You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

the art of location
W
e saw earlier (pp.
17–18
) that the Greeks and Romans valued the art of
location above all others in relation to memory. The locus method was their
fundamental principle of memorization. I believe that this time-honoured
principle is, without doubt, the key to my success at six World Memory
Championships. Placing each piece of data that I had to absorb in a particular
place that I had already set aside in my mind made it easier for me to recall those
items. And through practice I became proficient.
Just as we use association all the time without noticing that we are doing so,
the same is true of location. Think about the events that happened to you over
the course of the day. What did you do? If you were to describe your day in
detail to a friend, the chances are that location would figure prominently in your
recollections: “I got up and went to the kitchen to put on some coffee, then I

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went to the bathroom and had a shower, before sitting in the kitchen and eating
my breakfast ... ” and so on. Studies show that people who have spent the day
travelling are especially accurate in recalling the sequence of events in the day.
Even details of conversations seem sharper because the dialogue is remembered
in the setting in which it took place. The various locations in which we find
ourselves while travelling serve as a linear mental framework that throws into
sharp relief our particular experiences.
Further evidence for the importance of location in the art of memory is
found in the common problem of losing our keys. We all know how frustrating it
is to be rushing in the morning to leave for an appointment only to find that we
cannot remember where we put the keys to the front door. What most of us do
(perfectly logically) to trigger the memory is retrace our steps. The last time we
came into the house we must have had the keys in our hand, and we then went
straight to the study to check our telephone messages. But the keys are not there,
so we continue to retrace our steps (literally or figuratively) into the hallway,
where we went to hang up our coat. And so we continue, until eventually we
arrive at the place where we had put down the keys and, usually, we find them
again. We do all this using the art of location.
Locus-based memory systems work because the location is fixed, so that we
can always walk ourselves mentally back through the same places to pick up the
various pieces of information that we deposited there. This system of anchoring
is an important point about location. When we use the art of location, we
position images or data (or anything else that we want to remember, such as key
points in a speech) in a tangible, fixed place in our mind, such as the image of a
house that we know well or a familiar journey. When we want to remember the
information, we retrace our steps and find that the data is still moored there,
where we left it. We will soon go on to discover specific techniques for choosing
the most effective mental locations and anchoring the data most reliably.
The journey method (pp.
102–7
) takes the location principle to its furthest
and most impressive extreme, enabling us to memorize and recall surprisingly
large quantities of data (for example, I use it to remember simultaneously the
order of randomly shuffled cards in multiple decks). Location may be an ancient
technique, but it is certainly one of the most powerful memory aids.