Way back in 2014, I came across BBC's Sherlock on Netflix. I watched the first episode and was immediately hooked. It was a modern day interpretation of one of my favorite characters with subtle nods to the source material sprinkled throughout, featuring one of the most captivating actors to ever take on the mantle of Sherlock Holmes in Benedict Cumberbatch1 alongside the brilliant Martin Freeman as John Watson.
Sherlock didn't just let Sherlock mystify you, though. It had a way of letting you in on what his thought process was and how he was reasoning things out. In the first episode, for example, when inspecting a victim's wedding ring the screen shows the word "dirty" on the outside of the ring, then "clean" on the inside as Sherlock moves it around. While the show runners could have left that for viewers to sort out on their own, pointing out the clue ensured people had the pieces so they could reason for themselves why Sherlock would have been interested in that detail before he revealed his assessment a moment later. To Sherlock, the ring being dirty on the outside indicated an unhappy marriage where she didn't bother to clean it, but the inside being clean meant she removed the ring often. Deduction: she had an unhappy marriage and had resorted to adultery.
While it is clear that (to some degree) the observation and reasoning skills were in the realm of possibility for a normal person to learn2, there was another skill of Sherlock's that I was far more interested in. In "The Hounds of Baskervilles3," Sherlock dismisses Watson and Dr. Stapleton so he can enter his mind palace to determine where a hallucinogenic drug came from that got into their system. As he's leaving, Watson says "It's a memory technique. A sort of mental map. You plot a map with a location. It doesn't have to be a real place. And then you deposit memories there. That, theoretically, you can never forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it."
This sounded like a borderline superpower to me, so I started digging into the subject. I read the original Sherlock Holmes stories again, went to Wikipedia, and dove down a Google rabbit hole. Eventually, I landed on the book Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. Foer went to the 2005 USA Memory Championship as a curious journalist, went to the 2006 USA Memory Championship as a competitor, and left as the champion. Foer had learned from Ed Cooke, a Grand Master of Memory since age 234, who taught him techniques including the method of loci, which is the more formal name for mind palaces. The book describes how Foer assigned specific images to specific cards, for instance, and then placed those images in a walk through his mind palace to quickly memorize a deck of cards in a randomized order.
After reading Moonwalking with Einstein, I tried for months to develop images for things I needed to remember. I had a rich history of house layouts to go through for palaces since we had moved nine times before I graduated high school, and I had no problem remembering exactly how each house I could remember was laid out (basically every house I've lived in since I was 3). But, regardless of how hard I tried, I could never work out images sticky enough for my brain. Was I not creative enough to use mind palaces? Maybe it just wasn't a technique for me? I had ideas on how to potentially make it easier on myself. But I would discover the real answer as to why these images wouldn't stick 6 years later, lying on my living room floor, frustrated with a tree in a field.
Footnotes
-
AKA Bennyboop Cabbagepatch, Build-a-bear Covergirl, and more ↩
-
For that, I highly recommend the excellent Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova. ↩
-
According to Wikipedia, this requires memorizing 1,400 random digits in an hour, the order of 14 decks of cards in an hour, and the order of one deck of cards in under 40 seconds. ↩