Method of loci The Method of Loci (plural of Latin locus for place or location), also called the memory palace , is a mnemonic device introduced in ancient Roman and Greek rhetorical treatises (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium , Cicero 's De Oratore , and Quintilian 's Institutio oratoria ). The items to be remembered in this mnemonic system are mentally associated with specific physical locations. [ 1 ] It relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish, order and recollect memorial content. The term is most often found in specialised works on psychology , neurobiology and memory , though it was used in the same general way at least as early as the first half of the nineteenth century in works on rhetoric , logic and philosophy . [ 2 ] Description [ edit ] O'Keefe and Nadel refer to 'the method of loci', an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and described by Yates (1966) in her book The Art of Memory as well as by Luria (1969). Contemporary usage [ edit ]
The ancient arts of memory improvement | Darren Bridger posted on Saturday, April, 10th, 2010 10:30 am “The main course was just being served in the massive, ancient Greek hall when the expansive ceiling collapsed, crushing every one of the many guests in their seats. Not a single attendee survived, except for the poet Simonides, who had left the room just before the tragedy. The grim story above was recounted in a book on learning and memory by the Roman rhetorician Cicero four hundred years later. Basically, the memory tricks of the ancients involve harnessing the power of your imagination in order to remember things. In a sense, this technique is using your whole brain: the structured left side, and the imaginative, novel and spatial right side. Let’s see what specific tricks the ancients devised based on this idea. The Greeks The Greeks worshiped memory. The link system The link system is very simple and is best used to memorise short lists of items, such as a shopping list. Let’s take an example. The Romans The room system
Remember your words | Mental Athlete This article was originally printed in Issue 400 (July/August 2012) of the Australian Mensa magazine, TableAus. A friend of mine made a trip to New Caledonia. He had been a student of French for some time and was eager to test his skills in a ‘live’ setting. “My friend,” whispered a local at the next table across. Learning a foreign is as intimidating a challenge as it is exciting. Some people can. The link method As with any effective memory technique, the key to the link method is to create creative mental images and organize them in a way that allows us to easily recall them later. What this means is that we need to come up with an image that sounds like the word in question, and link it in an imaginative way to its meaning. Perhaps we want to remember the word ‘por’, which in Spanish means through. The Spanish word for cap, which is ‘gore’, might be remembered by creating an image of an Angora goat gore-ing two holes in a baseball cap for its horns. The language town Like this:
Mental Athlete | Stories from a mnemonist