If you can’t remember where you left your keys or you’re constantly misplacing your phone, you might want to sit up and listen. The ancient Greeks were the first realise this, but a recent study has proved that your brain has an untapped memory reserve that’s just waiting to be filled.
If you’d like to rival Sherlock Holmes in brain power, consider cultivating what’s called a ‘memory palace’. The technique requires you to create vivid images of the things you’d like to recall later and then placing them in a familiar setting, say your home.
A new study30087-9){href='http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30087-9' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer'} revealed that people using this method more than double the number of words they could retain over a period of time and that after 40 days of training their brain activity increased. For some, their mental power mirrored that of memory champions in wiring. Not bad, right?
The first step to creating a memory palace is to choose a setting you know well, like your workplace. Then, mentally plan a route, say front door, hallway, bedroom. Then, as if you were writing a shopping list catalogue the things you’d like to remember and then item, by item, create a mental image of them. Next, place those images in the way of your route that you take around your memory palace. Now, take a mental stroll around until you remember where you placed every object and voila, you’ll never lose your phone again!
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.