Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #4. Stash Things in Nooks and Crannies

Systematically place information in the corners and walls of rooms, and expand the capacity of your memory journeys up to tenfold.

"Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3] explains how to remember information by associating it with places along the way in an imaginary journey. (If you haven't read that hack, please read it now.) But each place on a memory journey contains other places: rooms typically have four walls, four corners, a floor, and a ceiling, for a total of 10 sublocations. In other words, if you have already memorized a journey through a building, you can now make your memory journey hold 10 times as many pieces of information.¹

In Action

Scott Hagwood, the U.S. Grandmaster of Memory, seems to have invented the nooks-and-crannies hack. He used it to break the world record for color-sequence memorization for the electronic game Simon. The previous record had been 14 sequences, but Scott was able to play an astonishing 31 sequences—all that the machine could offer. To do so, he used a memory journey and mentally stuffed the corners and walls of his places with items representing the colors he was trying to remember, such as a yellow sun or green bouncy balls.

Reconstructing Hagwood's system from his interviews is simple enough.^2,3 Hagwood's map for each room looks something like Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. The nooks and crannies of Hagwood's memory journey

The map in Figure 1-1 assigns numbers to the following places:

1. Near-left corner

2. Left wall

3. Far-left corner

4. Far wall

5. Far-right corner

6. Right wall

7. Near-right corner

8. Near wall/entrance to room

9. Floor

10. Ceiling

While this might not be Hagwood's exact system, it's the one we'll use in this hack.

In Real Life

In "Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3], we used a memory journey to recall Shakespeare's tragedies. Suppose you want to store more information about the plays in the same journey. You might associate the features of the plays with the features of the rooms in your memory journey in this way:

1. Near-left corner

Plot event 1.

2. Left wall

Plot event 2.

3. Far-left corner

Plot event 3.

4. Far wall

Plot event 4.

5. Far-right corner

Plot event 5.

6. Right wall

Plot event 6.

7. Near-right corner

Plot event 7.

8. Near wall/entrance to room

Plot event 8 (climax).

9. Floor

Publication date.

10. Ceiling

Related work. (Many later authors have based books or plays on Shakespeare, just as Shakespeare derived his work from earlier authors.)

You can think of the floor and the ceiling as special places within the room, so you can use them for special information about the play—in this case, the publication date and a related work. (The other eight places are all the same: slots for plot elements.) If you were memorizing the periodic table of elements, you might use the floor and ceiling for two key pieces of information: the alphabetic symbol of the element (such as Au for gold), and its atomic number (79). The rest of the places could then be used for other details.

Let's try the nooks-and-crannies hack to memorize the details of Shakespeare's second tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. In "Make Lots of Little Journeys" [Hack #3], I associated this play with the back bathroom of my apartment. Now I will associate the features of the play with the features of this room, in detail:

1. The Montagues and Capulets brawl (in the dogs' water dish).

2. Paris convinces Juliet's parents to let her marry him (mopping his brow with my towel).

3. Romeo falls in love with Juliet at a masked ball. (Their hair is sudsy with shampoo.)

4. Romeo and Juliet declare their love in the balcony scene and secretly marry (in the bathtub).

5. A duel ensues in the street, in which Tybalt kills Mercutio, and Romeo then kills Tybalt. (The guards wash away the blood with water from the shower.)

6. Juliet quarrels with her father about Paris (down in the toilet bowl).

7. Juliet takes a sleeping potion to feign death. (She falls facedown into the sink.)

8. Climax: Romeo discovers the drugged Juliet in a tomb; he kills Paris, who is mourning her; he poisons himself; she awakes and stabs herself. (All of this occurs in the doorway.)

9. Published in 1594. (Image: Albert Einstein (AE = 15), standing on my bathroom rug, walks into a red sandstone building with a thud (Nick Danger = ND = 94).)

10. The musical West Side Story. (Image: a miniature version of the scene from the movie in which the dancers split into many different colors, in the light of the heat lamp.)

The mnemonic for the publication date is worked out using the Dominic System [Hack #6]. The plot events should not be hard to visualize if you've seen the play; otherwise, you can use mnemonic tricks, such as representing Paris with a miniature Eiffel Tower, Mercutio with winged sandals like those of the god Mercury, and so on.

You can use the nooks-and-crannies hack to memorize any information that can be presented serially, from the digits of π, to the telephone area codes of the U.S. and Canada, to the nations of the world in alphabetical order. And if all of these examples leave you unimpressed, does the word Vegas suggest anything more to your taste?

End Notes

1. Mentat Wiki. "Nook And Cranny Method." http://www.ludism.org/mentat/NookAndCrannyMethod .

2. Zasky, Jason. 2003. "Total Recall: Remembering the 2003 USA Memory Championship." Failure Magazine, March 2003. http://www.failuremag.com/arch_flop_total_recall.html .

3. Gupta, Sanjay. 2005. "Mystery of Memory." Transcript of CNN report. http://www.bio.uci.edu/public/press/2005/MysteryMemory.pdf .