While a variety of tools for rote memorization have been used around the world throughout history, Cicero claims that the Greek poet Simonides inadvertently invented the mind palace: “He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts.” The story goes that Simonides stepped out of a dinner party when the roof fell in and crushed the other banqueters beyond recognition. Simonides identified the corpses by simply remembering who was sitting where around the table.

On the other hand, watching Sherlock access his memory is high-tech, high-speed, and occasionally thrilling. In “The Hounds of Baskerville,” Sherlock swipes through a kind of mental iPhone, multi-touching the air and auto-completing clues. The trope comes to a head in the conclusion of the third season: Sherlock has been shot and must solve the crime before bleeding to death. He wanders around his mind palace in a kind of clip show. Sherlock’s mind palace montage begins with him hallucinating Molly for a medical consult, and ends with him clawing his way out of Jim Moriarty’s imaginary insane asylum. He isn’t so much recalling a list of binary numbers as moving through a Technicolor nightmare.

Maybe it’s so reassuring to think of our mind as a place because so much of our memory lives in the cloud, on servers in Mountain View, or on a small beeping device. Sherlock’s mind palace makes Sherlock a testament to the power of human cognition in an age where intelligence itself is outsourced. The Greco-Roman technique of the mind palace declined with the advent of the printing press. Squire notes that mnemonic techniques like the memory palace are, “hardly vital in an age of external memory in which remembering information may be less important than knowing how to find it.”

And so Sherlock, who moves through but refuses to live in a Google-able world, might be the perfect protagonist for 2014. Given the past decade’s rash of larger-than-life superhero movies, a hero with an exceptional mastery of ancient memory techniques feels just the right size. The internet is a great rememberer, and so we love a hero who has so over-filled his memory that important information flows out the sides. If the most intense moments of the series occur when Sherlock remembers, some of the most delightful are when he forgets: forgets who the prime minister is, forgets that the Earth revolves around the sun, forgets even his own trousers.

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Why You Should Stop Googling and Start Remembering