Spatial Memory Quotes

When I'm problem-solving with something, I have, effectively, a CAD program in my head that's like a room that has specific qualities to it that I go to some deal of effort to populate. Textures and smells, something like that.

The truth is, I don't sketch much at all. I have a very visual/spatial brain that retains a lot of information about maps, directions, positioning, and details, so I usually prefer working out those issues on the page itself.

One trick, known as the journey method or 'memory palace,' is to conjure up a familiar space in the mind's eye, and then populate it with images of whatever it is you want to remember.

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

The past is still visible. The buildings haven't changed, the layout of the streets hasn't changed. So memory is very available to me as I walk around.

Once I'd reached the point where I could squirrel away more than 30 digits a minute in memory palaces, I still only sporadically used the techniques to memorize the phone numbers of people I actually wanted to call. I found it was just too simple to punch them into my cell phone.

As a kid I could be in New Lodge in a minute. I'd go down our street, turn right and I was there.

When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.

What did you do, memorize a map of the city for fun?” says Christina. “Yes,” says Will, looking puzzled. “Didn’t you?

My memory is basically visual: that's what I remember, rooms and landscapes. What I do not remember are what the people in these room were telling me. I never see letters or sentences when I write or read, but only the images they produce.

Chimpanzees are incredibly intelligent. They can learn more than 400 signs of American Sign Language. They have memories for spatial distribution, like numbers on a TV screen, way better than ours. You come onto the emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and despair - all the things for which I was accused of being anthropomorphic when I ascribed them to chimpanzees.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

I never, in any city I've ever been in, never remember the names of streets. The longest place I ever lived in was for five years and I didn't know the name of the next street over.

One person might be able to learn by reading, another will have a good audio memory, and another will make notes in different colored pens. I have a more multi sensory memory - I remember what I was doing when I learnt it and where I was.

The mammalian brain evolved exquisite place memory because that was essential for survival. This is why squirrels have such a good memory for where they buried their nuts.

I have found that all of my memories seem to need a place and that a good part of what we think of as explicit memory has to do with location.

When you visualize the recent past, do you see it as being somewhere over on the left?

I could walk into anyone's home one time and draw a three-dimensional architectural plan of the inside of their home from memory, but I could not add up a column of numbers.

I do not think about absent persons as often or with such intense longing as I think of places. They lie one below the other in my mind.

I'm greedy about cities - I like to form my impressions of them on my own, and on foot as far as possible, looking and listening, having conversations with bridges and streets and riverbanks, conversations I tend not to be aware of until a little later, when I find myself returning to those places to say hello again, even if only in memory.

The bees learn where they live by landmarks. If they're moved within their home range, they get confused.

As bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

It's easier to fall back into old behaviors when you come back to a place where you were a shorter person.

The inhabitants are hardly barbarous, they have a ...marvelous faculty for remembering places, and for describing them to one another. They ...can recall things that a White could not rehearse without writing

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.