The Metagame #010: How's Your Memory?

In case you missed my last email: I’m reviving The Metagame.

If you’re interested in the intersection between productivity, self-improvement, the influence games have on us, and ways to have a successful and meaningful life—you might want to stick around.

Here’s what’s in store for today:

• The Journey Method

• Experiencing vs. Remembering Self

• Sequence—A Daily Memory Challenge

Read time: 6 minutes

The Journey Method

If you’re familiar with the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, then you know about his “memory palace”—an imaginary dwelling constructed solely in his mind.

He uses this space to remember facts, details, stories, and bits of information that might come in handy later.

I’ll spare you the details on how memory palaces work—if you’re not familiar with it, or want to read more about them, check out this article.

While most people can't construct a fully-furnished mansion in their mind (I certainly can’t), I learned a little technique that involves using a place you’re more intimate with.

Memory expert, motivational speaker, and USA Memory Champion Chester Santos has an incredible book called Mastering Memory, where he teaches all the techniques he uses to improve his memory and retain information like a sponge.

One of these techniques Santos calls the “journey method,” but it’s also known as the “Roman room method.” (Roman orators, including the famous Cicero, would use this method to give hour-long speeches from memory.)

Picture your living room. Or your kitchen. Any room in your home or apartment you know every detail about. Picture the tables. The chairs. The cabinets. Is there a TV? A lamp? A toaster? A coffee machine?

In your mind, walk in a loop around the room and note 10-15 significant objects, appliances, furniture, or decorations.

This should be relatively easy, as you should be familiar with this place.

Let’s use my kitchen as an example. Here’s my list of objects:

1. Stove

2. Kettle

3. Blender

4. Coffee machine

5. Toaster

6. Sink

7. Drying rack

8. Wine holder

9. Microwave

10. Fridge

Feel free to come up with your own list, or just follow along with my kitchen.

(Although, it may be hard for you to do this exercise if don’t know what my kitchen looks like...)

Once you have these objects in your head, you’re pretty much set to memorize anything.

Let’s use this list to memorize the ten most recent Academy Awards winners for Best Picture:

2015: Birdman
2016: Spotlight
2017: Moonlight
2018: The Shape of Water
2019: Green Book
2020: Parasite
2021: Nomadland
2022: CODA
2023: Everything Everywhere All At Once
2024: Oppenheimer

Here’s how you use this method:

1. Picture a half-bird, half-man creature standing on a stove. Its little bird feet are getting burned by the hot surface of the stove.

2. Next to the bird-man, there is a kettle with boiling water. There’s a spotlight shining through the steam, making a stunning shadow across the room.

3. Next to the stove is a blender, with another beam of light shining on it—this time, from the moon! The moonlight refracts off the spinning blades of the blender, giving a disco-ball effect.

4. Next, you hear the drip of the coffee machine. You think you smell coffee, except you forgot to put the K-cup in! All that’s coming out is water into your funny-shaped mushroom mug. What a weird shape for the water…

5. You start to smell a burning coming from the toaster—oh no, there’s a green fire billowing out! Someone put a green book in it, making the flames change color!

6. You move to the sink to get some water for the flames, but when you turn on the faucet, hundreds of pink parasites start crawling out! They look like spiders, except they have 5 legs and fangs.

7. To get away from the parasites, you move over to the drying rack. Instead of cups, utensils, and plates, you find dozens of tiny little nomads climbing through the slots where the silverware should be! They’re also running away from the parasites coming out of the sink.

8. Next, there is a sweet, crisp smell of a nice merlot coming from the wine rack. What good is wine without a bit of music? You hear a melodious tune playing while you take a sip of the wine, and it’s so nice, you want to hear it play again. Luckily, it does and the coda plays twice. (If you’re non-musical, this might not make sense to you—in music, a coda is a section of a song that’s found at the end, concluding the music.)

9. After the music finishes, you hear the hum of the microwave. You look inside and see instead of food, there’s a metal spoon inside! This is causing a reaction, and plasma particles are shooting everywhere, all at once. Good luck cleaning this fiery mess up…

10. And finally, you realize how hungry you are. You open the fridge, and there’s no food left—only a massive, frozen atomic bomb. Who left this here? Must’ve been the one and only J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The goal is to be as creative as possible. Use all your senses—smell the bird-man creature getting cooked on the stove, hear the kettle whistling as it boils over, taste the delicious red wine while you hear the music. The more creative you are, the easier it is to remember the associations.

Now, you simply walk through the kitchen.

When you’re familiar with the room, it’s easy to traverse it in your mind, see all the objects, and recall the stories you created to help you remember the movies.

This is a powerful memory technique that, once mastered, can be applied to anything. Use this technique when you want to memorize movies, bullet points for a speech, or simply show off your memory skills to your friends.

The Experiencing Self vs. The Remembering Self

Imagine you’re planning the perfect vacation.

Where are you going?
How long are you staying?
What clothes do you pack?
What camera do you bring?

Now, at the end of the vacation, your memory is wiped, and all your photos are deleted.

If you knew this ahead of time, would you have still planned the same vacation?

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the late Daniel Kahneman talks about the experiencing self vs. the remembering self.

The experiencing self is the part of us that lives in the moment. The remembering self is the part that looks back and recalls past experiences.

Do you live in the moment?

Or do you live for the memory?

Keep this in mind the next time you plan a vacation (or see hundreds of people on their phones during a concert.)

A Memory Challenge

I’ve talked enough about memory already.

But what good is it if you don’t keep it in shape? Just like any other muscle, your memory needs to be trained—and maintained.

That’s why I built Sequence—a Wordle-inspired daily memory challenge.

It’s simple.

Follow the ever-growing pattern.

See how far you can get.

Repeat daily.

Play it here: Sequence.games

P.S. – My high score is 56.

Quote of the week

Thanks for reading!

If you have any questions, hit me up on LinkedIn or on 𝕏 at @sam_starkman, or feel free to reply to this email!

— Sam