(Newser)
“Sherlock Holmes fans will probably be familiar with something called the ‘loci method,'” Live Science notes. It is a device used by the famous detective to remember things, also called “palace of memory” or “palace of the mind”. Now a new study in Scientific advances by researchers in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany found that the method actually works for at least a month. According to this method, people imagine a place or path that they know well, then throw pieces of information along it to be retrieved later as they retrace their steps. Here is how Medical Xpress explains: “A person could assign a bottle of milk to the front step, for example, a bag of seeds in the rose garden right next to the path on the way to a sidewalk and a bag of a certain kind of nuts. , right next to a tree in the yard, if they wanted to memorize their food list. ”
For part of the study, the researchers trained the participants in the loci method or in another method or did not provide them with any training. After 20 minutes, the “loci” group remembered about 62 words from a list, compared to 41 and 36 words in the other groups. After four months, the corresponding results were 50, 30, and 27. An interesting part of the results: brain scans showed that people who use the loci method – including people who are experts in the technique considered “memory athletes” – had less brain activity in regions usually associated with memory during experiments. Researchers theorize that the technique makes their brains work more efficiently or, as Medical Xpress says, “it was easier for them to memorize the list.” (Having a great memory is not necessarily a good thing.)