Method of loci
The method of loci or Ars memoriae (art of memory) is a mnemonic device practiced since Classical times. It is a kind of mnemonic link system, used most often in cases where long lists of either related or independent items must be remembered in order.
Loci are physical locations or spatial correlations linking unfamiliar information which needs to be recalled with a familiar set which can be recalled at will. Memorable verbal linkages are used to connect the known set to the unfamiliar one, enabling the device's user to more easily recall the unfamiliar elements by starting from known elements and attempting to recall their relationships rather than simply recalling the unfamiliar elements independently.
For instance, according to Cicero's De Oratore, the method's inventor Simonides of Ceos, was once attending a dinner with other notable Greeks. After he had stepped outside, the building was destroyed, killing all inside. During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions at the table before his departure (hence their positions or "loci" were utilized in discerning their identities).
The most common technique is to memorise some large building, the more architectural elaboration of rooms, passages and niches it has the better — this is sometimes called the 'Memory Palace'. Mnemonic images can be placed about this palace to link to items that you wanted to remember, usually in symbolic form, with the images as striking as possible to enable recollection. To recall something, the practitioner mentally moves around the palace, reviewing the images in order. This was an essential technique of rhetoricians and preachers.
Another technique uses landmarks on a well-known journey instead of places in a building; this is called the 'journey method'.
A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place", and so forth.
It may be helpful to note that most of the best memorizers today use this technique to a greater or lesser degree. Eight World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien advocates this technique, as does Andi Bell.
The method of loci in literature
The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who from 1582 until his death in 1610, worked to introduce Christianity to China, described the memory palace technique in his work, A Treatise On Mnemonics.
Memory palaces appear in Thomas Harris' novel Hannibal, in which serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter organizes his memories in an elaborate memory palace. Another example appears in the Ice Age cycle of Magic: The Gathering books, in which many of the mages, most notably Jodah, store their repertoire of spells in a 'mental mansion'.
See also
Blending the various systems together
Adel Anwar, is a British Attorney, recently interviewed on CNN, that claims to have used a unique blend of ancient and modern memory systems to rise through the ranks of law rapidly, mastering complex legal information with minimal effort compared to his hard working friends from Oxford University. When questioned he states that he had to re-adjust the hackneyed Greco-Roman memory methods, in a unique way, so as to take into account the latest findings from Harvard Brain Research Scientists.
Scientists have also found that without such re-adjustment, or 'blending of various systems and strategies', students and businessmen, may surprisingly perform below-par, and ironically still experience failure, despite showing prodigious memory power at parties (i.e. strategies that can be very powerful indeed, if used correctly, end up being mere amateur 'party tricks').
In fact, academic and life-time failure results from complacency that is experienced if one merely uses such systems without taking into account the vast plethora of research that has come out recently relating to learning, neurology and intelligence theories.
Such recent explosion of knowledge is due to the great advancement, understanding and leaps that scientists have taken, as a result of brain imaging equipment (PET, MRI, fMRI, bio-feedback, electro-encephalograph); as well as recently reawakened interest in finding ways to develop either superhuman capability or to overcome the ravishes of the aging brain. Nevertheless, 'superior memory' seen in many modernly, is as a result of using ancient Greco-Roman methods, states Profs. Wilder & Valentine, of Royal Holloway College, University of London. Their ground-breaking research has been featured in the eminent 'Nature' magazine.
Academic scientists, such as Harvard's Prof. Daniel Schacter, or Prof. Gruneberg in Britain, are skeptical at the pop-culture espoused by non-scientists, which falsely claim to improve memory by allegedly but falsely installing a so-called 'photographic memory'. The fact is, the brain is not a 'camera'. A camera is an artificial device invented relatively recently, compared to the genetic evolution of memory and the brain.
In reality, there is 'no one thing called memory'. Memory is composed of many distinct angles, now documented by academics, yet little understood by the vast plethora of 'pop' memory experts. This also means relying on memory systems as one's only method of improving memory is erroneous; a claim shared by Dr. Kenneth Higbee of Brigham-Young University.