The medial parietal cortex is most associated with encoding and retrieving of information. Patients who suffered from medial parietal cortex damage had troubles linking landmarks with certain locations. Many of these patients were unable to give or follow directions and often got lost.
The retrosplenial cortex is also greatly linked to memory and navigation. In Pothuzien HH’s study on the effects of selective granular retrosplenial cortex lesions in rats, the researcher found that damage to the retrosplenial cortex lead to impaired spatial learning abilities. Rats with damage to this area failed to recall which areas of the maze they had already visited, rarely explored different arms of the maze, almost never recalled the maze in future trials, and took longer to reach the end of the maze, as compared to rats with a fully working retrosplenial cortex.
The mental walk originated from the idea that you can best remember things that you are familiar with. Therefore, by associating a certain object with a familiar landmark, you increase your chances of remembering that object. Since the mental walk revolves around the idea of visualizing a familiar place and associating certain ideas or items with landmarks within that familiar place, the medial parietal cortex plays a huge role in this technique. Without the ability to mentally “walk” through a familiar route, this method cannot work.
[edit]Contemporary usage
All top memorisers today use the 'method of loci' to a greater or lesser degree. Contemporary memory competition was initiated in 1991[14] and introduced to the USA in 1997. Part of the competition requires committing to memory and recalling a sequence of digits, two-digit numbers, alphabetic letters, or playing cards. In a simple method of doing this, contestants, using various strategies well before competing, commit to long-term memory a unique vivid image associated with each item. They have also committed to long-term memory a familiar route with firmly established stop-points or loci. Then in the competition they need only deposit the image that they have associated with each item at the loci. To recall, they retrace the route, "stop" at each locus, and "observe" the image. They then translate this back to the associated item. Memory champions elaborate on this by combining images. Eight-time World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien[15] advocates this technique. His name for it is The Journey Method. The 2006 World Memory Champion, Clemens Mayer from Germany, used a 300-point-long journey through his house for his world record in "number half marathon", memorising 1040 random digits in a half hour. One individual has used the method of loci to memorise pi to 65,536 digits.[16]
Using this technique a person with ordinary memorization capabilities, after establishing the route stop-points and committing the associated images to long-term memory, with less than an hour of practice, can remember the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards. The world record for this is held by Simon Reinhard at 21.19 seconds[17]
The technique is taught as a metacognitive technique in learning to learn courses. It is generally applied to encoding the key ideas of a subject. Two approaches are:
- Link the key ideas of a subject and then deep-learn those key ideas in relation to each other, and;
- Think through the key ideas of a subject in depth, re-arrange the ideas in relation to an argument, then link the ideas to loci in good order.
It has been found that teaching such techniques as pure memorization methods often leads students towards surface learning only. Therefore, it has been recommended that the method of loci should be integrated thoroughly with deeper learning approaches.
Mark Sadler, author of “The Secret of Rapid Learning” (2007) believes references to “deeper learning approaches” are without clear meaning, therefore unscientific, and probably a reflection of continuing opposition to efficient and deliberate learning.
This opposition should be put in historical and present context. In a paper in the American Journal of Psychology (1957) Irvin Rock challenged the then view that learning resulted from the gradual strengthening of memory traces by means of “repetition”. He claimed, as a result of his experiments, that “associations are formed in one trial, and improvement with repetition is only an artefact of work with long lists of items” (in other words, instead of there being a gradual strengthening of all connections, with inefficient methods, some items are connected at a first run through, more at a second, and so on).
Readers of psychology journals of that time will know that Rock’s paper led to furious debate for some years. In some universities experiments with memory drums and nonsense syllables continued, the aim being to measure “the number of repetitions required for learning”.
At the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1956, Mark Sadler, then a young graduate, did experiments on one-trial learning with 32 student volunteers using, not nonsense syllables, but non-abstract nouns, one written on each “learning card”. Before the experiment, one psychology lecturer, Mr R. L. Reid said “You might be able to do one-trial learning, but nobody else can”.
In fact, Sadler’s experiments showed that, without any pre-learning of “places” or “loci”, and by the use of imagined placings in real or imagined places, most people can master one-trial leaning in less than an hour. Few do it correctly at the first attempt, but most can be guided to alter mistaken approaches and to discover for themselves the mental trick of it.
These experiments whereby a new graduate challenged the beliefs of established lecturers aroused, not approval, but hostility and a reluctance to publish any account of the experiments. Students using the one-trial method learned more than twice as fast as those using other methods, and a statistical calculation indicated that the likelihood that the results were due to chance was less than one in a thousand. Nevertheless, one lecturer, Dr Harry Scott said, “I would rather believe in that one chance in a thousand than believe there is anything in your ideas or experiments”.
In 2011, Sadler again attempted to get his 1956 paper on his experiments published since, for instance, the New Zealand Education Department continues to refer to deliberate learning as “rote” or repetition learning. Dr John Fitzgerald, editor of the New Zealand Journal of Psychology, rejected this fresh attempt at publication, saying he “does not see how subjective experiment conducted more than 50 years ago will advance our understanding”.
How can objective and large differences in learning times, between those using one-trial learning and those using other methods, such as “making up stories”, or just trying to remember in various ways, be dismissed as “subjective”?
In contrast to the approach of the New Zealand Education Department, which opposes deliberate learning, Sadler believes there are advantages in students remembering as much as possible. Commenting on this in rejecting publication of the 1956 paper, Dr Fitzgerald commented (4 August 2011): “Our socio-cultural and educational environments have changed so dramatically during the intervening years that the experiments have little social-education relevance”.
