When I asked a group of memory experts—such as Anthony Metivier—how they had benefited from using memory techniques in their personal life, I was surprised that the most common answer was involving meditation.
It turns out that the basic memory palace technique is ideal for managing your thoughts while engaged in typical meditation or mindfulness practices!
Thoughts during Meditation
Typically in meditation you have a intended focus—perhaps breathing or listening to your environment—and you aim to bring your attention back to that focus as soon as you notice that focus drifting onto other thoughts.
However, I found two difficulties with this:
- My mind would often drift onto thoughts that seemed “too important” to ignore! They could be ideas for a cool project, tasks I needed to remember to do, or messages I wanted to send to someone. I would want to take action immediately!
- My mind would often drift onto similar thoughts repeatedly, and it might be interesting to discover which ones were occurring most frequently.
Obviously it’s inconvenient or to follow up on thoughts in either of these ways during the actual meditation, so what can we do?
- Keep a notebook or phone with you at all times to write everything down.
- Take action immediately and return to the mindfulness practice later. But then you’d never be able to settle into the session!
- Make an effort to remember everything until the end of the session. But this would prevent you from keeping your attention on your intended focus.
So what can we do instead?
Applying the Memory Palace Technique
This is a variation of the basic technique that I have used in memory competitions, and is the same concept that the top memory athletes all use for memorizing objects and lists of words.
Preparation in Advance
- Choose a location that you know well, such as your school, office or home. This is your “palace”.
- Build a sequence of 10-20 locations within this palace, in some sensible order around the space. Imagine you were giving someone a tour, starting at the entrance and walking around. This could be the road outside, the door, the shoe rack, the bathroom, etc.
- Walk through this sequence of locations a few times so that it becomes effortless to remember.
Use During Meditation
- When a thought arises that you want to do something with, place something to represent it in the first location of your memory palace. For example, if you need to remember to message Maria about a recipe, then you can imagine her walking past on the road. The more vivid and bizarre this image is, the easier it will stick, so you might instead imagine Maria cooking this meal in a food truck on the road.
- It should take only a few seconds to place this thought in your memory palace. Then let it go and return to your intended focus. It will stay in your memory quite reliably without any rehearsals.
- The second thought you want to store will be placed in the second location of the memory palace, and so on, so as each new thought arises, you place it in the subsequent location in your palace.
Recall Afterwards
- When you are ready, walk through the sequence of locations and recall what object—and therefore which thought—was placed in each location. You may be surprised how easy it is to recall everything, despite having spent only a few seconds of attention on storing each thought, and without using any external tool such as a notebook!
- Take any actions that you want to do, such as sending a message, adding a task to a to-do list, or simply thinking further about whatever had caught your attention.