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#Sherlocks mind palace series

Squire notes that mnemonic techniques like the memory palace are, “hardly vital in an age of external memory in which remembering information may be less important than knowing how to find it.”Īnd so Sherlock, who moves through but refuses to live in a Google-able world, might be the perfect protagonist for 2014. The Greco-Roman technique of the mind palace declined with the advent of the printing press. Sherlock’s mind palace makes Sherlock a testament to the power of human cognition in an age where intelligence itself is outsourced. Maybe it’s so reassuring to think of our mind as a place because so much of our memory lives in the cloud, on servers in Mountain View, or on a small beeping device. He isn’t so much recalling a list of binary numbers as moving through a Technicolor nightmare. Sherlock’s mind palace montage begins with him hallucinating Molly for a medical consult, and ends with him clawing his way out of Jim Moriarty’s imaginary insane asylum. He wanders around his mind palace in a kind of clip show. The trope comes to a head in the conclusion of the third season: Sherlock has been shot and must solve the crime before bleeding to death. In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock swipes through a kind of mental iPhone, multi-touching the air and auto-completing clues. On the other hand, watching Sherlock access his memory is high-tech, high-speed, and occasionally thrilling. Simonides identified the corpses by simply remembering who was sitting where around the table. While a variety of tools for rote memorization have been used around the world throughout history, Cicero claims that the Greek poet Simonides inadvertently invented the mind palace: “He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts.” The story goes that Simonides stepped out of a dinner party when the roof fell in and crushed the other banqueters beyond recognition. Watching him lick a political opponent’s face as a show of domination in “The Last Vow” might be spine-tingling, but his secret weapon is actually both ancient and accessible. Bond villains have grills and trained sharks Magnussen has a palace in his mind filled with imaginary filing cabinets. The simplicity of the device also reveals Magnussen to be a lackluster villain, despite the symmetry of his and Sherlock’s mental acuity. The fact that a “mind palace” sounds quaintly Victorian makes it the perfect tool for Sherlock. Sex acts are, perhaps unsurprisingly, hugely popular images. To represent the king of clubs, journalist and memory champion Joshua Foer used the image of moonwalking with Einstein, the title of his book about memory competitions.

#Sherlocks mind palace series

In order to shock the brain into remembering seemingly endless data, the memorizer must associate this information with a series of vivid mental images deliberately and in advance. Things are linked to similar things.” Memorizing massive amounts of information is not like normal memory, he noted. “That doesn’t seem like a very good analogy,” he understated.

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I told him that Magnussen mentally visited a vault full of filing cabinets that he would rifle through for government secrets. Larry Squire, Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology at UC San Diego about the way that Sherlock visually represented Sherlock and Magnussen’s mind palaces. The mind palaces that enable memory champions to memorize the order of a deck of cards in 32 seconds don’t look like Magnussen’s filing cabinets, though. A 2003 Nature study confirms: memory champions have average brains, a lot of practice, and powerful memorization techniques. Memory champions like Ed Cooke, however, claim to have simply “average memories.” “What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,” Cooke told the New York Times. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock showboats, pouts, scowls, and molds his putty-like face into various contortions, as if to prove he is uniquely brilliant. Watching the videos of World Memory Champions parrot 3,841 binary digits memorized over half an hour might be less entertaining than BBC’s latest hit, but it is astounding. But do our brains really work like Magnussen's imaginary filing cabinets? And if so, how much information can a non-Sherlock really file?Īpparently, a lot. Yes, it's been proven that imagining information spatially can help you organize and retain an enormous amount of information. In the middle of the second season of Sherlock, Holmes turns to John, Molly, and the viewer and growls, “ Get out… I need to go to my mind palace!” In the final episode of the most recent season, we finally meet Sherlock’s new nemesis, Charles Augustus Magnussen.