The Mind Palace Project: How To Enhance Your Cognitive Abilities

What is a mind palace — and how do you use it?

In this art­icle, I’ll share my learn­ings and insights from con­struct­ing a mind palace for myself.

A mind palace is a men­tal con­struct of a meta­phys­ic­al build­ing with dif­fer­ent ima­gin­ary “rooms.”

By adding a dimen­sion of phys­ic­al­ity to your mind, the idea is that you’ll be able to use your mind palace not only for mem­or­isa­tion but also to con­trol your emo­tions and enhance your cog­nit­ive abilities.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

My Interest in Mind Palaces

Do you know those pop cul­ture moments that stick — and stay with you? Here are a few such examples from my mind:

For me, such a sem­in­al moment is from Sherlock, the British TV show star­ring Benedict Cumberbatch:

In the series, Sherlock Holmes and the vil­lain Charles Augustus use a memory tech­nique called the mind palace to com­mit inform­a­tion to memory. ¹The tele­vi­sion series Hannibal, star­ring Mads Mikkelsen as the geni­us psy­cho­path with a pecu­li­ar taste for human flesh, also men­tioned a mind palace. Weird eat­ing habits and, more import­antly, … Continue read­ing

The idea of hav­ing a mind palace appealed to me.

Is the mind palace a prop­er tech­nique that one can use?
And if so, how does it work?

The Method of Loci

As it turns out, a mind palace (or memory palace) isn’t just a tele­vi­sion trope. 

The mind palace is a mne­mon­ic meth­od used by ancient Greek and Roman schol­ars to com­mit large chunks of inform­a­tion to memory called the meth­od of loci (loci = Latin for location).

The prac­tice is straightforward:

Let’s say you want to mem­or­ise a deck of 52 cards. For this, you could think of a house with 13 (52 divided by 4) dif­fer­ent rooms, rooms you pass through in a pre-decided order. 

The first room is a hall­way with a large antique mirror. 

When you read the first card, let’s say an ace of hearts, you men­tally attach the card to the mir­ror — and then you move on to the next room in your sequence.

You place 13 cards in 13 rooms attached to 13 dif­fer­ent pieces of fur­niture. Then you take the same route three more times, secur­ing a new card for anoth­er piece of fur­niture in each room. 

Every room will now con­tain four pieces of fur­niture with one unique card attached.

The ground­work here is to con­struct such a “palace” in your mind before­hand. This means you won’t have to remem­ber rooms or fur­niture pieces. Or their order.

When you test how many of the 52 cards you remem­ber, you enter the first room (the hall­way), look at the first piece of fur­niture (the antique mir­ror), and see — the ace of hearts.

Some indi­vidu­als can take brute force mem­or­isa­tion to almost unbe­liev­able levels:

Amongst many oth­er things, the sav­ant Daniel Tammet is fam­ous for mem­or­ising 22,514 digits of pi in just about five hours. Tammet has described how he exper­i­ences dif­fer­ent num­bers in highly dis­tinct­ive col­ours, char­ac­ter­ist­ics, shapes etc.

It’s impress­ive. But I’m not look­ing to learn par­lour tricks.
What else is there?

Our Brain’s Built-In GPS System

In 2014, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awar­ded to John O’Keefe from University College London, May-Britt Moser, and Edvard Moser from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. 

Scientists found that cells in our brain con­sti­tute a pos­i­tion­ing sys­tem. The research­ers found:

“… cer­tain neur­ons in the hip­po­cam­pus fired whenev­er a rat was in a cer­tain place in the loc­al envir­on­ment, with neigh­bour­ing neur­ons fir­ing at dif­fer­ent loc­a­tions, such that the entire envir­on­ment was rep­res­en­ted by the activ­ity of these cells through­out the hippocampus.”

Assigning memory neur­ons to fire at spe­cif­ic loc­a­tions is a clev­er way to con­serve men­tal energy. 

The mind palace tech­nique makes good use of this brain fea­ture; by assign­ing an ima­gin­ary (enhanced with oth­er sens­ory inform­a­tion like the smell, sounds, tem­per­at­ure, light­ing con­di­tions, etc.) to a spe­cif­ic memory, recall becomes more accessible.

Mind Palaces in the Media

Here are a few examples of the memory palace or sim­il­ar con­cepts being ref­er­enced in vari­ous forms of media:

Mind Places in Literature

Several examples of the memory palace concept or sim­il­ar ideas appear in the lit­er­at­ure. Some not­able examples include:

These examples from lit­er­at­ure illus­trate how the memory palace concept has been explored in vari­ous ways, both as a his­tor­ic­al prac­tice and as a nar­rat­ive device to explore the power and lim­its of human memory.

Altering Your Emotional States

In an online memory for­um, I found ongo­ing dis­cus­sions of what oth­er uses there could be for hav­ing a mind palace:

One for­um mem­ber used a mind palace to lower the heart rate before a nerve-wrack­ing speech.

One for­um mem­ber used a mind palace to sleep instead of count­ing sheep.

One for­um mem­ber used a mind palace to pre­pare for meditation.

One for­um mem­ber used a mind palace to increase focus in dis­tract­ing environments.

One for­um mem­ber used a mind palace to rein­force pos­it­ive memor­ies to com­bat depres­sion and increase confidence.

Ergo: Some people have been using their mind palaces to alter or con­trol their emo­tion­al states — with pos­it­ive results. 

To me, this sounds inter­est­ing and poten­tially useful. 

Would it be pos­sible to use a mind palace to improve cog­nit­ive con­trol instead of prac­tising raw mem­or­isa­tion techniques?

Techniques To Enhance Cognitive Abilities

A few years ago, I came across the cre­ativ­ity research­er Win Wenger.

Wenger’s primary hypo­thes­is was out­land­ish yet freak­ishly fantastic: 

Since our sub­con­scious speaks to us visu­ally and not verbally, we can enhance our cog­nit­ive per­form­ance by rein­for­cing our inner image stream.

Here’s an inter­est­ing use case:

Imagine your­self sit­ting in a room with people that you look up to. I could be Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Stephen King. Discuss with them, and ask them ques­tions. Visualise them as they speak.

Soon, your “avatar friends” might start to sur­prise you, con­tra­dict you, or even chal­lenge you. Despite that, their words come from some­where with­in your­self, of course.

From this example, we could ima­gine build­ing a mind palace with sev­er­al rooms filled with dif­fer­ent types of valu­able experts with one sin­gu­lar trait in com­mon — they’re not you, even though they are.

The prac­tice could bring the power of visu­al­isa­tion and loc­a­tion togeth­er, sug­gest­ing a power­ful combination. 

We could start see­ing a “room” in a mind palace as a sep­ar­ate cog­nit­ive tool for pur­poses oth­er than just com­mit­ting inform­a­tion strings to memory.

Mind Palace “Room” Examples

Of course, you can have rooms you like in your mind palace. Here are a few examples of rooms that I fre­quently use:

Building a Mind Palace in Minecraft

For me, con­struct­ing the mind palace has been some­what chal­len­ging. It requires focus and con­cen­tra­tion for long peri­ods. And life tends to get in the way.

Building a rep­lica of my mind palace in Minecraft is help­ing rein­force my memor­ies of its layout.

As with Lego, I nev­er for­get a build. By build­ing the mind palace in Minecraft, I’ve rein­forced the meta­struc­ture in my mind.

This Minecraft trick has giv­en my men­tal struc­ture a form of sta­bil­ity. ² I’m look­ing for­ward to VR and AR soft­ware ded­ic­ated to the use cases. I wouldn’t mind hav­ing Metaverse mind palace!

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