In her last years, my grandma used to place an egg to boil on the stove and I would find it an hour and a half later because I would get a whiff of something burning after all of the water had evaporated and the egg had turned to a crackled blackened clump. I don’t like boiled eggs but in forty-five years maybe I will have forgotten that. Someone I can’t remember once told me that taking different routes to walk back home from work decreases your likelihood of getting Alzheimer’s.
My ability to recall memories has never been good. Most of my defining expe-riences are only fragmented images, hazy colours, and recollected feelings that I jigsaw together to elicit a sympathetic “that’s interesting” at a dinner party. An attempt to reminisce turns into an embarrassing recitation of someone else’s story or a mid-sen-tence realization that I’m sharing the remnant memory of a dream I once had. I’ve always been frightened by that thing that people say: When you recall a memory you’re not actually recalling the event but the last memory you had of trying to recall that event. The memory of the last memory. Each instance getting further and further away from the reality of what happened.
I’ve heard of this trick to remember your grocery list. Make a memory palace! To begin building your memory palace, you must start with visualizing a location that you are intimately familiar with. It’s helpful to pick a place that has several smaller desi-gnated spaces inside, such as bookshelves, side tables, a shoe rack, a dog bed. Is it your one-bedroom apartment? Is it your childhood home? Got it? Ok.
Plan your route (the same one you always take). First, arrive at the door. Now, step through. Imagine yourself walking through your palace. Let your muscle memory be your guide as you navigate one room at a time. To make sure you really know it, why not try walking your route backwards? Then, once you have the architecture of your palace vivid in your mind, you can begin to insert the mental images of your grocery list into its spaces. Picture: a mandarin bouncing down your carpeted stairs or a toothpaste tube oozing its stripes out on your bathmat. When you wish to recall your grocery list, just place yourself in your palace and walk along the path to recover the things you left along the way.
The exercise of building a memory palace takes practice and investment. It only works if you recall your palace the exact same, each time. I’ve abandoned the idea of using the palace as a mnemonic device in favor of rendering my palace in clearer form. How many magnets were on the fridge again? My desire is to make my palace perfect. I want to see the anatomy of the doorway, the leftover screws in the wall from hanging last year’s Christmas lights, and the spattering of accumulated oil on the digital oven clock. I look forward to feeling the relief that comes from knowing something so concre-tely that you can return to it whenever you want.
-Text by Asia Jong