In other words, challenges to the current disapproval of deliberate learning should not be published.
Back in 1956, one psychology lecturer said of the one-trial learning method: “This is based on visual images”, Sadler replied: “It is not based on visual images. To prove it, I will teach the method to a person blind from birth!” This, with the cooperation of the local Institute for the Blind, he succeeded in doing.
This experiment seems to indicate that the learning method is based on the mind’s ability to remember spatial journeys and learned shapes of objects rather than on visual images.
The method should be attempted with the aid of learning cards – one noun to a card – until the ability to rapidly achieve 100% recall after going through the pack of cards once has been mastered. (Although one goes through the cards just once, each connection requires the learner to do two things. Doing this consistently requires sustained attention and concentration. The need for the “two things” explains why, as Sadler says in the Introduction to his book, “The secret of convenient and efficient learning is hidden within the Ancient Greek ‘method of loci’, rather than revealed by it”.)
Once the basic method has been mastered with the aid of nouns on cards, the method can then be applied to learning poetry or prose passages with some reduction in accuracy. In December 1955, prior to the 1956 experiment with student volunteers, Sadler learned a 1,000 word passage (never previously read) in 51 minutes 33 seconds. The whole 1,000 words was then recited from memory in 11 min 42 seconds. Overall accuracy was 96%, counting synonyms as errors, or 99% neglecting synonyms. (By comparison, Lyons, described by Robert S. Woodworth as “a very skilled and practised learner”, gives his time to learn 1,000 words as 2 hours 43 minutes).
To achieve such accuracy, even with rather abstract material, 1,000 words is roughly divided into lots of about 100 words. One then learns 100 words going through them slowly once, recites from memory, learns the next 100 words, recites, and so on. Finally, one recites the whole 1,000 words. One may learn things for personal interest or enjoyment, eg jokes or poems, or to pass exams, eg chemistry notes, or the vocabulary of a foreign language. Note that among the 1956 student volunteers, two, a young man and a young woman, proved to be able to learn considerably faster than Sadler. This shows that the above learning time was based on the method, and not on any exceptional personal ability.
Of the method, one student protested, “But, by this method of learning there are no associations!”. To this the reply was: “By this method of learning there don’t have to be any associations. Just do it!!”. This contrasts with the learning instruction given by Ed Cook to Joshua Foer (“Moonwalking with Einstein”, p.99): “The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know. It is important to deeply process that image”.
Like other writers of books on mnemonics, eg “The Memory Book”, by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas, Joshua talks of “elaborate, engaging, vivid images”. To connect “pickled garlic” to “cottage cheese” one is supposed to imagine the smell of pickled garlic and thus create “a complete multisensorial picture of picked garlic”. This is followed by “I want you to close your eyes and see an enormous wading pool size tub of cottage cheese”. For some unclear purpose one is then asked to “imagine Claudia Schiffer swimming in this tub of cottage cheese”. On page 100, Ad Herennium is quoted as saying of images “the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better”.
In comparison with the simple quick method advocated in Sadler’s book, all this is extraordinary. Perhaps imagining a woman swimming in cottage cheese helps in long-term retention, but the alternative view is that a scientific approach to preventing forgetting by spaced recalls is more generally effective. Indeed, most books on mnemonics advocate time wasting elaborations because of an imperfect understanding of one-trial spatial learning. In the pursuit of coherent simplicity, even Sadler’s book is deficient, perhaps, in not stressing the need to quickly imagine the shapes of objects being linked together.
A recent variation of the "method of loci" involves creating imaginary locations (houses, palaces, roads and cities) to which the same procedure is applied. It is accepted that there is a greater cost involved in the initial setup, but thereafter the performance is in line with the standard loci method. The purported advantage is to create towns and cities that each represent a topic or an area of study, thus offering an efficient filing of the information and an easy path for the regular review necessary for long term memory storage.[18]
Something that is likely a reference to the "method of loci" techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases "in the first place", "in the second place", and so forth.[19]
[edit]In popular culture
In popular culture, the technique is employed by the fictional serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal (1999) the third of a series of novels by American author Thomas Harris. In several passages in the book, Dr. Lecter is described as mentally walking through an elaborate memory palace to remember facts.[20]
In the 1981 fantasy classic Little, Big by John Crowley, an advisor-mage Ariel Hawksquill uses the method to link obscure information to aid her clients, and notes that:
"...the greatest practitioners of the old art discovered some odd things about their memory houses the longer they lived in them ... it was discovered, for instance, that the symbolic figures with vivid expressions, once installed in their proper places, are subject to subtle change as they stand waiting to be called forth... also, as the memory house grows, it makes conjunctions and vistas that its builder can't conceive of beforehand..."
The technique was depicted in the BBC series 'Sherlock' in "The Hounds of Baskerville", where Holmes uses his "mind palace" to seek important facts and associations in his memory relevant to the case.[citation needed]
The memory palace concept is also used in several episodes of the TV series The Mentalist by the titular mentalist Patrick Jane to help collegues and witnesses remember things such as playing card locations in a deck or information and names of guests at a party.
[edit]Example of usage of the method of loci/mental walk
Constitutional Court chief Mahfud MD speaks at a seminar in Jakarta on Thursday, where he called on President Yudhoyono to explain why he gave Australia "marijuana queen" Schapelle Corby five years clemency. (Antara Photo)
