So, an author named Joshua Foer recently wrote a book, Moonwalking with Einstein, about remembering. Not just remembering to bring your lunch to school, but remembering the order of ten (10!) decks of cards that are shuffled together – REALLY REMEMBERING.
As he started to write about remembering, he studied the skills of HOW to remember and Joshua Foer, the author, ended up winning the U.S. Memory Championship! How great is that?
Joshua Foer is convinced that you can LEARN techniques to improve your remembering skills too. In fact, he recommends the use of ARCHITECTURE to remember. Memory Palaces are a way to improve your memory. What the heck is a Memory Palace, you might ask? Well, in an article on the website Salon, he explained that
“The basic idea of the Memory Palace, which dates back to Ancient Greece, is that if one creates an imagined building in the mind’s eye, and populates that building with images that you want to remember, those memories are much stickier. It sounds strange. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and that was kind of what I thought when I went into all of this, but it turns out that it is actually an incredibly effective way of remembering stuff.”
He says that our brains can remember visual images. So if you stick what you want to remember onto the visual images, in this case, onto the rooms of a palace and the items inside, you will improve your ability to remember.
To try it out, let’s say you want to remember three numbers. First, picture a palace with a grand entrance that has a huge wooden door, a luxurious red carpet and a startling, shimmering chandelier. Using this visual image, let’s try to remember three numbers:
The door = 122; The red carpet = 637; and The chandelier = 793.
Close your eyes and feel like you are entering through the Wooden door into the Entry Hall with the red carpet and the bright chandelier. Could you remember the numbers by picturing them? Could you remember your math facts this way for your next text in math class? Try to remember to this trick next time you need to remember something. Let us know at archKIDecture if it works.