We already know that stories persuade. But are there other reasons stories are useful? What is it about what happens in our minds when we hear stories that makes them so useful to us as trial lawyers?
When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to drive a manual transmission. That was either lucky or well-planned since I spent 8 years of my life playing professional basketball in Europe where I almost exclusively drove manual transmissions. The first car my dad gave me was a 1976 Fiat Spider convertible (like the one below) which, even when I was a 6’5” 15-year-old learning to drive, wasn’t easy for me to fit in. But it sure was fun.
The first time my dad let me in the driver’s seat, I’m sitting there at the top of a small hill in Carrollton, Texas, the top down on a hot Texas day, the engine running, and my dad sitting next to me. I had my right foot on the brake, my left foot pushing the clutch in, and my hand shaking holding onto the stick shift. He said, “Let’s go!” and I pulled out the clutch before my right foot left the brake. The car jumped forward about a foot and the engine died. I was so mad.
But then I remembered my dad telling me the story of the first time he drove a manual transmission. He said back in boot camp, the Army instructor piled my dad and a dozen or so other recruits in the back of a large military truck to prove they knew how to drive. The instructor would pick a recruit from the back of the truck and make him shift through the gears enough to get the truck up to 30-40 mph. Then the next recruit was up. That’s how the Army tested their ability to drive.
So my dad sat in the back of the truck huddled in the corner trying to hide from the instructor long enough so he could ask his fellow recruits how to drive a manual transmission. When it was his turn up, my dad dropped out of the back of the truck and walked to the driver’s seat, knowing there was no way he was about to pass. When he got in the driver’s seat, he was at the top of a hill looking down. The instructor said, “Let’s go!” and my dad let off the brake. The truck started to roll down the hill. Once it picked up some speed, he let out the clutch, pushed on the gas, and the truck took off. He whipped through a few gears, and the instructor said, “Good job, Bennett. Next!”
He had passed.
Memory experts for hundreds of years have used a technique called a “Memory Palace” to help them memorize all sorts of things. The science backing the memory palace technique reinforces the notion that people like information that is delivered to them in a way that flows naturally (is easy to follow) and with details that can be easily remembered.
Memory is a crucial function of our brains and is essential to our sense of self, yet there are still a lot of misconceptions about memory. Some people may consider themselves bad memorizers, and many people may experience forgetfulness from time to time, but what if we are collectively treating memory wrong. What separates individuals who compete in memory competitions, memorizing hundreds of random words and numbers in just minutes, from the rest of us? It turns out these “memory athletes” do not have a higher IQ or differences in their brain structures from the rest of us. Rather, a vast majority of superior memorizers have continually practiced and mastered some form of a technique known as the “method of loci” or “memory palace technique,” which engages regions of the brain associated with encoding and retrieval of information.
The origins of the memory palace technique can be traced back to ancient Greece. It was found that visualizing a familiar, physical place (such as your home) in your mind and associating information with specific areas of that familiar place helped to remember the information. To create a memory palace, a person first “walks” through the familiar place in his or her imagination, tying each piece of information to a specific area in the place with vivid detail. Retrieval of the information is done by following the same imaginary path back through the place, stopping at each specific area to access the tied information. Anthony Metivier, of Magnetic Memory Method, provides a good guide for creating your first memory palace, and suggests the technique is more effective “when you add surprising or out-of-the normal features to the information.”
What the ancient Greeks did not know about the memory palace technique is that visualizing and retracing this imaginary route triggered specific areas of the brain associated with spatial memory, allowing the information to be more easily processed by memory-related brain structures. Even more recent research suggests that the memory palace technique not only triggers specific areas of the brain but can reorganize the brain’s overall functional network, “enabling superior memory performance” with proper training. In this study, published in 2017, researchers in Germany compared 51 participants with no training in the memory palace technique to top memory athletes. The participants were initially screened to get a baseline of their memory abilities before being placed into two groups: one group got six weeks of memory palace technique training (a total of 40 thirty-minute sessions) and the other control group received no training. The group that received only six weeks of memory palace training saw a significant change in the number of words recalled compared to the non-training control group. Additionally, the group that received training began to show brain connectivity patterns that were similar to that of top memory athletes, while the control group did not experience similar changes.
Despite some continued skepticism around the memory palace technique, research continues to suggest the technique and training works. And after I re-started that Fiat at the top of that hill with my dad sitting next to me, I remembered his boot camp story. I let off the brake and let the car coast down the hill before pulling the clutch and taking off. I don’t know if my dad told me that boot camp story on purpose. But I do know my memory of that story helped me find the solution, and I haven’t forgotten it since. A good trial lawyer can emphasize important facts, binding them to parts of their client’s story that the jury can visualize. Maybe people have better memories than we realize, we just have to walk them through it in a way that effectively uses their memory.
For more information please listen to the following podcast:
https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/memory-palace/