8The Journey Method

“Any landscape is a condition of the spirit.”

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–81)

THE SCENIC ROUTE TO A PERFECT MEMORY

The technique I briefly described in the previous chapter – of imagining journeys through familiar landscapes and locations in order to “fix” items and their order in the memory – isn’t exclusive to me by any means. You too can use it, and in this chapter I show you how.

The following exercise is a test of imagination rather than of memory. However, after looking through the list on the following page you should be able to achieve total recall. You will do this by using the journey method, or system of loci, that the ancient Greeks knew and practised to improve their memories more than 2,000 years ago.

But first:

1You will need to prepare a mental route consisting of twelve stages. The route could, for example, be a typical journey from home to school, college or a friend’s house.

2Choose significant or memorable landmarks as stages along the route, such as a church, bus stop or post office.

3Make sure the journey follows a logical direction. This will preserve the order of the items on the list.

4Once you are happy with your route, learn it before looking at the list. It could look something like this:

Stage1Front door

Stage2Gate

Stage3Corner shop

Stage4Traffic lights

Stage5Footbridge

Stage6Station entrance

Stage7Platform 4

Stage8Train

Stage9Church

Stage10College gates

Stage11Library

Stage12Your desk

The idea is to mentally place each item of the list opposite at each stage of the journey. For example, if the first stage of your chosen route is the front door, then imagine seeing a huge bell planted on your doorstep preventing you from leaving. Approaching the second stage, you see long strips of bacon draped over the gate as you sense that unmistakable smell wafting in the air – a very odd sight. Outside the corner shop you see the characteristic shape of the Eiffel Tower. It’s only a model of the original, but what on earth is it doing there? … and so on.

Imagine journeying to college as you would on any other day, only this time you will experience some unusual encounters along the way. As well as visualising each item at each stage, try to conjure up the atmosphere of the location. Use all your senses – listen to the traffic; what’s the weather like, mild or cold? Taste, smell and touch will play a part, and note your reactions as you see each item.

Tip: don’t try to memorise the words, just try to bring them to life. Remember, this is a test of imagination. There is no time limit, so don’t rush. Just enjoy the trip.

1Bell

2Bacon

3Eiffel Tower

4Michael Schumacher

5Grease

6Bob Geldof

7Ice cream

8Lux soap

9Net

10Glass of port

11Bull

12Crown

I said at the beginning that this was a test of imagination. However, as I believe imagination is the key to memory, I fully expect you to be able to recall all twelve items.

Total recall

To recall the list, all you have to do is review the journey. Play back your mental cine-film and reminisce over the unusual scenes.

If you did hit a blank at any stage it’s not your memory that’s defective, it’s the way you programmed the information in the first place. Don’t blame the projector when the recording equipment’s at fault. If you missed a scene, then the picture you created obviously didn’t make a big enough impact on your memory and was not sufficiently stimulating, so go back to the relevant location and reshoot that scene. You probably found it easier to remember the two people, Schumacher and Geldof, than some of the less animated items, for the reasons I’ve already given. That’s why it’s necessary to exaggerate the scenes to compensate for some of the less interesting items.

The beauty of this method is that it’s so well organised – assuming, of course, that your route is. It is a highly effective mental filing system, allowing quick, easy access to any data required. For example, if you wanted to know what item comes after “bacon”, you could pinpoint the answer, “Eiffel Tower”, simply by referring to your route. Similarly, you could repeat the whole list backwards by reversing the journey – that is, by travelling back home from college.

Did you notice anything significant about the items themselves? Here’s another lateral poser for you:

Question: What is the connection between each of the items?

Answer: They are symbols for the first twelve countries to join the European Union, which you have unwittingly been tricked into memorising in alphabetical order.

I should say that they are my symbols. Whenever you use this method you should create your own very personal symbolic representations. Even so, you should be able to see the connection from this list:

1Belgium

2Denmark

3France

4Germany

5Greece

6Ireland

7Italy

8Luxembourg

9Netherlands

10Portugal

11Spain

12United Kingdom

If you found that exercise easy, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t start exploiting the journey method further. Using this method, the amount of knowledge that can be stored is virtually limitless, because the amount of storage space available – in geographical locations, for example – is essentially unlimited. I measure my own storage capacity by the amount of journeys or routes that I have gathered and organised over the past few years. In fact, I have about 100 journeys in my head, each consisting of fifty-two stages.

In theory, then, it’s possible for me to memorise 5,200 playing cards (100 packs), or 5,200 names, faces, numbers – or anything else. But this is a conservative estimate because each stage could easily accommodate many more images. Think of your own route. If you used your desk at college as just one stage of the journey, imagine how many more images could be stored throughout the rest of the college buildings and grounds.

So my original figure of 5,200 is really more like 50,000 as far as storing “bits” of information goes; but if I were studying for exams I wouldn’t be using this storage space to memorise sequences of numbers, football scores and racing results. I would be saturating my mental maps with historical events, Shakespearean quotations, foreign vocabularies, chemical formulae, maths equations, laws of physics, economic statistics, and so on.

