What the techniques do
90 min
Two hosts talk the lesson through. The voices are synthetic; the script was written from this lesson and checked against it, and asserts nothing the lesson does not.
- Describe the method of loci and what the training study measured
- Apply the transfer distinction to a memory technique, and say which level its evidence reaches
- Say what this course can and cannot tell somebody who wants a better memory
Five lessons of things going wrong. This one is about the technique people actually ask for, and the honest verdict on it is narrower than the advertising and better than you might expect after everything that came before.
The technique
The method of loci is the oldest technique in the subject. Here it is as it is generally described, which is not something the abstract this course read sets out.3 You take a route you know well, a walk through your house or a street you have lived on, and you place the things you want to remember at points along it. To recall them, you walk the route.
It is the technique the training studies are about, and the athletes the first study compared were ranked among the world's top 50 in memory sports.1 What proportion of competitors use it, and on what material, is not something this course read.
And it has been studied with a design worth looking at, which is what the next section is.
The study
Wagner and colleagues compared memory athletes with people who had never used mnemonics, and then ran a training study.1 This course has read the abstract and the participant counts, from the preprint. The published version was not located and the body was not read.
In the authors' words: "Mnemonic techniques, such as the method of loci, can powerfully boost memory. Here, we compared memory athletes ranked among the world's top 50 in memory sports to mnemonics-naïve controls. In a second study, participants completed a six-weeks memory training, working memory training, or no intervention. Behaviorally, memory training enhanced durable, longer-lasting memories."1
Three arms, about fifty people across them, with the athletes of the first study counted separately. The retest at four months comes from the preprint page's description of the design rather than from the sentences quoted above, which the research file records.1
Before the next section. Three arms: memory training, working-memory training, and no intervention. Why would a study bother with the middle one, when the comparison everybody wants is training against nothing?
Show the answer
This is Focus and Deep Work lesson 6 arriving in a new subject, and if you did that lesson the answer's already yours.2
A group that does nothing controls for almost nothing. The trained group turned up, did something for six weeks, expected to improve, got attention from researchers, and practised being tested. All of those move scores on their own, and a no-intervention group has none of them.
The working-memory arm is an active control, which is what Focus lesson 6 called a treated control condition. It takes similar time, similar effort and similar attention, and it isn't the technique under test. What survives the comparison with that arm is attributable to the technique rather than to the fact of training.
That is why this design is better than most in this area, and it is worth saying plainly after what Focus lesson 6 found: in the working-memory training literature, the entire far-transfer verdict turned on whether the control group had been given something to do.
Which is not a claim that this study settles anything. It is a claim that its design does not have the specific hole that emptied a neighbouring literature.
What the lesson will not give you
A number. The abstract this course read reports the design and the durability finding and gives no count of words recalled, before or after, by anybody.1 The numbers are in the body and the body was not opened.
That is worth pausing on, because a lesson with a figure in it reads as more useful. It'd be very easy to reach for one from a secondary source, or from the popular writing about memory athletes, and print it here. Nothing would look wrong, and that's the trouble.
And it is precisely what lessons 2 and 4 are about. A figure whose provenance nobody states is the defect this course exists to teach, and printing one here would be worse than teaching without one.
So the honest statement of the finding is: six weeks of training in the method of loci produced durable, longer-lasting memories, in a three-arm study of about fifty people across the arms, retested at four months. Which arm the effect was measured against is in the body, and the body was not opened.1
Worked: five things on a route
This demonstration is constructed, and the route and the items are invented.2 The point of it is that you should not meet the transfer question without having seen the technique do anything.
The route. The front door. The hall table. The bottom stair. The bathroom sink. The bedroom window. Five points, in the order you would walk them, in a place somebody knows without thinking.
The list. Five things to buy: bleach, a birthday card, batteries, bread, a bicycle pump.
The first three, placed. Bleach is poured over the front door, running down it and taking the paint off. The birthday card is on the hall table, propped open and singing. The batteries are stacked on the bottom stair, so you tread on them and they roll.
