The Number Field

The Memory Palace is a podcast/radio segment that tells stories from the past about people, places, things and events that have been forgotten and deserve to be remembered more broadly in our society and culture. The idea of the memory cottage is somewhat more modest; also to preserve that which is in danger of being forgotten, but is only relevant to only a small group of people–me, my family, and maybe a few friends.

The name of the podcast is a reference to a memory enhancement technique, also known as the Method of Loci, which uses the technique of creating links between the familiar and unfamiliar to aid in recalling the latter. My mother, a psychology professor, described it as trying to remember your grocery list by imagining walking from room to room in your house, placing each item on the list in a memorable place as you go along. When you need to recall the list, walk through the imagined house again and pick up the things that you left there. At the edges of my memory, I think there was a funny bit of apocrypha about a person famed for using this technique who forgot something one time, and blamed the failure on having recently rearranged the furniture in his real house. In a way, my hope is that this process can work in reverse; there are things all around that can remind us of the unfamiliar objects that once were once placed in the memory palace, and hopefully can cause that which was once familiar but is now less so to resurface, as Proust’s Madeleine did.