Sherlock’s ‘mind palace’ – it actually works in real life!

Sherlock Holmes has long been known for his powers of deduction. But that’s not all. The latest reincarnation of the master sleuth, in the BBC drama simply titled ‘Sherlock’, also serves up another trick of his: the mind palace.

If you’ve watched the series, then you’d notice how he moves about this mental space picking up clues that somehow hold the key to the puzzle that the duo is faced with.

It’s quite against the “Google it” norm. Yet the truth is that even if this feat seems only fictional, it has existed, long before technology made things so much easier for all of us.

It all began with Greek poet known Simonides who discovered as in an accident that when he visualized the room, he could recall the names of all the people who died. Later on, he used this technique to remember things by walking through buildings that he was familiar with.

As for now, this technique continues to be used by ‘mental athletes’ who compete in memory championships throughout the world. These athletes associate an imagined simple stroll in a familiar neighborhood with binary numbers, strings, random words and shuffled cards and so on and so forth.

Of course, most of us could do with a bit of mental real estate considering how we have to remember PINs, birthdays of people but most importantly relevant facts and concepts for our exams.

And it should come as no surprise that a Grand Master of Memory, Ed Cooke, used this technique to memorize almost a thousand studies for psychology finals as he strolled through the streets of Oxford.

Yes, it works in real life.

All in all, even if it might seem passe in this age where technology is there to make Life easier, nothing beats remembering the number of a cab company especially if your phone is dead.