Two points left, the bathroom sink and the bedroom window, and two items, bread and a bicycle pump. Place them yourself before reading on, and notice what you do to make each one stick.
Show the answer
Whatever you wrote is better than what is written here, because you made it.
The version this lesson had in mind was a loaf of bread jammed in the sink with the tap running into it, and a bicycle pump sticking out through the bedroom window like a cannon.
Now notice the two things you did, because they are the whole technique. You put each item somewhere specific rather than thinking about it in general. And you made the picture strange, because the ordinary version of a loaf on a worktop is not distinguishable from every other time you have seen a loaf on a worktop.
The strangeness is part of the standard instruction, and nothing read for this course tests whether it helps.3 What is being claimed for the technique is not that strangeness is magic, but that ordered arbitrary items given distinct places are easier to walk back through than the same items given nothing.
Walk the route and you have the list. Front door, hall table, bottom stair, sink, window. That took two minutes to build and it is the whole of the method.
And notice what the list was. Five arbitrary items in a fixed order, which is exactly the material the next section is about.
The transfer question
Focus and Deep Work lesson 6 taught the distinction and this lesson applies it rather than re-teaching it.2
Near transfer: you get better at the thing you practised. Intermediate: you get better at something different that draws on the same system. Far: you get better at something out in your life.
Where does the method of loci sit? The shape of the answer is the lesson.
The technique works on what it works on. Ordered lists of arbitrary items, which is the research file's own description of what the technique is for rather than a list of materials anything read here tested.2 That isn't a small category and it is a specific one.
Whether it reaches the material a reader actually wants to remember is the transfer question, and this course has not answered it.2 A memory palace for a shopping list and a memory palace for the argument of a book are different propositions, and nothing read here tests the second.
What makes this different from the brain-training case in Focus lesson 6 is this course's own reading of the two claims rather than a comparison anybody has published, and it is worth stating because the two look similar and aren't.2 Brain training claims that practising a component improves the system. The method of loci claims something much weaker and much more plausible: that a particular way of encoding a particular kind of material works better than no method at all. That is a claim about a tool rather than about an organ, and it is the sort of claim training evidence can support.
After five lessons of things going wrong, is this the lesson where the course finally gives you something that works?
Show the answer
Partly, and the qualifications are the useful part.
Yes, in the sense that the technique was trained and something durable came of it. A trained group showed the durability effect after six weeks. What material the training was tested on, and which arm the effect was measured against, are both in the body and the body was not opened, so the step from the study to "the kind of list the technique is built for" is this course's and not theirs.2 That is still more design than most of this genre can show.
No, in the sense that the thing most readers want is not that. People want to remember what they read, what was said in a meeting, the names of people they met last month. The technique's evidence is about ordered arbitrary lists, and the step from one to the other is the transfer question nobody in what this course read has taken.
And there is a cost the studies do not measure, which the lesson flags as its own observation.2 Building a memory palace takes time, and using one takes attention during encoding. A technique that works and costs more than the thing it saves is a bad deal, and no study read here compares the technique against simply spending the same time rehearsing.
So the honest recommendation, and it is a recommendation: if you have ordered arbitrary material you must hold, this is the only method this course found a controlled training study for, and it is worth an afternoon to learn. If what you want is to remember what you read, this course cannot tell you whether it helps, and somebody who tells you it does is going past the evidence.
Worked: one claim, sorted
The claim is invented and the sorting is the course's own reasoning.2
"Our memory course will double what you can remember. Graduates recall lists of forty items after a single pass."
Two sentences and two different levels.
- "Recall lists of forty items after a single pass." Near transfer, on exactly the material the technique is for, and this is the level of claim the technique is for. It is the kind of material the technique is for, and it is the level of claim that tells you least. 2. "Double what you can remember." Far transfer, unqualified, and about everything. Nothing in what this course read supports it, and the first sentence is not evidence for it.
The sentence does its work by putting them next to each other, which is the same move Focus lesson 6 built into its own invented claim. Neither sentence is a lie. The claim is in the adjacency.
Three things people get wrong about this
"Memory athletes have better memories." They have a technique, and the training studies are about what that technique does to ordinary people.
