Creatively Speaking: The Mind Palace

Have you ever watched the BBC show Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch? It’s a fabulous, contemporary reimagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional character Sherlock Holmes. There is plenty of intrigue, suspense, and surprises — even in the retelling of stories that are more than 100 years old!

One of my favorite features of the show is Sherlock’s Mind Palace. It’s the BBC’s interpretation of Doyle’s “brain attic”:

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.” (A Study in Scarlet)

Indeed, Sherlock’s brain attic, his Mind Palace, is in quite perfect order. A bells-and-whistles brain filing system of memories complete with rooms of information and virtual touch screens for recall.

Sherlock’s Mind Palace is rooted in a centuries-old mnemonic technique known as the “method of loci.” It involves imagining yourself placing pieces of information around a room and then visualizing yourself walking back through to pick up the information. As Sarah Zielinski explains in her article “The Secrets of Sherlock’s Mind Palace” (Smithsonian Magazine):

“The ancient Greeks and Romans, such as the orator Cicero, employed the mind palace technique to memorize speeches, marking the order of what to say within a complicated architectural space. To write something down in that era was expensive and time consuming, a luxury not to be wasted, even on rhetoric. The method of loci continued to flourish through the Middle Ages, when monks and other scholastics used it to commit religious texts to memory.”

As a writer and artist, I have a Mind Palace of sorts. It’s filled with shelves on which I keep my memories and stories. When I’m working on a project, I often rummage around on the shelves, looking for some little detail or piece of story I can use. They don’t call up quite as dramatically as Sherlock’s, but the process is similar — connecting mismatched pieces of thought to come to a conclusion or a creation.

Now that I think about it — no pun intended — I have other places in my Mind Palace that I use for my creative work. There are rooms filled with books that I reference for quotes and comparisons, archetypes, and mythology. And a flatfile filled with artwork, images, and symbols I use for my projects and my clients’ projects. There’s even an audio room where I can play back conversations with mentors and teachers to help figure out the best step forward, for me and the people with whom I work.

That Mind Palace was actually the inspiration for this new series of emails you’ll be receiving called CREATIVELY SPEAKING. For the past few years, I’ve done separate eblasts for my Words by Jen clients, my Three Chairs Publishing fans, for self-published authors, and for creative professionals like myself. That approach has been feeling a bit fragmented lately — different voices, different personas, different messages.

My hope is that the quarterly posting of CREATIVELY SPEAKING will have a little bit of something for everyone — tips about promoting your business and your creative work, interesting articles about living a creative life, success stories from my clients, and more. Hope you enjoy it!

Happy Summer!

— Jen Payne

P.S. Want to know more about how to create your own Mind Palace? Read “How to Build a Memory Palace” from Art of Memory