The Memory Palace

Imagine your room where two cats, wearing a bowler cap, are tap dancing, and holding two umbrellas in the middle of your room, a bunch of hay with chocolate on top on your bed, and a Omastar, with Shakespeare’s face superimposed on it. In the kitchen, on top of your refrigerator, a picture with you and your significant other facing the sunset in a beach you have just visited last summer. Inside the washroom, you will find Marian Rivera playing the piano and singing Sorry not Sorry while playing a kid’s piano.

That is the Memory Palace, a technique used and is still using by some people today. Cicero in his book, Rhetorica Ad Herrenium, has described it being a technique developed by the Ancient Greeks. Cicero goes on to relate a story in which the sophist was invited to present a lyric poem at a banquet in Thessaly. Shortly after he presented the poem, Simonides was called outside, during which the roof of the banqueting hall suddenly collapsed. The other guests were crushed to death, many of their bodies mangled beyond recognition.

This made it difficult for the identification of the dead, which was required for their proper burial. By consulting his visual memory of where the guests had been seated around the banquet table, Simonides was able to identify the dead. It was from this experience that Simonides realized that it would be possible to remember anything by associating it with a mental image of a location, thereby developing the Method of Loci.

The technique has, indeed, been proven by science, as you can see here.  According to that study, when asked to report whether the medicine students found the Memory Palace helpful, all participants (100%) agreed. Most of the respondents (92.9%) were able to recall facts better after learning them with MOL, although one participant remained neutral and another participant disagreed. About 85.7% of the participants agreed that it helped them understand the topic better, whereas 14.3% were neutral. In response to the item “I learned more during the session with MOL compared with my previous experience in physiology,” 71.4% agreed, 17.9% remained neutral, and 10.7% disagreed.

Based on my personal experience using the technique, I find it effective because I could visualize the different keywords in a provision, and attribute it in an object or an event that is poignant to me. Well, the results are, my scores got better, and I can easily remember a Section or an Article in law. Even so, sometimes, because of pressure, I have had a hard time concentrating; and thus, I cannot attribute all the provisions inside my head.

I still use the Memory Palace, anyway, being comfortable with it.

To test the technique, I will give you the meaning of social justice as defined in Calalang vs. Williams:

Social justice is “neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism, nor anarchy,” but the humanization of laws and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and objectively secular conception may at least be approximated. Social justice means the promotion of the welfare of all the people, the adoption by the Government of measures calculated to insure economic stability of all the competent elements of society, through the maintenance of a proper economic and social equilibrium in the interrelations of the members of the community, constitutionally, through the adoption of measures legally justifiable, or extra-constitutionally, through the exercise of powers underlying the existence of all governments on the time-honored principle of salus populi est suprema lex. Social justice, therefore, must be founded on the recognition of the necessity of interdependence among divers and diverse units of a society and of the protection that should be equally and evenly extended to all groups as a combined force in our social and economic life, consistent with the fundamental and paramount objective of the state of promoting the health, comfort, and quiet of all persons, and of bringing about “the greatest good to the greatest number.”