The core of the Mind Palace Memory Technique is that you use rooms in your head to store information. What if you are in a position where all you have is your brain. This article is not about writing on paper or noting down the to-do list/notes in apps. Study co-author Magaret Simmons, a senior lecturer at the medical school, did gather feedback from the students after the study and found that they enjoyed learning the techniques and that some still used them in their studies.Mind Palace Technique doesn’t fall under the category of simple memory tips that presents you with a common solution: “Write things down to help you remember”. Not enough students returned for a follow-up for the researchers to test the long-term impacts of the different training methods. The storytelling of the Aboriginal technique was also communal instead of individual, which could have also helped boost memory. Or it could have had something to do with the fact that participants physically went to the garden to learn (the mind palace participants simply imagined their childhood homes). The advantage of the Aboriginal technique may have been due to the additional layer of the narrative, Reser said.
"If you're remembering, say, a biochemical pathway or a surgical technique." "You can envision, certainly, in the medical field things where order is important," Reser said. The test didn't require ordering the list, Reser said, but it makes sense that students who were attaching the information to a narrative would remember the information in a certain sequence.
The students trained in the Aboriginal technique were also significantly more likely to list the butterfly names in order than the other two groups. The chances that a student would improve from remembering fewer than 20 of the names to 20 out of 20 on later tests tripled in the Aboriginal group, doubled in the mind palace group, and went up only by 50% in the untrained group. However, other ways of looking at the memory training also showed improvements with the Aboriginal technique compared to the mind palace. "By the time someone gets into medical school they probably have developed some pretty sophisticated techniques themselves," he said. A future study with medical school students would need to be more challenging, he said. This translated to only one or two extra names, though, as the test turned out to be a little too easy for the eager medical students - many remembered 20 out of 20 butterfly names on the first try, without any training at all, Reser said. The memory palace technique improved the total percentage of the 20 names that the students remembered by a moderate amount, with the Aboriginal technique showing a strong effect. After a 20-minute unstructured break, they were tested for a third and final time.Īll of the students improved over the tests, simply because they had seen the list several times. The students were again given the list and 10 minutes to memorize then they were asked to write down the butterfly names again. The final third, a control group, watched an unrelated video during this time. Next came a 30-minute session during which a third of the students were taught the "memory palace" technique, and a third were taken to a garden on campus, where Yunkaporta walked them through the Aboriginal technique and developed a story attached to the garden for memorizing the butterfly list. They were then told to write down as many of the names as they could remember. They were first shown a list of 20 common butterfly names - chosen specifically because the researchers wanted the study to have nothing to do with medicine - and given 10 minutes to memorize the list. Yunkaporta, now at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia, is a member of the Apalech Clan and author of " Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World" (HarperOne, 2020).Īlong with other colleagues and medical students, Yunkaporta and Reser put together a study of the two techniques, drawing from first-year medical students at the university during their very first days of classes.
The idea to compare the two arose when Reser and a fellow lecturer, Tyson Yunkaporta, were chatting about memory and ways to incorporate Indigenous culture into the medical school curriculum. This technique also attaches information to physical geography, but in the form of a narrative that incorporates landmarks, flora and fauna. A new study tests the mind palace technique against the one used by untold generations of Aborigines.
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