This week Crew Young have grappled with the concept of Memory Palaces and employed the method of loci to facilitate the retention and recall of lists of seemingly unrelated words. Beginning with watching the iconic, but already outdated “Shift Happens“, we considered the exponential global increase in data and information, and what we might reasonably be expected to remember at school, before sharing techniques that we already use, e.g. mnemonics, to recall academic concepts.
The method of loci (plural of locus = Latin for place) centres around the idea of visiting a special or significant memorable place in your mind, and “pinning” ideas or words to these locations, that are then subsequently “visited” in your mind to extract the information.
Later last week we experimented by applying the method of loci technique to improve our memory skills within the context of the XP East School site. We were given a series of twelve random words to remember, and on average we were able to recall around half of them. We then heard a story that included each of the twelve words found in school in a very creative and abstract manner, and on average we remembered around 90% of them.
The story will be familiar to our members of staff, especially to Mr Said (the author) as it featured on our last Staff Planning Day, and Crew Young will be working to introduce this technique (and the wacky story!) to other Crew groups shortly.