newspaper, which we’ll conveniently slot into the letter box. Next is half a dozen eggs.



These we place on the living room mantelpiece to use in place of vases. Meanwhile, the shirt you want to buy is hanging in the front room window where
the curtains normally are. It doesn’t matter how weird things get in your memory palace. In fact, the stranger things are, the easier they are to
remember.
The more you use this technique, the more elements you will be able to remember. Some experts claim to be able to recall hundreds of things in
this manner.
But that’s enough of the theory. See how you get on with these challenges, perhaps using one or more of the techniques above. The first of the
following two exercises will test your short-term memory, while the latter will give a work-out to your long-term memory.