Sherlock Holmes, Chess and Pastries
Memory and learning by accident
If you read my last newsletter and didn’t already know that in England a rental car is often known as a “hire car,” I bet it has stuck with you.
That’s because when new information comes to you in a story, it sticks. There’s plenty of research that seems to back this up, but I’m happy with anecdotal evidence (get it? Anecdote?).
30 seconds
Jack and Jill went up a hill. Why did they do it? I’m sure you can tell me. Just like you can probably tell me the major plot points of your favorite novel even if you haven’t read it in years. But how many times did you check and recheck your grocery list the last time you were at the store?
Short term memory is well named, it turns out. Our short term memory only lasts 15-30 seconds, according to this article by Yana Weinstein at Duke. I forget where I was going with that, but the point is, if there’s something you want to remember, you have to find an effective way to transfer it to your long term memory. If you remembered that if you want to rent a car in England you’re looking for a “hire car,” then you successfully put that piece of information into your long term memory. When you want your readers to remember something, you need to give them a way to do the same.
In the article linked above, Weinstein quotes another researcher, who compared memory to a hotel. “short-term memory [can only enter] the lobby, and long-term memory [checks into] the guest rooms.”
A mind hotel. Sounds a lot like a mind palace.
Memories on memories
I first heard about a mind palace while watching the TV show Sherlock. It’s a mental reconstruction of a place you know, and you put things you want to remember into it, each memory in a specific spot. This is supposed to aid in retrieval, because you can always go back to that place in your mind. Fictional show, real technique.
Maybe it’s a stretch, but I think that part of the value of a memory trick like this is that you create little make-believe experiences for yourself each time you use it. When Sherlock remembers something this way, he doesn’t start with the fact in hand. He visualizes the journey through his mind palace until he finds the memory he was looking for. What’s a make-believe experience if it’s not a story?
You can list as many facts as you want, and your readers might be able to check some of them into the hotel. When you tell a story, though, not only are they more likely to remember it—they don’t even have to. Because when they want the facts, they can simply remember the story.
Chess and pastries
In his excellent book, How Life Imitates Chess, Garry Kasparov, one of the most dominant world champions ever, explains that grandmasters don’t simply memorize hundreds of moves across dozens of variations. Of course they haven to commit a lot to memory, but how do they access the right memories to use? People will call it intuition, but Kasparov describes it as a pastry.
If you walk into a bakery on the other side of the globe, you might not be able to read any of the signs. You may not exactly recognize anything in the display case. But you’ll almost certainly see something that you know you’ll like, because it looks like something you’ve seen before.
Learning by accident
When a story has the right elements—characters, tension, conflict, hope, struggle, maybe even resolution and satisfaction—facts that come up in the course of its telling become just part of the experience. Learning them may not have been what you set out to do, but learn them you did. I call this learning by accident and it’s the key to writing blockbuster nonfiction.
Use this technique in your writing and your readers will come out on the other side with the information. They’ll feel smart, too, which is a great way to make sure they’ll talk about your book.
Mastering this skill—the ability to surface facts from within a good story, rather than using stories as examples after delivering the facts, and you just might write a bestseller one day.