Hack Your Memory

Expand Your Life with Mnemonics

Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, Claude Monet

Welcome back to Quests, where we adventure together through past, present, and future.

This week, we’re heading to the Library, our home base for exploring the ideas of writers and philosophers across time.

Among the stacks there’s a section dedicated to what the British historian Frances Yates, describing the methods of the Ancient Greeks and their successors, called the “art of memory.”

For the Greeks, memory wasn’t just an act of nostalgia or a passive record of the past. It was a dynamic, central force in the life of the mind. And it could be manipulated, even mastered.

Plato regarded memory as a process of anamnesis—the soul’s recollection of eternal truths it had known before birth in the realm of Forms.

Aristotle rejected such supernatural framings and instead distinguished memory (the retention of past experiences) from recollection (the active search for those experiences).

We’re all basically Aristotelians now. We know that memories are entwined with this world and our sense-experiences of it. We also understand that memories are fundamentally spatial, anchored to where and how they’re formed, i.e., “I remember where I was when X happened.” Augustine called memory “a vast court,” a “large and boundless chamber.”

This understanding of the physical aspect of memory gave rise to mnemonics, a kind of mental art originating with Simonides of Ceos, who is said to have invented the “method of loci.” By associating ideas with vivid images placed in specific locations—like rooms in a building or landmarks along a path—memory became something you could structure and navigate.

Consider the knuckle mnemonic, in which each knuckle represents a 31-day month:

In seconds, you’ve transformed your hands into a memory device.

This is the alchemy of mnemonic thinking—the transfiguration of everyday objects and experiences into something fascinating, even precious.

And here’s the thing:

You can do this sort of operation all the time.

It’s like a cheat code, a power-up. With a little creativity, you can encode more powerful memories every day.

So let’s learn some mnemonic spells. Cast them frequently, and watch your timeline expand in glorious technicolor.

Orange Mornings

A few years ago I smelled—no, I practically inhaled—oranges every morning for exactly one week.

At breakfast time, I’d peel an orange and hold the carpels close to my face and breathe as deeply as I could.

Why TF did I do this? I don’t even like oranges that much. (Bananas, on the other hand, are goated and may even prove God’s existence.)

I took to huffing orange as a silly but significant self-experiment in memory. I wanted to “code” the week as “orange,” thus carving out those seven days in stark relief to the rest of the month/year/my life.

Strangely, but not surprisingly—for reasons we’ll explore—it worked. I can more clearly remember that week as a result of my orange-y mornings.

I was inspired to do this by a few books I’d been reading.

I’ve always been drawn to memory-obsessed writers like Sigmund Freud (who understood early memories as constitutive of the self) and Virginia Woolf (who wrote philosophy in the form of memory-laden novels), and Marcel Proust, whose famous memory of eating a madeleine cake triggered the production of his 4,000+ page masterpiece.

Four Seasons in One Head, Giuseppe Arcimboldo

During Covid I finished Karl Ove Knausgaard’s (very Proustian) My Struggle series, in which a mountain of banalities coalesce into something unputdownable. Over six books, Knausgaard seems to write out the entirety of his life, or rather something close to it: the remembered version. “Memory itself is an internal rumour,” wrote George Santayana. (Isn’t that a great quote?) Knausgaard plays it out on every page.

The tipping point, though, for my experiments in orange was Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, an excellent 2011 book about memory and memory competitions. As the 2006 USA Memory Champion, Foer is well-equipped to describe this cerebral subculture, where participants memorize decks of cards, strings of numbers, and obscure epic poems in minutes.

He weaves in mini-histories on mankind’s understanding of memory over the millennia and interviews cognitive scientists and memory experts. He quickly discovers that our scientific understanding of memory is actually quite weak.

Foer writes:

For all the advances that have been made in recent decades, it’s still the case that no one has ever actually seen a memory in the human brain. Though advances in imaging technology have allowed neuroscientists to grasp much of the basic topography of the brain, and studies of neurons have given us a clear picture of what happens inside and between individual brain cells, science is still relatively clueless about what transpires in the circuitry of the cortex, the wrinkled outer layer of the brain that allows us to plan into the future, do long division, and write poetry, and which holds most of our memories [...] The brain makes sense up close and from far away. It’s the in-between—the stuff of thought and memory, the language of the brain—that remains a profound mystery.

From Moonwalking with Einstein, p. 34

I’m personally guilty of conceptualizing memory in computational terms, in which the brain is like a hard drive and my lived experiences are the data written on it. Some files I can call up perfectly in 4K video. Others are corrupted.

But this is not how memory works.

Memory lives in-between, as Foer suggests, the brain’s neurons, the inner and outer world, this moment and the next.

Even this description falls short. The truth is, we don’t fully understand the mechanics of memory. But we don’t need to know exactly how memory hacking works to know that it does.

So what are the techniques that Foer and other memory champs use?

Elaborative Encoding

The book’s fifth chapter, “The Memory Palace,” details Foer’s conversations with Ed Cooke, another competitive memorizer and the author of Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could. Cooke is a likeable character with a penchant for pithy description.

