Psychologyspeaking topic
The method of loci: placing information inside an imagined space has been a memory technique for thousands of years. Why is our spatial memory so powerful?
— method of loci (memory palace)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Confirmation bias: why do we only pay attention to information that supports what we already believe? Why do we demand far more evidence to change our minds than to keep them?
- Each time we remember an event we rebuild it, mostly out of words, and the memory reshapes itself to fit the telling. Describing a face in words even makes you worse at recognizing that face later. Is telling a memory a way of preserving it, or of slowly corrupting it?
- The Dunning-Kruger effect: why are the people who know the least sometimes the most confident? And why can our confidence actually drop as we learn more about a subject?
- Effort justification: why do we value something more the more effort and hardship we went through for it? Why does hard-won feel more precious?
- The Barnum effect: why do horoscopes feel like they were written just for us? Why do we read vague, flattering statements as personal truths?