In the coming chapters, I will be concentrating on the techniques that will enable you to achieve this for yourself.

Master discs and blank discs

I liken my journeys to video tapes or to rewritable DVDs, because they share similar characteristics. Once you have bought a blank video-cassette or disc, you can use it to record documentaries, films, sport, comedy, drama and so on, and you can use that same tape or disc to record on over and over again, ad infinitum according to the manufacturers. This is possible because every time you make a fresh recording, whatever was last recorded gets wiped off, and, unless you are hopelessly sentimental, this is a very handy facility. However, to retain your favourite film, you can create a master version by removing the bit of plastic from the back of the cassette or by “locking” the disc.

This is how I organise my own mental discs. I have about 100 journey-discs, of which fifty are blank. These I use for record attempts, demonstrations, memory competitions and everyday use. Because the sort of information I am memorising, like a 1,000-digit binary number, is not worthy of long-term storage, I can use these same journeys or discs over and over again. The new sequence simply wipes out or records over the old one.

The remaining fifty master discs I use for storing data like Number One hits, football championship winners – anything that needs to be kept for future reference.

Every so often, I play or review some of these old discs to refresh my memory, usually before a demonstration, and occasionally I need to update the information as things change, either by extending the journey or by adding further images to existing stages. Perhaps a better analogy in this case would be that of a computer file in which I can easily access the stored information, update it and save it for future use.

ANCIENT GREECE AND VIRTUAL JOURNEYS

The memory techniques I have just described are the product of my own trials, conducted over many years. Perhaps I should say trials and errors; some of my earlier methods were not always successful. Because these systems have been developed literally from scratch and independently over time, I had assumed that they were completely original. Indeed, having since compared my work with other books on memory, I have found that although many of them encourage the use of association, conversion of numbers into images (see chapter nine) and imagination, hardly any emphasis is placed on the use of locations.

I have always stressed that familiar locations are essential for anchoring all the mnemonically generated images (images you create in order to jog your memory). They provide order by acting as three-dimensional filing systems. Without places, images have nowhere to live, and so hang around in the air like lost souls. If images are left to float in a sort of fog, then they will be difficult to access, fade quickly from the memory, and be easily confused with other images, which rather makes the use of techniques for aiding memory pointless.

A time-honoured technique

However, my hopes of being the inventor of a revolutionary new method for enhancing memory were soon dashed after I learned that the ancient Greeks had already discovered these methods more than 2,000 years ago. To the Greeks, memory was an art form, and they were masters of it. This is not surprising when you consider that they were living in a book-free age. Although a crude form of paper, papyrus, existed, and wax tablets were used occasionally for important texts, the ancient Greek tradition was truly oral. It was vitally important to have a good memory – we know that in Athens, school students were expected to learn Homer’s epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey by heart (that’s equivalent to a book of about 800 pages in modern terms). If an individual did not possess a naturally good memory, it was necessary to develop an artificial one.

This skill was known as mnemotechnics. An unknown Roman teacher of rhetoric compiled one of the few ancient texts on the subject that remain: Ad Herennium. It is a treatise on the precise rules for training the memory, which preserved a tradition that began with the Greeks.

Practising the art of memory in the twenty-first century, as I do, can seem like a solitary pursuit, so it is somewhat comforting to learn that I’m not the only one to have taken extensive excursions through an internal, imaginary world. As the anonymous teacher says,

“If we wish to remember much material we must equip ourselves with a large number of places. It is essential that the places should form a series and must be remembered in their order, so that we can start in any place [locus] in the series and move either backward or forward from it.”

Here, the author is clearly affirming the use of the journey method you have just learned in this book to remember a list of information.

He goes on to say,

“A locus is a place easily grasped by the memory, such as a house, an intercolumnar space, a corner, an arch, or the like. If we wish to remember, for example, the genus of a horse, of a lion, of an eagle, we must place their images on definite loci.”

You may be tempted to think that you simply don’t know enough locations to store all the information you need to remember for the academic courses you are following. But your imagination will ensure that you can never run out, because, as the ancient author says,

“Even a person who thinks he does not possess enough sufficiently good loci can remedy this. For thought can embrace any region whatsoever and in it and at will construct the setting of some place.”

In other words, if you think about it, there is an infinite number of imaginary places that you could create in your mind to house your mnemonic images. The Greeks used a healthy mixture of fictitious places as well as real ones to boost their memory power. If there aren’t enough rooms in your house to make a long enough route, you could always create an extra floor or dig out a basement block. Anything’s possible.

Virtual journeys

At this point I have to admit to a passion for computer games. Apart from the entertainment I gain through the problem-solving they require, games offer a certain escapist value, as the illusion created by the graphics is powerful enough to give one some sense of “being there”. However, these are not completely idle pursuits; I use the geography of the virtual worlds of some computer games as the basis for some of my mental journeys.

Surprisingly, they seem to be no less effective than real locations when it comes to storing information. So the next time you are caught at the computer when you’re supposed to be studying, you’ll have a legitimate excuse. Just say you’re swotting up on Hamlet – and if your accuser doesn’t believe you, tell them to read this!