Sunday, January 31, 2010

The answer to my memory

Quite a few of the people I've interacted with throughout my life have nicknamed me a lot of things. The ones relating to the topic of this piece is "The Master of unnecessary information", "The human encyclopedia" and so on. While I have from childhood been blessed with a very good memory it didn't get to where it is today by accident, it did so with a technique called a "memory palace".

What the memory palace does is that it lets me associate certain locations with things I need to remember. This location can be anything that you want, in my case its my grandmother's house. I have her house completely committed to my memory and as I imagine myself walking through it, I have made certain things into "reminders" of things. Each room of her house represents a different kind of knowledge. If I walk into the kitchen there is a white sink with a blue rubber covering around the edge. There is the door to the bedroom with red and blue trimmings. The kitchen table with te narrow bench around it. The flower pot at teh center of the table, the clock on the wall. The microwave on top of a cabinet section, the first drawer holding her rarely used kitchen utensils. Under that a larger cabinet for her biggest pots and pans.

While I'm not going to describe my entire memory palace the sections I've explained so far will serve to illustrate the technique. The sink lets me remember that most household bacteria will die at temperatures between 70 and 100 degrees Celsius. The red and blue door reminds me of the signing of the Norwegian constitution at Eidsvoll in 1814. The Microwave oven reminds me that microwaves are short electrical waves with a length ranging from a few millimeters to a meter.So it goes on from item to item from room to room.

The book "Natt og Tåke" written by Trygve Bratteli about his time spent as a prisoner in concentration camps during WW2, is a reminder of that Natzweiler Strufhof was a concentration camp for NN prisoners, about 50km from Strasbourg.

All the different objects represents something I need to remember.

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