3. Method of Loci

The earliest recorded mnemonic device comes from Ancient Greece. One night, a poet named Simonides was called upon to recite a poem at a banquet. By some stroke of luck, Simonides briefly left the banquet hall, right when the entire building collapsed. Because the bodies of those that remained inside were so badly mangled, Simonides identified the dead for their families by recalling where people were sitting at the time of the accident. This memory device of associating things with a place or location became known as the method of loci, and it was all the rage for teaching in Ancient Greece. If you've ever said, "in the first place" or "in the second place" when rattling off a list, then you're using a modern derivative of the method of loci.

In using the method of loci, you're essentially piggybacking the information you need to remember on top of information that would be near impossible for you to forget. For example, it would be hard for you to forget a bus or subway route you use every day, or the setup of your own house. If you select between five to seven locations on these routes or in these places, you can use the landmarks to remember a list of errands by using the visualization methods we discussed earlier.

For example, let's say that you've selected places you pass daily on your commute to the office. You drive by a large yellow house, a fast food chicken restaurant and a tire shop. You need to remember to stop by the store to get detergent, bread and orange juice. For each familiar place, visualize an association with an item on the list. You could envision the detergent dripping down the sides of the yellow house, making the yellow even brighter. You picture the chickens eating pieces of bread thrown to them in their chicken coops, and you could imagine tires trying to move through a rising river of orange juice. You can expand the list with more landmarks as needed, and then when you arrive at the store, you just pull up this route information and think of your visualizations.

For another tip that uses familiar spaces with a twist, go on to the next page.