The Powerful Memory Technique used in Ancient Rome and Greece
The Method of Loci
The ancient Roman and Greek civilizations obviously did not have electronic devices to preserve information. They did not even have convenient writing tools like paper and pencil. Thus memory was important.
The oldest known book that explains how to memorize speeches dates from at least 80 B.C., the Rhetorica ad Herennium.
The human mind responds to visuals and stories. That’s why movies and TV are such powerful forms of media. We are also very location-centric.
Have you ever walked past a place where you had a particularly joyful, sad or scary experience and how those same emotions coming flooding back to you? That’s your location-centric brain kicking in.
A way to take advantage of this is take a route you know well, such as your trip to work, grocery store or favorite dog walk. Then find specific landmarks on this route.
I use my 2 mile dog walk around West Chester, PA. It has a total of 52 landmarks. This allows me to put one visual (or more) at each location and use it for remembering every card in a deck cards.
But I could also use it to memorize any other 52 item list.
So, here’s how it works. The first is to memorize the Journey in order. Depending on the size of your journey (the number of stops along the way) this might take some time. But remember the beauty of this method, is that you are using a route that you use often.
If you commute to work, you take basically the same route 200 times every year. Once you have the journey down in order you can start putting visuals at the various places in your journey.
You want to make these visualizations vivid and memorable as I explained in previous posts:
Visualizations Tips from the Godfather
The first step of my journey around West Chester, PA started in my house, my Bedroom to be exact. So, if I wanted to memorize a deck of cards here is how I would go about it. If the first card was the King of Diamonds, I would visualize Warren Buffett in my bedroom. Warren Buffett being my image for King of Diamonds.
NOTE: In addition to memorizing the Journey you also have to memorize visuals for each of the 52 cards. This seems like a lot of work but it really isn’t. If you would like to learn more about this technique, I do have an Improve your memory course program listed at www.Heal.Me/dave.
The 23rd location on my dog walk was the West Chester Post Office. If the 23rd card in the deck was the Jack of Spades, I would think of comedian Jack Black at the Post Office acting out a scene from one of his movies.
Then when I go back and try to remember what the first card was, I ask myself who did I visualize in my bedroom?
This is where the saying “in the first place” comes from. Greek speakers would memorize a speech by visualizing ideas at each stop around their own Journey. In my case the first place is the bedroom.
I will explore this idea in more detail next week.
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