He tells Foer:

“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,” Ed explained to me between breaths into his clenched fists. “That’s what elaborative encoding is. In a moment, we’re going to do this with a list of words, which is just a sort of general exercise for getting ahold of the techniques. Then you’re going to be able to move on to numbers, playing cards, and then, from there, to complex concepts. Basically, when we’re done with you, you’re going to be able to learn anything you want to really.

From Moonwalking with Einstein, p. 91

Cooke presents Foer with a shopping list to memorize, which includes pickled garlic, salmon (peat-smoked if poss.), six-bottles of white wine, and cottage cheese.

He prods Foer to create what he calls “associative hooks” for the listed items, tying vivid mnemonic cues to each thing.

Cooke encodes the cottage cheese with an evocative description, telling Foer, “I want you to imagine Claudia Schiffer swimming in this tub of cottage cheese. I want you to imagine her swimming in the buff, and dripping with dairy. Are you picturing this? I don’t want you to miss any of the details here.”

Sure enough, Foer recalls all the items after mere minutes of vividly associating, including the cottage cheese. This method can be stretched to impressive extremes. I once memorized all forty-four (at the time) U.S. presidents by turning my apartment into a memory palace, associating each president with an object and walking through the rooms in my mind. Teddy Roosevelt galloped across my desk on a horse. FDR sat in a wheelchair next to my lamp.

It’s a powerful technique, but it takes some conscious effort and maybe an hour to fully set up a palace like that.

The beauty of this, though, is you don’t need to memorize lengthy lists or pull off showy feats of memory to use it. You can apply the same principle to quick, everyday tasks, like meeting new people: Tom becomes Tomato Tom. I’ll picture a David with a slingshot, ready to slay Goliath. James is 007 in a tuxedo.

The key is to find an association that works for you—the sillier, the better. You are trying to create something NEW in your mind’s eye, thus tapping into the mind’s associative, metaphorizing nature. (For more on the analogical character of cognition, see Douglas Hoftsader’s book Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking.)

In the meantime, follow Ezra Pound’s life slogan: Make it New.

Embracing Novelty

So yes, stop and smell the roses. No, really. Smell is one of the most powerful senses tied to memory. Businesses know this and use it to manipulate us all the time. Sam’s Club wafts the scent of baked goods at the entrance. Subway floods its stores with the smell of fresh bread. Coffee shops pump up the scent of roasted beans.

Anything you can do to differentiate one action/day/week from the next will not just boost your memory: it will expand your subjective time sense. It’s almost literally like a longevity treatment.

This is because, as the editors at Scientific American write, “our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period.”

Introduce novelty, and slow the march of time. It’s that simple.

Do you exercise? Perhaps you walk—hopefully with purpose!

Listen to nothing but 80s rock music (or some other genre if that’s your usual bag) for a week while walking. That week will be differentiated.

Name segments of time. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace imagines a dystopia where corporations sponsor the calendar: the Year of the Whopper, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It’s ridiculous, right? And unforgettable. I think I’ll name next week, December 8th to the 15th, The Mid-December X-Mas Gift Extravaganza. This, embarrassingly, will motivate me more than you can imagine.

Travel is a no brainer novelty-hack. This is the “holiday paradox”: time seems to fly by when you’re on vacation, but in hindsight, those days are full, stretched by new experiences.

Can’t jet off to Paris? No problem. You can “travel” close to home. Take a new route to work. Eat at a restaurant you’ve never tried. Sit in a park you’ve never noticed before.

Or you can just stay home and smell some oranges.

Our first tour of the Library is almost complete. We’ve touched on writings by ancient Greeks, literary Modernists, and cognitive scientists, weaving our way through the art and science of memory.

What I ultimately want to suggest is this: with a little conscious thought about how you’re experiencing and encoding your life—the content of your existence—you can stretch it out.

You can elongate your weeks, week after week.

The Lovers, Emile Friant

I’d also argue there’s a massive opportunity for tech companies to do a better job integrating novelty into their platforms. As Kirby Ferguson recently argued in a video essay at the New York Times and as Kyle Chayka suggests in Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, algorithms thrive on sameness. They feed us what we’ve clicked before, reinforcing predictable patterns. And it’s safer financially to serve the familiar. Hence, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, carbon copies of TV sitcoms, and the entire music catalog of Ed Sheeran.

But there’s a real hunger for novelty, if platforms would feed it and the entertainment industry would reward it. I’d love to see more incentives, perhaps gamified ones, for exploring new areas of content. YouTube could offer badges for engaging with underseen creators or watching content in unexplored categories. Spotify could spotlight emerging artists with dynamic, “out-of-your-comfort-zone” playlists. TikTok could deploy a “Randomize My Feed” feature, injecting videos from creators outside your usual algorithm bubble.

I’m spitballing here, but you get the idea.

Intentional novelty should be both a personal and cultural priority.

Here’s Quest 7:

Encode novel memories

Key Details

• Share an example of how you’ve encoded a vivid, differentiated memory in the comments below or @ the Quests Community.

• Bonus points to the most creative, elaborative encoder.

• Complete this quest, log it @ the Quests Community, and you’ll earn The Library badge on your adventurer profile.

Please comment here on Substack with thoughts, counterthoughts, and suggestions.

It’s dangerous to go alone—find a quest partner, and party up.

Recommended Reading:

The Art of Memory

Moonwalking with Einstein

In Search of Lost Time