Those of you who watched Sherlock Holmes last night would have seen him use a memory technique that is closely linked with NLP. Whilst trying to remember the significance of two clues he put himself into a trance and went to what he called his "mind palace". Whilst he wrestled with a string of seemingly random associations, his partner Dr.Watson explained to another character what he was up to.
Essentially what he did was to return to a place in his memory - somewhere that he had deliberately visited before. When there in his mind previously he had deposited certain memories. As he returned there, he associated that place with the memories and they returned to him. What he had done was to set up what in NLP terms is called an anchor. This is an association between two things and can occur naturally or as in this case be set up deliberately. All he had to do was remember how to journey to the place and the memories stored along the way would return to him as associations as he passed them.
Many of he world's memory experts use this technique for things such as remembering a pack of cards in order. They follow a familiar journey in their mind and as they do so mentally place the cards along the route. The cards then become associated with something about the route at that point and an anchor is set up. When they mentally return to that same point, the same association occurs and they remember the card.
It's a great technique to teach kids to help them remember things like vocabulary lists. They are often surprisingly good at it and making it into a game makes it more fun too.
The female character in Sherlock Holmes seemed more intrigued by the name Holmes gave to the technique. She asked Watson, "why does he call it his mind palace." The answer - "he would, wouldn't he!"
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