Improving Our Memory Using Navigation Skills

The unofficial record for reciting digits of pi is held by a Japanese engineer, Akira Haraguchi, who memorized a whopping 100,000 digits of the constant.

Haraguchi’s record was filmed east of Tokyo in 2006, where he continued to recite numbers for sixteen hours straight, taking only five-minute breaks every two hours. When asked for his tips on memorizing things, Haraguchi said he uses a system to encode the numbers into symbols, and then uses those symbols to create stories that are easy to remember.

People wield all sorts of mnemonic devices to remember things – like this silly sentence from geography class: “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles” which, however silly, continues to help kids memorize the names of the planets in our solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Moonwalking down memory lane

It’s not just Haraguchi – many competitive memory champions have developed their techniques based on an ancient mnemonic device that leverages our brain’s natural spatial mapping ability.

Champions such as Dominic O’Brien, Joshua Foer, Ed Cooke, and Nelson Dellis have all demonstrated the power of the method of loci. Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, won the 2006 USA Memory Championship using this technique, and has written extensively about his journey into the world of competitive memory.

The method of loci, also known as the “memory palace technique,” involves visualizing a familiar place and then placing the items to be remembered at specific locations within this imagined space. For instance, you can imagine walking through your childhood home. In the living room, you see a coffee table with a giant apple on it. In the kitchen, a pink cat lounges on the counter. These unusual and vivid images are easier to remember because they are tied to specific locations in a familiar environment. When you need to recall the information, you simply “walk through” the house, and the items come back to you as you encounter their associated locations.

The origins of the memory palace technique date back to ancient Greece and Rome. According to legend, the poet Simonides of Ceos discovered the technique after a tragic incident at a banquet. The roof of the banquet hall collapsed, killing many guests. By mentally “going back” to the hall and visualizing where each guest had been sitting, Simonides was able to identify the victims based on their positions. This method was later described in classical texts such as Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s De Oratore, which emphasized its effectiveness as a memory aid.

Modern research and functional MRI have confirmed that this method activates the brain’s built-in navigation tools in the hippocampus and parahippocampal regions. By mapping information onto spatial frameworks, we leverage the hippocampus’s robust capabilities in both navigation and memory, facilitating more effective encoding and retrieval. Whether for academic purposes, competitive memory sports, or everyday tasks, the method of loci remains a powerful tool for enhancing memory.

Remember when the world changed

In quite a common scenario, someone might decide to go to the bedroom to grab their pajamas. They enter the room, look around, and – poof! – have no idea why they went to their bedroom in the first place. They will think for a while, then go back to the room where their idea was created, and finally remember: Ah, my pajamas!

Memory is context dependent. When an event is stored in our memory, the contextual information surrounding the event is also stored. Remembering things is usually easier in the original context in which they happened.

This is true even when the original space has changed. In a rather cunning experiment, researchers asked participants to memorize furniture pieces in a room, then emptied out the space and asked the same people to place everything back the way it was. To make the job a little harder, the researchers moved the walls and changed the room’s dimensions.

As it turns out, people employ predictable strategies when encountering a slightly different space. For example, an item that used to be next to a wall will go next to a wall, and people tend to remember the relative distances between objects rather than the absolute distances.

This mapping ability isn’t limited to physical environments: repeating the same experiment in virtual reality (both desktop VR as well as head-mounted, immersive experiences where people can freely walk around), the results are pretty much the same. A person will have built an internal map the first time they learned a room, and then they will rely on visual cues to find familiar spots when navigating the space.

Memory Essential Reads

Why Cramming Doesn't Work

Shaping the "Episodes" of Our Memory

Remember where you’ve never been before

Large IKEA stores are an absolute maze and take hours to walk through – the first few times. But experienced visitors quickly learn the tricks: They know to wait to collect small items until they get to the marketplace, to look for the shortcuts between sections, and to skip categories they are less interested in and jump into the ones they actually came to browse.

This is also true for a new IKEA you’ve never been to, since all outlets use the same visual clues and categorize their objects the same way. The organization of the store often mirrors our cognitive preferences; the logical grouping of related products and consistent layouts and signage tap into our brain’s ability to create mental maps, making the shopping process smoother and less stressful.

Likewise, the way we arrange our living spaces often reflects our natural inclination to create zones for specific activities. We cook in the kitchen, sleep in the bedroom, and work in the study. We often organize our surroundings in ways that align with our spatial memory, which will reduce cognitive load and streamline daily routines. By creating distinct areas for specific tasks, we make our environments more functional and our daily lives more efficient. As neuroscientist Daniel Levitin notes in his book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, “The principle underlying all these is off-loading the information from your brain and into the environment; use the environment itself to remind you of what needs to be done.”