The Power Mnemonics

I watched a video of Josh Foer talking about a memory palace memorization techniques. Using the words "fox", "license", "soup", "hair", "gerbil", "ring", and "finger" he demonstrated how you could walk through your memory palace - an imaginary mind slate in which you can put objects to stimulate memory recall. The video was interactive, so I tried out this technique that I was totally skeptical about. The amazing thing is that it worked! The idea that he discussed was that images are very memorable, so by creating more memorable images and dropping them into your memory palace you could easily remember them.
This is extremely cool and excites me to try these techniques for myself. I want to see how far these techniques will actually be able to stretch the power of my memory. I have always been pretty bad about staying with things that I have quick ideas about - for instance I wanted to go to graduate school in Germany and learn German...that bombed out. This is something I want to stick with and test how it works very much.

Some things that are very promising with these techniques:
Ben Pridmore - memorized a deck of cards in 32 seconds and could memorize over 1000 digits in an hour.
Tony Buson - "one hour a day 6 days a week practicing and you would be able to join the world championship

The biggest problem with memory is that it is great at memorizing certain things and terrible at others. Our minds evolved through natural selection in an environment different from the one we live in now. People once depended solely on the ability to memorize information such as the location of food sources and how to get home. We now live in a world in which we have technology to answer all of these questions for us, therefore our ability to use these simple systems has diminished. New elaborate systems have been developed to cope with our changing surroundings. They allow us to memorize things that are important to us today - written language and numbers (things that did not exist when the original memory techniques were developed).

The way in which this is done is through elaborative encoding -taking kinds of memories our brains cannot remember easily and transforming them into memories our brains can remember easily like lists and numbers. Several books outline these strategies very well:

"The Retorica Ad Herennium", "Institutio Oratoria" - Quintillians, "De Oratore" - Cicero and many others. Each book discusses the memory palace in detail. The memory palace is a hard concept to explain. A memory palace is some structure, a building, a route to school, your office, even the seams on a baseball. The only important factor is the memory palace is known by heart, every intricate detail, that you can imagine walking through with your eyes closed without even being there. Once you have a memory palace that you can completely imagine, you walk through it and place memorable images throughout the memory palace. Once this is done, all you have to do is re-walk the route and the images you placed, if stimulating enough, will literally "pop" into your head. According to Josh, you need multiple memory palaces to memorize a multitude of different information.

I memorized seven objects over a month ago with this method and it works too well, I can't get the stupid images out of my head whenever I picture my house. Walking through a memory palace depositing these items is freaking awesome. The sensation of each item simply pops into your head as you walk through. The indistinguishable smell of picked garlic in front of my house is still stuck in my head.