How many times have you been in front of the following task: You need to buy ten things from the supermarket, or remember ten to do tasks, or remember ten words or anything else you can imagine.
What is the common solution? You open you agenda and write them down, or write them on a post-it, or write them in the notes app of your iPhone.
We rely too much on technology or written memos to remember relatively small lists. If you try to memorize them you will find it rather difficult and challenging to recall all the ten items of the list after some time.
There is a solution coming from people from ancient Greece and then used by Romans. It is called the Roman Room Technique.
It is a fun to use and easy technique to easily remember small lists of items although some people have evolved it so much that they remember tons of items with this simple technique.
There is no such thing as memory weakness. There are lazy brains.
Your brain’s memory machine has two parts: Short term memory lasting about ten seconds and long term memory.
Short term memory gives you about ten seconds to code info that you want to pass to long term memory. People that forget are people that do not go through this encoding routine.
Roman room technique is such an encoding algorithm. Our memory works with associations. Your brain’s memory drawers work by embedding only the info that are encoded through common life associations.
Let’s see how Roman Room Technique works:
Try to imagine vividly a room that is common to you, like a room in your own house. Imagine all the stuff you have in there, drawers, windows, plants, PCs etc etc. Be in your room, observe it vividly, smell it, touch the stuff you have and then close your eyes and try to imagine it.
This feeling of your room will be your memory buffer for the Roman Room Technique.
Yes, it is true our memory works with buffers. These buffers help you to create easy to remember associations of other items, that our brain keeps as a buffer, with common everyday things.
Then take a list of ten things that you want to remember. Start by taking one by one and placing them in your imaginary room. For example if you want to remember to buy apples and you have a drawer in your room create an image of an apple in your imaginary drawer. Or imagine a plant of apple in your room, or imagine a rotten apple, smell it! The more vivid the image the more propable the memory will be stuffed into the long term drawers of your Brain.
Do the same for all the other ten things of the list. See an example list of mine:
Buy from Supermarket:
Apples: I am entering my room and I step into an apple, I almost lost balance out of it.
Steak: A huge steak is on my desk (what is it doing there? )
Pencils: I take a pencil and stub the steak to see if it soft or not
Lighter: I want to eat my steak so I take the pencils and light them up to roast it
….etc etc etc
Remember to use vivid images of the things you want to remember with the things that are already in the imaginary room.
Then you may create other rooms, rooms that do not even exist and put things in there to remember your lists. Or you may use a familiar road you take every day to go to your job or go for a walk and in certain checkpoints set the things you want to remember.
When you practice a lot with your Roman Room Technique, you will need to insert in every imaginary room of yours something that will cause the rest of the story to unfold.
This is not reported elsewhere where Roman Room technique is described and it is something I made up to further encode my memories with RRT.
I call it the initiator.
The initiator is the relevant correlated ignition that will cause the rest of the story to unfold. For example if I associated a list of supermarket stuff with my room then I needed to imagine that by entering the supermarket there is a secret door to my room. I imagine this vividly so that when I enter the supermarket I get the right room with the right stuff infront of me.
This is not necessary to do for your first steps to Roman Room Technique but you need to do it if you start using this technique with many imaginary rooms and many lists that you want to remember for a long time.
I am sure that if you practice a bit with Roman Room Technique you will see your memory enhanced as never before!
Enjoy…
L.A.>
