The memory palace technique: how to build one
A memory palace stores information by placing vivid images along a route through somewhere you know well. To remember, you walk the route in your mind and read off what you left there. It's also called the method of loci, and it's more than 2,000 years old.
How to build one
- Pick a place you know cold. Your home, your childhood home or your walk to work all work. You should be able to picture it without effort.
- Set a fixed route. Choose a path through it and stick to it, such as front door, coat hooks, kitchen table, stove, back window. These stops are your loci. Start with ten.
- Turn each item into an image. Abstract things don't stick, so make them concrete. To remember "contract renewal," you might picture a giant pen signing itself.
- Place one image at each stop. Make it strange, oversized or moving. A loaf of bread on the counter is forgettable. A loaf of bread kicking the coat hooks off the wall is not.
- Walk it back. Close your eyes and go through the route in order. Do it again after an hour and again the next day, fixing any stop that comes up blank.
A quick example
Say you need to remember milk, a dentist appointment and a call to your sister. At the front door, milk is pouring through the letterbox. On the coat hooks hangs a huge set of teeth, chattering. At the kitchen table, your sister is sitting there holding a ringing phone out to you. Walk through the house once and all three are there, in order.
Where it comes from
The traditional origin story, told by Cicero, is about the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos. He stepped out of a banquet moments before the roof collapsed, and he could identify the victims by remembering where each one had been sitting. Roman orators later used the technique to deliver long speeches without notes, which may be where the phrase "in the first place" comes from, though that origin is disputed.
What the research says
Memory champions aren't built differently. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience compared superior memorizers with matched controls. It found no sign that exceptional intelligence or differences in brain structure explained their ability. Their brains did engage regions tied to spatial memory and navigation more strongly, and nine of the ten said they used the method of loci for some or all of the tasks.
Ordinary people can learn it. In a 2017 study in Neuron, participants with no memory training were assigned to six weeks of method of loci practice, working memory practice or no training, at 30 minutes a session for 40 sessions. The method of loci group's recall of a 72-word list improved far more than either control group's, roughly doubling according to coverage of the study, and the advantage was still there four months later.
Keep the limits in mind. That study had 51 participants, all of them male, and it tested word lists. It tells you the technique works for memorizing, not that it makes you sharper in general.
Mistakes that make it fail
- Using a place you can't really picture. If you're inventing the route as you go, you're memorizing two things.
- Overloading one stop. Stick to one image per locus, or chain a few together only once you're practiced.
- Using bland images. If an image isn't odd enough to surprise you, it won't be there tomorrow.
- Skipping review. A palace holds up well, but anything you want for the long term needs a few return visits.
- Reusing a route too soon. Old images linger and collide with new ones. Keep separate routes for separate lists.
Using it for passwords
The technique works well for the few passwords you need to keep in your head, and we cover that in how to remember passwords. Password Palace takes the idea one step further: you build a 3D room, and arranging it correctly is how you log in. Try the demo to see how it feels.