I have rather enjoyed the version of the memory palace portrayed in the current BBC series Sherlock<\/i>. The idea of memory palaces goes way back — at least to Simonides of Ceos.<\/p>\n
Specific memories are associated with an imagined physical architecture. In the mind of the mnemonist, each fact is placed in a particular location. One then simply needs to tour the imaginary building in one’s mind to retrieve each memory from its allotted place.<\/p>\n
There is an argument to be made that the sort of future reality I have been describing in these posts — in which you can walk around freely, using your own physical body to visit imaginary places — would be the ideal interface in which to store a memory palace. Your own muscle memory, proprioception, body sense and geographic intuition could be integrated into the process of storing and retrieving memories.<\/p>\n
Given what we now know about place cells<\/a> and grid cells<\/a> and how they operate, this seems like a very fruitful avenue of research to explore. These cells, buried deep in the hippocampus, turn out to be incredibly important.<\/p>\n In 2014 John O’Keefe and Edvard and May-Britt Moser won the Nobel prize for the discovery of such neurons, and for thereby showing that our ability to navigate the physical space around us is a fundamental part of how our memory works.<\/p>\n So perhaps the secret to future computer interfaces lies deep in our hippocampus, which is, by the way, a wonderful word. If translated literally, it means “horse fish”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have rather enjoyed the version of the memory palace portrayed in the current BBC series Sherlock. The idea of memory palaces goes way back — at least to Simonides of Ceos. Specific memories are associated with an imagined physical architecture. In the mind of the mnemonist, each fact is placed in a particular location. … Continue reading “Memory palaces and embodied cognition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16501"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16501"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16502,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16501\/revisions\/16502"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}