There’s an idea I’ve heard about, the Mind Palace. It’s a sort of memory exercise, where you imagine a building—library, museum, palace, whatever—and sort stuff you know into different rooms. You take advantage of your brain’s natural tendency to form associations by tricking it into joining certain information to these imaginary rooms, so visualizing the room also calls up everything you’ve “stored” in there. I’ve never had the patience to try it out myself, but I thought of it earlier yesterday, when I decided to embark on this project, and I found myself able to begin conjuring up shots in my minds eye, just like I used to years ago, as if the ability was behind a door in my mind I just hadn’t opened up in a while. Maybe I didn’t “lose” my mojo so much as was driven away from it. Continue reading →