This is the methods of loci. It was originally discovered in Ancient Greece, mostly by accident, The basic premise of it is that by accessing parts of your brain that isn’t normally dedicated to memorizing concepts (such as quotes, numbers or information) you can greatly enhance your abilities.

It is also referred to as the “journey method”, because in the first phase of training you essentially just have to imagine a building, or travel-path, and imagine the desired information being located on this path. This building can be a real building, or one you have made for the purpose.

This method is the most common method used by Memory Trainers all around the world, even by world champions. Memory challenges most often involve learning Pi to hundreds of points or even memorizing entire dictionaries

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDcVKtyryPw

Brain training methods such as this demonstrate the immense potential of the human mind, however, the methods as taught in the above video are designed to mostly target remembering sequences or lists. As such, to hope that after training our brains we could pick up languages in miniscule frames of time is a bit optimistic…but it can be done with a bit of tinkering.

Josh Cohen from http://www.mnemotechnics.org wrote this on another forum

Check out the audiobook Quantum Memory Power by Dominic O’Brien. He covers a vocabulary technique that allows memorization of grammar at the same time as vocabulary.

Basically, the method is to choose a town of city for your memory palace. Depending on the grammar of the language, divide the town up into two or three sections. Mnemonic images for masculine nouns go in one part of town, feminine in another, and neuter in another. Verbs can go in parks or stadiums, and adjectives in other parks or locations.

Examples with Spanish:

The mnemonic image for garlic (ajo) could be placed in a supermarket in the masculine section of town. Mnemonic image: a tuna fish wearing a lei made of stinky garlic, since “ahi” is tuna in Hawaiian.

The mnemonic image for mustard (mostaza) could be placed in a supermarket in the feminine section of town. Mnemonic image: painting a mustache with the mustard.

When you search through your mind for “garlic”, you end up in the supermarket in the masculine section of town, see the ahi tuna, and recall “ajo”.

Spanish is fairly straightforward with masculine-feminine, but you can use it for verbs too. I experimented with the technique by placing mnemonic images for Modern Greek in three separate parks depending on their conjugation pattern. “Perimeno”, “allazo”, and “xero” all go in one park. “Odhigo”, “prosepatho” and others go in a different park. If I recall Odie the dog driving a car around, I remember odhigo (to drive), and the image is in the 3rd park, which means 3rd conjugation group…

Dominic O’Brien’s basic method is to incorporate association, location, and imagination (exaggeration). Anything to be remembered should be associated with something (garlic -> ajo -> ahi -> tuna), exaggerated with imagination (tuna wearing a lei of garlic), and placed in a location (the supermarket in the memory palace).

Perhaps, rather than recieve a typical education as we know it using textbooks and games, the children of the future will be trained in mental techniques and meditation from a young age to allow them to accumulate vast amounts of knowledge and skills in a much accelerated time-frame. Perhaps it could even be the next generation…?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci