The idea is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily visualize, and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to remember. Known as the "method of loci" by the Romans, such a building would later come to be called a "memory palace."#4033•
The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better. "When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous.
But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time."#4031•
When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex#4032•
Chapter 6
As Petrarch said in a letter to a friend, "I ate in the morning what I would digest in the evening; I swallowed as a boy what I would ruminate upon as an older man. I have thoroughly absorbed these writings, implanting them not only in my memory but in my marrow." Augustine was said to be so steeped in the Psalms that they, as much as Latin itself, comprised the principle language in which he wrote.#4035•
This is not dissimilar from how actors are taught to memorize scripts. Many actors will tell you that they break their lines into units they call "beats," each of which involves some specific intention or goal on the character's part, which they train themselves to empathize with. This technique, known as Method acting, was pioneered in Russia by Konstantin#4034•