The Memory Palace - How to Remember

Photographic memory doesn’t exist, but the closest thing that might correspond to our perception of a photographic memory is Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM). According to an article by Alexander McNamara, that includes fewer than 100 people in the world as of 2021. That’s less than 0.00125%.

Picture Marlin, Nemo and Dory from Finding Nemo with tiaras beatboxing at the bottom of our school’s BPR entrance, outside the gate, waiting for their ubers. Visualise the music, the smell of seawater, and their shiny tiaras.

In our modern society, it’s hard to remember things. 

Think about it. We have so much information shoved in our faces on a daily basis that we barely seem to be able to hold on to any of it. If I asked you what you ate two days ago, or hell even yesterday, chances are you don’t recall. Or after scrolling through reels, could you describe more than five clips you’ve just watched? 

An average person receives around 74GB of information everyday, equivalent to sixteen movies per day. Sixteen! I couldn’t get past sixteen movies on a plane even if I wanted to!

Life would be so much simpler if anyone could remember anything they wanted, especially being a student in secondary school. We’ve all lived that moment where we completely forgot we had a test, only to find ourselves feverishly flipping through our books ten minutes before the bell rings. The older you get, the more you’re expected to know and recall.

Now, what if I told you there was a way to remember?

First of all, let me introduce you to the World Memory Championships (Yes, that’s an actual competition!). Founded in 1991, the amateur sport has since then been adopted worldwide as the basis for competitive memory competitions. 

Every year, about 30 countries participate in the sport in hopes of becoming the next World Memory Champion. In order to choose their players, each delegation themselves hosts a competition, including Hong Kong. 

Conducted over the course of 2-3 days, the championship has around 10 disciples such as the binary numbers disciple, random names disciple, etc.  Let’s take the binary numbers disciple: imagine a bunch of people memorising hundreds of decimal numbers for a limited number of times, then spewing out as many as they can. For reference, the current world record is 1,168 decimal numbers in fifteen minutes by Wei Qinru. 

That seems insane right? And yet, surprisingly, these people are no different from us. 

A study from UCL shows that the champions don’t possess a superhuman brain, nor were they intellectually gifted. However, the research observed an interesting and telling difference between the memory champions and regular subjects. Upon consulting MRI machines on their brains, the scientists realised that when the subjects were memorising, they were accessing the spatial and navigation part of the brain. Why is that?

These memory champions mostly use a technique known as the loci method, also known as the memory palace method. This mnemic strategy focuses on the ability to remember visual information by associating elements with specific locations in a familiar mental place.  In order to illustrate this, let me ask you a question. 

Without scrolling back up to the top of the page, can you remember the information in the very first paragraph in italics? What about the name of the journalist, or the statistic? 

What about the second paragraph? Who is waiting at our school entrance, and what are they doing?

Chances are you remember the second piece of information better than the first. That’s because you associated the pieces of information to a visual character you remember watching as a kid. And having them beatboxing in tiaras? You certainly don’t see that everyday. If you visualised the image clearly, the next time you think of the school entrance, you will see this.

Now, the key is to associate these elements to information you desire to remember. For me, Marlin, Nemo and Dory make me think of my memory. Tiaras are for princesses, who belong in a palace. There you go: memory palace!

The Memory Palace method consists of placing these random humorous scenes at distinct spots in familiar places, like your home or school. Memory champions train themselves to associate certain images to words or numbers, then place them in familiar settings. The more you get familiar with the images, the closer you get to creating a new language. 

So next time you have a shopping list, just remember Kevin Bacon playing footsie with Brie Larson and you won’t forget a thing.

Sources: 

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2272135-did-you-know-fewer-than-100-people-have-a-photographic-memory/#:~:text=Did%20you%20know?,Health

https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/attention-spans

https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00023#:~:text=Scientists%20have%20measured%20the%20amount,billboards%2C%20and%20many%20other%20gadgets.

World Memory Championship Rulebook

Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer YouTube · TED 11 May 2012 

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, 2011. 

