Verified by 
Key points
- A memory enhancement strategy often used in memory competitions, known as the "method of loci," can help improve laypeople's memory, a new study finds.
- Both memory athletes and non-athletes demonstrated increased hippocampal connectivity after training; such memory-related brain changes were not seen in a control group.
- Using mnemonic devices like the method of loci could help many people improve long-term memory, the researchers suggest.
A new European cognitive neuroscience study published in this month’s Science Advances reveals that by using the “method of loci," long-term memory can be improved by anyone, not just world champions of memory sports.
The method of loci is a common technique used by memory sports competitors. It refers to the memory enhancement strategy of associating the items to be memorized with specific physical locations and retrieving the items by mentally “walking” through the imagined place.
This method is not a new technique; its origins are traceable to ancient Greece and Rome. In Latin, loci refers to a location or place. In De Oratore, Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) describes a mnemonic technique of mentally selecting and placing images that was used by the Greek poet Simonides (c. 556-c.468 B.C.E.) according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Among the study authors is world-ranked memory athlete Boris Nikolai Konrad, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour at the Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands. Konrad is a three-time winner of the North German Memory Championship (2004, 2005, 2009), among his numerous other record-setting memory achievements and awards in both team-based and individual memory competitions.
“Even memory researchers who are not familiar with mnemonics seem to believe what memory athletes do is targeting working memory,” said Konrad. “Tasks look very similar to what is done in working memory research. For example, the digit span task is often used. Most people can remember seven digits read out to them at the pace of one per second. Memory athletes can do hundreds. Even more important, while those seven digits are forgotten quickly, memory athletes can remember them the next day and longer. They surpass working memory.”
The study has two parts, a memory athlete study, and a memory training study. In the memory athlete study, the cognitive scientists compared how 17 experts using the method of loci among the world’s top 50 in memory sports were able to recall a list of items with a matched control group of 16 that was “closely matched for age, sex, handedness, and intelligence.”
For the training study, the 17 memory athletes were compared with 50 participants who were not memory athletes. The non-athletes were divided into three groups where some received either six weeks of memory training, working memory training, or no training.
The scientists took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans during both encoding and recognition. They discovered that task-based activation decreases in the lateral prefrontal, parahippocampal, and retrosplenial cortices for both memory athletes and the participants of the memory training group post-training.
“Across participants of the training study, we found increased hippocampal connectivity during rest after training with the lateral prefrontal cortex, left angular gyrus, parahippocampal regions, and the caudate nucleus that was higher the more durable memories were formed,” wrote the researchers. The follow-up analysis showed that these effects were “specific to the memory training group after training but were not present in any of the control groups.”
"What I found most interesting about our results is that already after six weeks of training people memorize more efficiently,” said Konrad. “I had expected that for the memory champions who have years of experience. That we see it in beginners so quickly is great news in my opinion, as it shows it is possible to quickly adapt this way of learning. Our study confirms that in both memory athletes and novices, doing memory training using mnemonics leads to more durable memories."
Copyright © 2021 Cami Rosso All rights reserved.
