The science journalist Joshua Foer in his book Moonwalking With Einstein introduces people to an ancient mnemonic called the memory palace. The idea is people are better at remembering visual images than facts, words, and dates. The goal is to picture a real or imaginary place you are familiar with, and then associate what you want to remember with the areas and objects in that place. Joshua Foer talks about the memory palace in his TED video above.
It can be difficult to organize a memory palace in a way you can easily recall important facts under the stress of a trial. In Shane Read’s book Winning at Public Speaking he gives the following example of how he organizes his memory palace. Shane Read uses the rule of three, to use three rooms in a house, to remember three points in the following example.
He associates the front door with his bottom-line message (I refer to this as an Overall Theme), and pictures the bottom-line message on the door. He then enters the house and associates his first point with the first room on the left, the dining room. If wants to make two subpoints he uses two objects to represent each subpoint. By picturing something like a dining room table and a chair in the dining room it reminds him there are two subpoints he wants to make. For the second point he moves into the kitchen. He uses the dishwasher as an example to represent a weakness in the case, because he considers his failure to unload the dishwasher one of his weaknesses. He then associates his third point with the garage, with his ending point being associated with the garage door leading to the alley.
