But when viewers finally get a look inside Holmes’ palace during “His Last Vow,” the final episode of the latest season, they see something quite a bit different. Most people when they start out building a palace choose a place very familiar, such as the home they grew up in. Sherlock Holmes’ mind palace, however, isn’t the typical type of storage place for the method of loci. “The brain attic is much more broad,” Konnikova says.Ī mind palace certainly sounds grander, befitting Holmes and his outsized ego, as Watson notes in season 2 of Sherlock. The mind palace makes the idea more specific by organizing the information in a certain way. “Otherwise it might as well have disappeared,” she notes.
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“The key insight from the brain attic is that you're only going to be able to remember something, and you can only really say you know it, if you can access it when you need it,” says Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Watson, in contrast, has a brain attic more like the rest of us, jumbled with memories both valuable and inane, with none specifically selected for storage based on their potential future worth. To make room for what was truly needed, Holmes tossed the rest out – even deeming unimportant the fact that the Earth circles the Sun. Holmes is careful to fill his brain attic with only memories that may be useful, such as cases from the past. “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose,” Holmes tells John Watson in A Study in Scarlet, the first of Conan Doyle’s tales about the detective. Instead, he attributed his creation’s prodigious memory to an exceptionally well-organized, well-stocked “brain attic.” Given the technique’s power and history, it’s a little surprising that Arthur Conan Doyle never mentioned such a thing in his stories. And at the Swedish Open last year, Reinhard set another record, managing to memorize the order of 370 cards.
Competitor Simon Reinhard holds the speed record for memorizing a pack of playing cards in 21.19 seconds at the German Open in 2011. But the method’s popularity saw a resurgence in the latter half of the 20th century, particularly in international memory competitions, where skilled participants see it as a primary tool for recalling large numbers of items in order. With books more easily available, there was less need for such powers of memorization. It fell out of favor, however, with the invention of the printing press. To write something down in that era was expensive and time consuming, a luxury not to be wasted, even on rhetoric The method of loci continued to flourish through the Middle Ages, when monks and other scholastics used it to commit religious texts to memory. Greeks and Romans, such as the orator Cicero, employed the mind palace technique to memorize speeches, marking the order of what to say within a complicated architectural space. When those memories need to be recalled, you can walk through the building in your mind, seeing and remembering each item. To take advantage of the mind’s ability to hold onto visual memories, it often helps to embellish the item being stored-the milk you need to buy at the grocery store might become a vat of milk with a talking cow swimming in it.
In the house version, every room is home to a specific item you want to remember. That place is often a building such as a house, but it can also be something like a road with multiple addresses. To use the technique, visualize a complex place in which you could physically store a set of memories. That ability to remember based on location became the method of loci, also known as memory theater, the art of memory, the memory palace and mind palace. Though his fellow banqueters were too badly crushed by the collapse for their remains to be identified, Simonides was supposedly able to put a name with each body based on where they had been sitting in the hall. But when he arrived outside, the young men were not there and the hall was collapsing behind him. Simonides stepped outside to meet with two young men. Of course, this being Holmes (and television), his version was somewhat more advanced than that of the average rememberer.Īccording to myth, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos invented the technique after attending a banquet gone wrong. This time, though, his creators have gifted him with a talent for a mnemonic device straight out of ancient Greece-the mind palace. The Holmes of Sherlock, the BBC/Masterpiece program that aired its season finale Sunday night on PBS, is no exception. Sherlock Holmes, in any incarnation, packs a lot of information into his head, and he has to be ready to draw out those details as he makes his deductions and solves the most mysterious of mysteries.
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