Memory Palaces & Avoiding Ancient Greek Dinner Parties

One night around 514 B.C., the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was attending a dinner party. According to myth, it ended rather badly. The banquet hall buckled and collapsed, crushing everyone inside beyond recognition—except Simonides, who had stepped outside and was saved. (Okay, it ended very badly.) As the story goes, although the dead were too crushed to be identified by their physical features, Simonides was able to name each one by recalling where the unfortunate partygoers had been seated, and from the disastrous feast came an interesting mnemonic technique called the method of loci.

Simonides was apparently struck by the idea that one could remember anything by associating it with a mental image of a location. This method, also known as a memory palace or mind palace, links memories with specific spatial locations and activates brain regions such as the medial parietal cortex, the retrosplenial cortex and the hippocampus, which are all involved in spatial awareness.

The place a person chooses as a memory palace should be complex as well as well-known, for instance, his or her house. The important aspect of the technique is not the actual space chosen, but rather the visualization and the interaction of each part of a visualized memory with the surroundings. If, for example, a person were trying to remember a shopping list that included toothpaste, he might picture himself walking into the bathroom and squeezing an enormous tube of toothpaste into the sink. Creative, vivid and absurd visualizations add to the effectiveness of the method, so fully imagining the smell of the toothpaste and the feeling of squeezing the tube would help solidify the item at that particular locus.

The success of the method comes from its use of trigger locations along a familiar route—or, for more advanced memorizers, a route designed entirely in one’s mind. The technique has been employed by real and fictional people ranging from Simonides to Sherlock Holmes to Hannibal Lecter to Gary Shang, who took it upon himself to memorize pi to over 65, 536 digits and who makes my mind palace look like a mind hovel.

Though it might seem like a lot of work just to avoid writing down a grocery list, I suppose you never know when you might end up in a structurally unsound banquet hall and have to show off your visualization skills. Happy remembering.

—Kate Oksas

Sources

<http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/secrets-sherlocks-mind-palace-180949567/?no-ist>.

<http://health.howstuffworks.com/human-body/systems/nervous-system/how-to-improve-your-memory7.htm>.

<http://remembereverything.org/memory-palace-the-method-of-loci/>.

An Optical Illusion: What do you mean that’s not a spiral?

We all have our own set of burning questions—those inquiries that sit in the back of our minds and refuse to leave us alone. They vary widely from person to person; Alessandro Volta was apparently tormented by the mystery, “What would happen if I completed the circuit of a 50-volt battery by sticking two metal rods into my ears?” while Paul Broca wondered (somewhat more prudently), “What does the brain’s left frontal lobe have to do with our ability to speak?”

A question that bothers me on occasion (while perhaps not quite as creative as Volta’s) is one regarding optical illusions. Specifically, “Why does my brain tell me that the picture below is a spiral?”

The image consists of concentric circles (you can trace one with your finger for proof). I know that the image consists of concentric circles, but no matter how I try to convince myself of the fact, all I can see is a spiral. The illusion, known a Fraser spiral or a false spiral, was first studied by British psychologist James Fraser in 1908. It combines a regular pattern of circles with misaligned, differently colored strands, which create visual distortion. And as if the tilted strands weren’t hard enough on our unsuspecting brains, the checkered background also contains spiral components to heighten the illusion.

The deception happens through a combination of simple image processing in the retina and more complex processing in the brain’s striate cortex, a primary visual receptive area. Orientation-sensitive cells in the cortex make horizontal connections with each other that change depending on context. In the case of this irritating not-spiral, the cells interpret the message of diagonal bands—that is, the misaligned black and white strands—that they receive from the retina as an unbroken line, creating the appearance of a spiral.

Maybe not the most dramatic answer, but at least it didn’t require closing an electrical circuit with my ears.

-Kate Oksas 

Sources

<http://www.psychologie.tu-dresden.de/

i1/kaw/diverses%20Material/www.illusionworks.com/html/fraser_spiral.html>.

<http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FrasersSpiral>.