BBC Sherlock Fan Forum - Serving Sherlockians since February 2012 / What's the difference between mind palace & pictorial narratives?

**Posted by saturnR** January 19, 2014 5:23 am

In school, I remember being taught pictorial narratives as a way to remember dates & definitions/basic facts, where we are told to convert words to pictures based on phonetic association & numbers to pictures based on visual association. For random lists, you assign a picture to each entry on the list & then link the whole list via narrative, the more ridiculous the narrative, the better.

Is this technique like a watered down version of the mind palace technique (which is supposed to be more powerful) or a completely different memory technique altogether.

**Posted by silverblaze** January 19, 2014 2:36 pm

They're similar. In a mind palace, you use locations that you know and you put the visual cues there. The advantage of a mind palace is that if you forget one cue, the chain doesn't break. The disadvantage is that it takes more work, especially in the beginning, because you need to pick good locations that you can remember easily.

**Posted by guestthebutler** January 27, 2014 1:34 pm

I once played a comedy Sherlock Homes in a wee amdram production. For the huge, great, big, lengthy and daunting speech at the end where Sherlock reveals who the villian is and how he did it, I had to make up a little 'mind palace' of sorts to help me remember it all. Each clue from the monologue was, in turn, mentally matched to a different well known location on a favourite walk of mine. Worked a treat and I could remember it for ages afterwards too so it really works!.