Created way back during the days of the Roman Empire, the method of loci is really a sort of linking method with a twist. This method was supposedly devised by the poet Simonides of Ceos, who was the only survivor of a building collapsing during a dinner he was attending. Those who had died were crushed beyond all recognition, but Simonides was able to identify the dead by remembering where the guests had been sitting.
From this horrific experience, he realized that it would be possible to remember anything by associating it with a mental image of the location. Greek and Roman orators used this technique in order to give speeches without the aid of notes – it was the most popular mnemonic system until the mid-1600s, when the phonetic and peg systems came into being.
Here’s How It Works
• Think of a place that you’re extremely familiar with, such as your house.
• Visualize a series of locations in the place in logical order. For example, if it’s your house, picture the path that you’d usually take in your house to get from the front door to the back door. Begin at the front door, go through your hall, enter the living room, proceed through the dining room, into the kitchen, and so on.
• Place one item that you want to remember at one of the locations.
• When it comes to remembering the items, simply visualize your house and go through it room by room. Each item that you associated with a specific room in your house should spring to mind as you make your way through your home in your mind.
Here’s how this strategy would work if you wanted to remember the following shopping list:
• Shaving Cream
• Peaches
• Hot Dogs
• Ketchup
• Ice Cream
When you’re visualizing your home, imaging spraying shaving cream on the front door. Don’t just think of the word “shaving cream,” think about actually spraying shaving cream on the door. Then, open the door, and picture a giant peach rolling down the hall straight towards you. Now walk into the living room, and visualize an eight-foot-tall hot dog wearing a cowboy hat and lounging by the fire. Next, enter the dining room and imagine a bottle of ketchup, dressed in a maid’s uniform, setting the table. Finally, go to the kitchen and think of a gallon of ice cream, melting as it slaves over a hot stove.
After you have visualized all of this, when you try to remember your shopping list, all you have to do is visualize your front door. You will instantly see the shaving cream in your mind; as you enter the hall, the peach will enter your mind; and so on. The more outrageous and funny you make your mental images, the easier it’ll be for you to remember them.
This method can be used to remember lists, names of people at an event, things you need to do, important points in a speech, or even a thought you want to keep in mind. This mnemonic strategy works well because it changes the way you remember. Since the locations are organized in an order that you know well, one memory flows into the next very easily.
If you want, you can place more than one item in any particular location. For example, if you have 50 items on a shopping list, you could place five items in ten different locations. Each of these five items should interact at its location.
For example, you could think of your daily routine in the morning:
• Bedroom
• Bathroom
• Kitchen
• Garage
• Car
Now you need to link the items that you want to remember to each of these places. Of course, it’s imperative that you remember the places, but this shouldn’t be too hard, because they’re part of your daily routine. Then attach each item to a place. Using the grocery list example from above: You wake up next to a giant can of shaving cream; you find a huge peach having a bath in your bathroom; a hot dog is making you breakfast, a bottle of ketchup is blocking your car; and a gallon of ice cream, wearing sunglasses, is melting in the driver’s seat. You could then picture five more items along your route to work, five in your office, and so on.
The loci method allows you to remember items on a list, but it doesn’t allow you to locate just one particular item. For example, if you wanted to find the 9th item using this system, you’d have to work your way down through the first eight items to get to it.
The way around this small problem is to place a distinguishing mark at every fifth place. For example, at the fifth place, you could add a one-dollar bill to the image. At the tenth place, you could add an image of a clock. Using this added touch, there really is no limit to what you can remember.
Source: howstuffworks
Images: depositphotos
