Four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis and psychological scientist Julia Shaw explain how to use the memory palace technique to boost your memory skills
1. Start with strong images
Let’s start with a fairly simple memorisation task: the seven wonders of the world. To memorise these, Dellis recommends starting by turning each one of those items into an easily-remembered image. Some will be more obvious. For the Great Wall of China, for example, you might just want to imagine a wall. For Petra, you might instead go for an image of your own pet.
"Using juicy mental images like these is extremely effective. What you want to do is create big, multi-sensory memories," explains Julia Shaw, a psychological scientist at University College London and the author of The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. You want to aim for mental images that you can almost feel, smell and see, to make them as real as possible.
Let’s start with a fairly simple memorisation task: the seven wonders of the world. To memorise these, Dellis recommends starting by turning each one of those items into an easily-remembered image. Some will be more obvious. For the Great Wall of China, for example, you might just want to imagine a wall. For Petra, you might instead go for an image of your own pet.
"Using juicy mental images like these is extremely effective. What you want to do is create big, multi-sensory memories," explains Julia Shaw, a psychological scientist at University College London and the author of The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Science of False Memory. You want to aim for mental images that you can almost feel, smell and see, to make them as real as possible.