"A technique that works on lists works on everything." The transfer question, unanswered here. Nothing read for this course tests the technique on anything but the material it is for, so this is not a claim the course can support or refute.
"Mnemonics are a trick rather than a skill." Six weeks of training, and a retest at four months. Whatever else it is, it's learned.
Practice
Take 40 minutes, then 5 minutes a week later.
Pick a route you know without thinking. Your home, a walk you do often, the layout of a building you have worked in. Fix ten points along it, in order, and say them out loud until the order's automatic.
Then take ten arbitrary things you actually need: a shopping list, ten countries, ten dates, ten names from a team you are joining.
Place one at each point, as vividly and as strangely as you can manage. The strangeness is part of the standard instruction for this technique, and nothing read for this course tests whether it helps.3
Then walk the route in your head and write down what you find. Count how many you get.
A week later, without revisiting it, walk it again and count again. Write down both numbers.
You won't learn from this whether the technique works, because one person doing it once is the thing this course spends six lessons explaining. What you'll learn is what it costs, which is the part the studies do not report and the part that decides whether you'll use it.
Take 20 minutes.
Find something being sold on the promise of a better memory: an app, a course, a book, a training programme.
Write down four things.
- The claim, word for word.
- The level it claims: near, intermediate or far.
- The level its evidence reaches, if it names any evidence at all.
- Whether there was a control group, and whether that group did anything.
Then one line: which of the four did the source give you?
If a claim names no evidence, that isn't proof it's false. It's a claim nobody can check, and lesson 7 is about what to do with those.
Connections
Back. Lesson 3 is the nearest thing this course has to an account of why a technique like this might help at all, and nothing read here tests that connection. Focus and Deep Work lesson 6 supplies the transfer distinction and the active-control argument, both used here and neither re- taught. How to Learn Anything lesson 2's chunking is the nearest relative of what a memory palace does to a list.
Forward. Lesson 7 is what stays useful when every figure in this course has dated, and the sorting exercise above is its rehearsal.
Go deeper
- Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci (preprint). Read in part by this course: the abstract and the participant counts. The body was not read and the published version was not located. Read the abstract for the design, which is the thing worth taking from it.
- Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of "Far Transfer" (Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2016). Focus and Deep Work lesson 6's subject, whose abstract that course read verbatim. Read it beside this lesson: it is the case where a training literature's far-transfer claim collapsed, and the contrast is what makes this study's design worth noticing.
Sources
- Isabella C. Wagner and colleagues, "Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci", preprint. Read in part: the abstract verbatim and the participant counts. The published version was not located and the body was not read, and the body of this lesson says so twice. Supports: the quoted abstract passage; the comparison of memory athletes ranked among the world's top 50 with mnemonics-naive controls; the three-arm training design with its six weeks; the behavioural retest at four months; and the total of about fifty people.
- The transfer distinction is Focus and Deep Work lesson 6's and is used here rather than re-derived; that lesson holds its own source, and the active-control argument in the predict block is that lesson's too. The argument that the method of loci makes a weaker and more plausible claim than brain training does is this course's own reasoning, said as such at the head of the paragraph where it appears. So is the step from what the training study measured to "the kind of list the technique is built for", which the checkpoint labels, and so is the phrase "ordered lists of arbitrary items", which is the research file's own description rather than a material any source here tested. The observation that no study read here compares the technique against spending the same time rehearsing is also the course's own, marked in the checkpoint. The invented claim in the worked case is labelled as invented where it appears, and the sorting of its two sentences is the course's reasoning rather than a reported analysis.
- The description of the method of loci itself, and the standard instruction to make the images strange, is the technique as it is generally described. The abstract this course read names the technique and does not describe it, so neither the walk-the-route description nor the strangeness instruction comes from anything read here, and the body says so at both places. No source read for this course tests whether strangeness helps.
Check your understanding
This lesson has a 6-question quiz. Pass it and the questions come back on a schedule in Review, so what you learned stays learned. Your progress is saved in your browser; no account needed.