(Newser)
– Sherlock Holmes fans will probably be familiar with something called the “loci method,” Live Science notes. It is a device used by the famous detective to remember things, also called “palace of memory” or “palace of the mind.” Now a new study a Scientific advances by researchers in the Netherlands, Austria and Germany have found that the method works, in fact, for at least months. According to this method, people anticipate a place or path that they know well and then leave pieces of information along it to retrieve them later as they walk their steps. This is how Medical Xpress explains it: “A person can assign a bottle of milk to the front step, for example, a bag of seeds in the rose garden right next to the road path to a sidewalk and a bag of a certain kind of nuts, right next to a tree in the yard, if they wanted to memorize their grocery list. ”
In one part of the study, the researchers trained participants in the loci method or another method, or did not give them any training. After 20 minutes, those in the “loci” group remembered about 62 words from a list, compared to the 41 and 36 words in the other groups. After four months, the corresponding results were 50, 30 and 27. An interesting part of the results: brain scans showed that people who used the loci method (including people skilled in the art considered “athletes of memory “) had less activity regions normally associated with memory during experiments. Researchers theorize that the technique makes their brains work more efficiently or, as Medical Xpress says, “it was easier for them to memorize the list.” (Having a super memory is not necessarily a good thing.)