by Joseph Shieber
When I think back on when I realized that I think differently than most people, what surprises me most is that I didn’t realize it sooner.
The earliest indication that I can explicitly recall would have occurred to me some time in the 1990’s. It was around then that I’d learned about the “method of places” technique for memorization — also known as the “memory palace” technique.
The technique works like this. Choose a location that you know very well from memory — say, the street where you grew up. Visualize yourself walking down the street, observing landmarks along your walk. Now, when you want to memorize items in a list in order, simply visualize those items at locations along the familiar path in your mind.
I could pretend that I first learned about the method of places from Jonathan Spence’s 1984 book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but it’s likely that I actually encountered it first in Thomas Harris’s 1999 novel Hannibal. Harris would have led me to Spence’s book — as well as to Frances Yates’s 1966 book The Art of Memory.
The technique is one of the most widely used strategies by mnemonists — like the journalist Joshua Foer, who wrote about how he employed the technique to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship in his 2011 book Moonwalking With Einstein.
Now, the technique is not easy. It took Foer a year of concentrated effort to prepare for the Memory Championship, for example. But when I set out to try it for myself, I found that I was unable even to get started.
The problem was that first step: visualization. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to. Read more »