Mentat Wiki: Nook And Cranny Method

The "nook and cranny" method

This is a method for expanding the capacity of a MemoryPalace tenfold without adding extra rooms. It seems to have been developed by Scott_Hagwood?, the first Grandmaster of Memory from the US. He used it to play the longest game of Simon on record: 31 sequences of light and sound. (The previous record was 14 sequences.)

Hagwood's method is described in the article "Simon Made Simple" by John Grossmann, in the July 2004 Games magazine, page 4:

: To handle Simon's vexing array of yellow, red, blue, and green flashes, Hagwood employs what's called the "RomanRoom method," using familiar objects in the rooms of his house to help him remember Simon's pulsing patterns. "Counting walls, corners, floor, and ceiling, every room has 10 places I can 'put' stuff," he says. For example, if Simon initially flashes yellow, he might think of the sun, and starting in the corner to the left of the door to his den, imagine the sun melting the stereo speaker that sits there. If the next color is green, he pictures green balls bouncing (again, imagining movement helps) on the TV screen on the wall to his left. When he has used all the objects in the den, Hagwood moves to the living room, hanging more colors on easily retrievable mental hooks.

Here is a reconstruction of Hagwood's system based solely on the information in this paragraph. All places in the room are relative to the door through which you enter into the room, whether it is a real door or a notional one. A corner is defined as the intersection of two walls, not two walls and the ceiling or floor; it is a line segment, not a point. Thus, there are four corners in a room, not eight.

  1. near left corner
  2. left wall
  3. far left corner
  4. far wall
  5. far right corner
  6. right wall
  7. near right corner
  8. near wall
  9. floor
  10. ceiling

In short, to get ten more places out of each room, mentally traverse the room, starting in the near left corner and "touching" every wall and corner until you return to the wall through which you "entered" the room, then count the floor and ceiling as two more places.

Evidently Hagwood uses the objects in the places in his house as pegs rather than the places themselves. This makes good sense (LinkQuickly).