Introduction to Psychology & Neuroscience – Simple Book Publishing

created songlines through my local landscape, stories in the skyscape, a totem pole and an array of handheld decorated objects. I experimented with them all. I am now totally and utterly convinced of the power of the memory spaces, both large and small. What astonishes me is that these memory skills were allowed to fade from the Western education s

This week, I’ve been researching an ancient mnemonic technique called ‘the mind palace’, where people imprint a real or imagined building onto their memory - a palace, a mansion, a church, even a whole street - and then fill it with striking images, to which they attach bits of information they want to remember.

Daniel Levitin, in his new book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, suggests that the technique works because our memory-system for images and places is older and more reliable than our memory-system for names and words.

normally memories are stored more or less at random in semantic networks, or webs of association. But you have now stored a large number of memories in a very controlled context. Because of the way spatial cognition works, all you have to do is retrace your steps through your memory palace, and hopefully at each point the images you laid down will

This is the image for story-mind, which is about the role of narrative in memory and knowledge transmission. It is the most powerful tool for memorisation, particularly when connected meaningfully to place. This is how songlines have worked in Australia for millennia to store knowledge in stories mapped in the land and reflected in the night sky.

the memory was also the very instrument that she used to design and build new mental structures from the materials she had at hand.2 In Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the memory was where monks did some of their most complex concentrating. To do that, monks learned how the memory worked—rather than treat it like a black box, as we often