Is Sherlock Holmes' Mind Palace a possibility?

The great Sherlock Holmes, the most sought after fictional genius of last two centuries has a lots of fascinating traits on offer. It isn't surprising that Sherlock's intellect has been the inspiration for various kind of studies like forensic sciences, science of deductions, science of handwriting, advancements in the science of psychology, collection and restoration of data and many more. His meticulous ways of investigation became a starting point for many inventions and development of methodologies to be used in research. In BBC's super successful series titled ' Sherlock ', in which Benedict Cumberbatch played the genius detective, a fresh concept related to Sherlock's brilliant intellect was shown. It was the 'Mind Palace'. Sherlock believed that for every problem there must be some experiential information stored in his mind which he in his own ways can access from his mind's memory storage to which he has given a theatrical name, his 'Mind Palace'. When I first saw it I was thrilled and have been imagining since then, what if ' Mind Palace' is a real thing? Can we create a mind palace of our own?

Many people whether they are fans of Sherlock Holmes or not argue that his level of intellect is unachievable and it's all a fantasy. Although there have been great many examples of genius personalities who have superb memory and they have been able to remember stuff beyond average intellect, like a figure that includes a lot of numbers, some people even have pictographic memory but all these things are still not anywhere near to the way Sherlock's fast processing brain works. Here we are talking about the 'Mind Palace', a place where every incident, every word written or read or spoken or heard is stored, like the folders of information in a hard drive, everything experienced in life exist as data in mind's storage. And the best part is he can access those informations on will, even if the odds are against him, however difficult or desperate the situation is, the 'Mind Palace' never fails him.

Like me, I am sure many of us face problems in remembering the very simple and little things in our lives, like the name of the person you met yesterday or the command you were given by your parent or partner or the boss about something or the things you read a little while ago. It's said that after attending a class, an average student's brain immediately forgets 40% of the stuff told or taught. Then, how can ordinary people like us contemplate the possibility of having a 'Mind Palace'? Well for all those who believe in learning from experiences and understand that whatever we are today is the result of all the things we have gone through, the environment we were given to groom ourselves, all the experiences that we have had, good-bad-amazing whatever they are, they are actually what combined together made us what we are.

Now, I would like to share a very personal experience about memory. Since childhood every time I was subjected to a traumatic experience in my life, like every time I was struck by a tragedy, I faced a serious hit to my conscious and sub conscious memory. The question is how ? Well we have a tendency to frame all the good experiences on our mind's memory wall, on the other hand we deliberately want to dump all the bad, traumatic, tragic and hateful memories out of our storage system. In the process we are forcing our brain to forget stuff and delete files from our system. While doing this our brain automatically starts to process things on the basis of significance and plain, boring or the things which are difficult to remember start slipping out of our mind, even if we want that to happen or not. The data of significant emotional values, may it be happy or tragic never slips out of our brain completely, it gets imprinted in our conscience. But in the desperate processes of removing tragic data, the ordinary data which does not have much emotional value but is of logical importance starts to slip out of our brain. Without our knowing, brain start labelling things and trashes out things chosen as insignificant by the brain. They may be stored in our sub conscious mind but are not in the conscious mind.

Let's look at a possibility where information in our brain is not to be retained by their emotional value. They are considered only as experiences and not labelled as good or bad ones, then our conscious mind will not prioritise information and keep everything as they are. We may not have the capability to build a 'Mind Palace' but we may end up having a 'Mind Apartment' of our own where significant amount of things and information is stored and can be accessed when we need them.

After all the jumbled discussions we have done above, the comparisons I am trying to draw here between Sherlock and us are that Sherlock's mind for the majority of time refrain from involvement of emotions, he thinks and reacts logically. He lives the adventures of life with thrill and excitement but never let them take any emotional toll on his head. At the times when he faces emotional challenges ( which are quite less by the way ) he does falter like all of us, he turns into a human like us, the superhuman powers take a hit. This tells that if a balance is achieved between emotional thinking, the emotional experiences of life and the logical thinking and logical experiences of life we surely can build a strong memory, if not a ' Mind Palace ' a ' Mind Hut' or a 'Mind Apartment ' of our own.