Wandering Around in the Memory Palace

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Since my last post on synesthesia, and messages from a couple of you reporting your own experiences with that fascinating condition, I have been thinking a lot about the mysterious realm that follows us everywhere, hanging out above our shoulders and between our ears.  Mostly I've been reflecting on that intriguing possible mental relationship between synesthesia and memory. Specifically the ability of certain stimuli to call up little memory vignettes; smells, sounds, sights, whatever, that transport you back to another place and time. For me lilacs, dill pickles, newly cut grass, burning leaves, and wood burning fireplaces are particularly powerful aromas that trigger memory floods. I close my eyes, focus on the smell and wait to see where it takes me.  Which, of course, raises the question of where do those aromas take me, and how, and maybe why? Here’s an idea.

The idea of a memory palace is an ancient one. Google tells us that Cicero (106 - 43 BCE) described the Memory Palace technique in his writings on rhetoric, called De Oratore.  However, my earliest recollection of the notion is far more prosaic; Jerry Lucas on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, which Google also informs me took place on May 14, 1971. [Which, of course raises the question of why, with Google, do we really need a memory palace?, but let's let that go for now.] For those of you who have not yet attained "a certain age," Jerry Lucas was a basketball star at Ohio State, the NBA and the Olympics in the late 1950s and early 1960s, who later gained renown for his remarkable memory. Lucas attributed his feats of memory to the memory palace technique.

Briefly the technique is said to work like this: you call to mind a structure with which you are intimately familiar. You know every crook and cranny. No problem there, I often amuse myself when settling down to sleep by mentally “walking around” in the house and neighborhood in which I was raised. Next, when you want to remember something you stash it somewhere in that structure - AKA your memory palace. OK. Now it is getting a little “iffy.” So if I want to remember when my daughters were born I take those dates and stash them in the bottom drawer of the big built-in drawers in my sister’s bedroom where the cat had kittens. All right, maybe. But now when I need to remember those dates I need to bop over to the memory palace and haul those dates out of that drawer - top or bottom or wherever I put them. I may have that somewhat distorted, which may be why it has never worked for me. It always seemed to me that with the memory palace, instead of just remembering one thing - the dates - I now needed to remember where in the memory palace I had put the dates, so now instead of just remembering one thing - daughter dates - I now need to remember two things - drawer and dates. Something rotten in that particular state of Denmark, not?

But like many interesting concepts, the memory palace notion provides some delightful points for reflection.  First and foremost I love the metaphor of a palace as the place in which our memories reside. It is a narrative device that resonates strongly with me. My acquaintance with scripture is sketchy at best, but for some reason the phrase “My father’s house has many mansions.” (John 14:2 - thanks again Google) has always spoken strongly to me, both for its inclusive theme, and for my visual imagining of a structure with a plethora of hallways and doorways, windows and mirrors -  exciting and still a bit frightening. The house in Francis Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a delicious example.

So if you combine the idea of this slightly spooky memory palace with my assertion in the previous post about the time-traveling synesthetic potential of music you end up - potentially anyhow - with a synesthetic memory palace in which a song, a dream, an image, color or flavor can catapult you into one of the many rooms of your own unique memory palace, landing you in the lap of a long-ignored, yet still present, memory.

This somewhat fanciful construction has the added benefit of bringing comfort to those of us on the far side of a “certain age” about the accessibility of our memory palace. The memories are there. Oh, I’m not saying that the particular noun for the round bread product that is kneaded, then shaped, baked and boiled, the, the, the, bagel! dammit! won’t occasionally escape you. But the larger more important memory of breakfasts shared where, when and with whom, are still there in the palace, just waiting for the right synesthetic key to turn the lock, swing the door open, revealing the rest of the memory and the absolutely wonderful opportunity to wander around in that time and place one more time.

All of which brings me to both the greatest frustration and the most tantalizing possibility of this whole memory palace notion. The greatest frustration is that I can't choose when to enter my synesthetic memory palace, it just sort of happens when I happen to encounter the key. Nicely serendipitous, but potentially awkward; "Pardon me, miss, but could I sniff your neck?" I'm thinking that some combination of guided meditation/relaxation/reike might provide a path and I play around with those elements sometimes during my night time sleep ritual, however without success to date.

The tantalizing piece comes when I have been fortunate enough to stumble into the palace and walk into one of those lovely, but long forgotten, memories and discover that that particular space leads to other spaces - sort of like a memory maze. The people and places in that first memory lead to other people, places and spaces, and I can wander through that delightful cascade of memories until I am disturbed by some intrusion from what we arrogantly call the "real" world.

Well, that's where I am with the whole memory palace thingy, and I better get this post out to you now, lest I forget . . . .