Concept
Brain attic
Sherlock Holmes thinks of his memory as a small attic that holds only useful things, neatly sorted.
- 1
Lay out the route
Take a route you know, such as your home, and lay it out place by place: front door, hallway, kitchen, living room. The order is your route.
Lay out the route
Take a route you know, such as your home, and lay it out place by place: front door, hallway, kitchen, living room. The order is your route.
- 2
Place a memory image
One tap on the picture sets a marker. It holds what you want to remember and the image for it. “Generate AI image” puts it right into the place: a seer at your front door.
Place a memory image
One tap on the picture sets a marker. It holds what you want to remember and the image for it. “Generate AI image” puts it right into the place: a seer at your front door.
- 3
Walk it in your head
The walkthrough takes you back place by place. You look for the marker, reveal it and say honestly whether you still knew it.
Walk it in your head
The walkthrough takes you back place by place. You look for the marker, reveal it and say honestly whether you still knew it.
Picture your memory as an attic. If you throw everything in there, you won't find anything anymore. But if you put every item in a fixed spot, you can grab it right away. That is exactly how Sherlock Holmes thinks about what he knows.
Arthur Conan Doyle had Holmes appear for the first time in 1887 in the novel “A Study in Scarlet”. Already in the second chapter, Dr. Watson is amazed: Holmes doesn't know that the Earth goes around the Sun. Holmes dryly replies that now that he knows, he will do his best to forget it again. He says the brain starts out “like a little empty attic”, which you should only fill with useful things.
Luckily, space in your head isn't quite that tight, Holmes got that wrong. But order really does help: knowledge with a fixed spot is easier to find again. Memory champions do exactly that, they hang everything on places they know well.
Toward the end of the introduction to the Memory Palace, Mnemorya tells you exactly this story under “Did you know?”: how Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes sorts his knowledge in a brain attic. And that the Sherlock from the BBC series goes into his “Mind Palace”, his memory palace, in the episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” (2012).
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
In this first Sherlock Holmes novel, Holmes explains why he treats his memory like a small, tidy attic.
A Study in Scarlet. Ward, Lock & Co. (Beeton's Christmas Annual).
Memory champions don't have different brains and aren't smarter than others; almost all of them use the same trick, which is placing things at locations in their mind.
Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95.
doi.org/10.1038/nn988
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