The Art of Making Coffee

It lands in soft sprinkles, like sand down an hourglass. A little mountain of brown powder begins to rear its head above the rim as I methodically add spoonful after spoonful of coffee into the holding cup. A firm tap of my spoon soon flattens the mountain, and again, little sprinkles are added until the basket is filled to the brim. 

I grind the lid of the coffee tin against the top of the cup, until the crowning layer is as smooth as sunbrowned skin. I screw the handle into the coffee machine in a practised gesture, and wait for the machine to give me the OK. 

Ding. Green light. I dash and press start - the longer I wait, the worse the coffee will be - and a rich waterfall of goodness begins to stream into the little espresso cup, the porcelain handle poised like a hand on a hip. Click. The buzzing comes to a stop as I inhale the strong, inviting smell of the coffee. I gaze happily at the long awaited treat, aware that while the caramel coloured top may seem like cream and sugar, underneath hides a black, acrid tasting liquid that will need to be washed down with something sweet. Chocolate or nuts, preferably. 

Of course, not everyone likes this type of shot like coffee - these days, we can get our caffeine from Pacific Coffee and Starbucks without torturing our palates with bitterness. Despite its taste, drinking coffee in this form is something I do almost every day. This may or may not be because I am addicted to caffeine. But more to the point, I like espresso because it makes me feel more Italian. 

In a school full of multilingual kids with multinational backgrounds, I’m sure everyone can relate to the feeling of not really belonging anywhere. Hong Kong may be where we live, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s home to all of us. Foreigners are accepted here - they even play a significant role in beauty standards - but no matter how long they reside here, they will never be true Hong Kongers. 

One big factor to this is simply because many expats never learn the language, given that a colonial history has led to much of Hong Kong adopting English as a third language. After all, why would we need Cantonese or Mandarin, when all the street signs have English translations and the MTR trills to us in English? Therefore, we grow up in a sort of expat bubble, never exposed to the real culture that surrounds us, except in heated exchanges with enraged bus drivers and the occasional cup noodle (that last one’s a lie, we all love Hong Kong food.) 

And yet ‘home’, wherever that may be, doesn’t necessarily accept us either. Especially when it comes to people of multiple ethnicities. Many will be familiar with the backhanded compliments, the not-so subtle jokes, and the borderline racism that awaits them back in their home countries. All of us have felt ashamed at some point at our incomplete grasp of our native language or our ignorance of the local culture. 

All this isn’t to say that a multinational, multilingual background and an expat lifestyle don’t come with substantial benefits. After all, we live highly privileged lives: we have access to many places and resources that most don’t, many of us travel, we get to experience a lot more than the average person and speaking multiple languages makes us more attractive to future employers. 

But in the end, the price for this international background is that we will always be, somewhat, set apart. Sometimes, it doesn’t even come down to others excluding or making fun of you. Sometimes you may be having a grand time wherever you live (your home country, Hong Kong, etc) but keep having that lingering thought, in the back of your mind, that you have known other landscapes, other temperatures, other cuisines and other people, and that you miss them. Sometimes you can’t help but be lonely with your countrymen, no matter how accepting they may be, because while they have only really known one world and one way of being, you have seen and experienced several. Is this a bad thing? It does give us a larger world perspective, but it may also lead us to being perpetually dissatisfied. After all, unless you hit the jack-pot and truly prefer one country above all others, you will always be dreaming of that other life. 

But we won’t be alone in these feelings for much longer. If the world continues to go in a globalised direction (rather than going back to the small minded nationalism of the past), it is inevitable that there will be more international and interracial marriages, resulting in more second and third culture kids. Hopefully, as a greater percentage of the population gains the multicultural perspective, racism and prejudice will have less ignorance and bigotry to thrive upon.

In the meantime, no one can stop us from enjoying the small pleasures of life. Whatever reminds you of you, of your roots and heritage, you should both encourage and enjoy: whether that is celebrating a particular festival, preparing certain foods, or engaging in certain customs and traditions. Or even whistling the national anthem - but do so at your own risk, because that’s still pretty weird to do by yourself. Save it for the football game. 

Back to my drink. The coffee is mellow and pleasant on my tongue. A little pool of warmth forms in my stomach as I sip, taking a second to savour it. I close my eyes and remember who I am.