Elephants Must Have Large Homes

Have you ever heard of a Memory Palace? If not, don't worry. You'll probably hear about it again soon. That's thanks to the Bader-Meinhoff effect. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

The idea of a Memory Palace has its start in the ancient Greek poet Simonides. The short version of the story is that Simonides was reciting his poetry at a big shin-dig of some important people of the time and he fortuitously stepped outside for a bit right as a huge earthquake struck. The earthquake toppled the building, killing everybody inside. With the bodies being so badly mangled, they weren't sure how they were going to be able to identify anyone. Fortunately, Simonides was able to solve this problem by picturing in his mind where everybody had been sitting. Thus, all the bodies were identified and a new memory device was realized.

By attaching the memory of the people to a physical location, Simonides inadvertently created the concept of a Memory Palace. Usually when we remember something we do so by repetition (saying that phone number over and over until you can write it down, assuming you don’t have a pen or cell phone handy) or mnemonic devices ("If red touches black, you're ok jack, If red touches yellow, you're a dead fellow" to remember how to distinguish the coloring of a coral snake from that of a king snake, the former of which is venomous. I evidently expected coral snakes to be a much bigger problem in my life than they have thus far, since I instantly committed this mnemonic to memory the first time I heard it. Now that I think about it, a far easier and more practical mnemonic would have been "don't touch snakes in the wild." Problem solved, no rhymes needed. But then I would have to put more important information in its place and that just isn’t practical :)

Anyway, back to Simonides’ inadvertent discovery of the memory palace. Instead of remembering information in the ways listed above, with a memory palace you attach memories to visual concepts. So for example, if you want to remember all of the cranial nerves you would first imagine a palace in your mind (or house as the case may be). Then you would place that cranial nerve in a specific location in that house.  So for me the Vagus nerve (which in my imagination is a grey stringy nerve wearing a white Elvis suit ) would be placed in the kitchen because it is responsible for innervating certain organs in your gut, which is where food goes.  Then, when you need to remember the nerves it is just a matter of walking through your memory palace and seeing what you put in each room or area.

I think it is a fascinating concept and I am working on putting it in to practice in certain ways in my life. It is actually a bit more complicated than outlined above, because some concepts are hard to visualize. For example, if you wanted to remember a bunch of the digits of pi you would first have to come up with a way of visualizing a number. There are workarounds for this but it is a bit time consuming in the beginning.

The concept of memory palaces is interesting in and of itself, but I actually bring it up because of another phenomenon that it highlights. You see, I was recently watching an episode of Sherlock (which is a fantastic show except for the fact that there are only three seasons with three episodes each and I have already gone through all of them on a Netflix binge : ( Also, the fourth season isn’t coming out for another two years because the stars of the show shot to fame after Sherlock first aired and now they are busy making movies about Hobbits and winning Oscars. Sigh, first world problems…)

Anyway, Sherlock himself uses a memory palace to house his vast collection of knowledge and recall seemingly minute details of things. When I was watching the episode in which they first mentioned this I had a vague sense of Déjà vu because they were treating the concept as a new one, but I had heard of memory palaces before. In fact, I read a book about them not long ago called Moonwalking With Einstein.  It’s a pretty good book if you are interested.

I’ve had this experience before of learning about a concept or an idea that I have never heard before and then inexplicably hearing about it again shortly thereafter. Apparently there is a name for it: The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

The Phenomenon takes its name from a movie called the Baader-Meinhof Complex, which is based on the true story of a West German militant/terrorist group that was active in the late 1960s.  You can click here for more information on the movie, but the plot line is actually unimportant to the concept of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, which is basically the experience I described above about memory palaces.  A person learns something new (like memory palaces, or coral snake stripe patterns) and then shortly thereafter comes across it again (while watching an episode of Sherlock or reading an article about camouflage.)

It’s not really that the information is coming up more often than it would ordinarily. The concept of memory palaces has been around for ages after all. It’s that your mind is really good at finding patterns, so that when you hear about memory palaces twice in a short amount of time your mind tells you that it is more than just a coincidence, even though it’s really not.  

I do think that in the case of memory palaces there is something more going on than just the coincidence of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. It seems to be becoming more common knowledge than just a random fact to share at the water cooler, and more like a permanent fixture in society’s collective consciousness. I can’t really explain it better than that but it does get me interested in the idea of how knowledge spreads. Now there’s an interesting topic (since I have likely bored you to death with this post already. Kudos to you for making it this far).

Oh, I forgot to mention how the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon got its name:  It was coined by a guy who heard about the Baader-Meinhof Complex (the movie) twice in a 24 hour period and experienced that same weird sense of déjà vu.

Anyway, to recap what we have learned from this post: 1. Start watching Sherlock (I need someone to analyze it with me!) 2. Don’t touch wild animals 3. I am the queen of useless information (seriously, now I know all of this information on the Baader-Meinhoff Phenomenon, on top of other useless information I have stored through the years (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species…Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Grumpy, Sneezey, Bashful, Doc…Ice-cream sales go up in the winter… the heart of a giraffe weighs 25 pounds….seriously, this list goes on and on) but do I know any more about Biochemistry, which I should have been studying? No. Queen of self-defeating behavior at least.) 4. You are probably going to hear about something from this post in the next few days or weeks. Now you know why. Assuming the contents of this post are now safely stored away in your memory palace : )

PS- As a reminder to myself, here are some other things I ought to tell you about in upcoming posts: The beauty of the Spanish phrase No Me Nace, the awesomeness of moon cups, an item in Spain on my List of Possibilities, and why the Everglades are probably glad that Americans eat cows. Oh, and maybe a brief update on my life and goals, brief being the operative word.  Happy best day of the year!