Building an Emotional Mind Palace
Best known as the construct Sherlock used in the most recent BBC series, the Mind Palace is a method used to store and easily retrieve memories. Sherlocks use of the Mind Palace is based on the idea of a brain attic from the original novels:
“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, A Study in Scarlet.
Method of Loci
The amazing feats Sherlock performs using his mind palace are based on a theory, the Method of Loci, which was formulated over a thousand years ago. A Memory or Mind Palace is the visualisation of a building, usually familiar to the individual, through which a person can imagine walking in a particularly ordered way, so as to rediscover memories stored in meaningful places within the building. Therefore, the memory becomes one of an experience, rather than a rote memorisation.
This memory device is found in ancient Roman and Greek writings (in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero’s De Oratore, and Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria).
In reality, as opposed to Sherlocks fantastical applications (where he is able to have spontaneous and new non-memory discussions with people inside his mind palace, as if in a dream), the method of Loci has only ever been used to…
