Alongside my MIDI fractals project which has become a pure passion project, I have been crafting a TedX talk in place of my 11th grade i2 project. The topic of the talk is something I am quite excited about: the memory palace, or more professionally, the method of loci. This is a subject that I truly hope I can do justice with my TedX talk, and I hope more than anything for the audience to share the same enthusiasm that I do by the end of my presentation.

For starters, the memory palace is a technique which combines the human brain’s inherent aptitude for spatial awareness and ability to remember absurd images with great effectiveness. By creating sticky images that relate to the content you are trying to memorize and placing it sequentially in a location you have pictured in your mind, you are able to recall long strings of words and lists in order, verbatim. The technique has ancient roots, tracing back to the time of great epic authors like Homer who had others pass down their works through oral tradition.

In my talk I want to not only share my excitement about how interesting the concept of the memory palace is, but I want to stress how it can be integrated in to your everyday life, how it can make the overwhelming, sometimes dreaded task of memorization fun, and how it can help rejuvenate parts of our brains that have fallen behind as we become over reliant on technology.

The process of writing an original speech is completely new to me, as although I have participated in speech since Sophomore year, I haven’t written any original works. Getting my ideas onto paper was tricky at first, but thanks to the mentors of the speech team I have been able to target specifics of the memory palace, narrow my scope, and find exactly what it is I’ve wanted to say.