Memory Palace Essay

300 Words2 Pages
Your daily task Discovering lost memories The nature of memory means that we can easily get stuck in repetitive habits of recall. This means we often have difficulty thinking beyond a small subset of our memories. However, it is possible to exploit the spatial organisation of our long-term minds to unlock memories that haven’t been visited in years, which can be a thrilling experience. Here’s how: 1 Think of a familiar place that you haven’t visited for a long time. It could be a house that you once lived in, a holiday home, a school or even a whole city. 2 In the space below, draw a rough aerial plan of the place you are mentally revisiting. If it’s a house, you might want to do this for each floor. Your map doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to give a rough overview of the various buildings or rooms. 3 Once you have drawn your map, rack your brains for everything you can think of that has happened at that location. Put a cross at all of the points where an event took place. You should find a smattering of crosses are clustered in various places across your map. These first crosses will probably represent relatively well-practiced memories. 4 Now look at where there are gaps on your diagram, where there are no memories that jump immediately to mind. Imagine yourself standing at that point in space and looking around the area. Hold yourself there, ears pricked for the distant squeak of a buried memory. With a little luck, by searching around these neglected “spaces” in your mind, you should be able to stumble upon something that you haven’t touched in ages. Such memories are often unusually emotional. Draw
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