A memory palace is a place you know well that you use to remember things in order. You walk a fixed route through it in your mind and leave a vivid image of each thing at a spot along the way: a giant egg cracking on your doormat, a cow drinking from the bathroom sink. To remember, you walk the route again. The images are waiting where you left them.
The technique is also called the method of loci, from the Latin locus, place. It is more than two thousand years old, memory champions still use it, and you can build your first palace this evening in about ten minutes. This guide covers where it comes from, what the research shows, how to build one in five steps, a worked example, exercises and the mistakes that make it fail.
Where the memory palace comes from
The founding story is told by the Roman orator Cicero in his book De oratore. The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos recited a poem at a banquet and was called outside. While he was gone, the roof of the hall collapsed. The bodies could not be recognised, but Simonides could name every guest, because he remembered where each one had been sitting. Cicero draws the lesson: order is the key to memory, and the surest way to fix things in order is to tie them to places.
The oldest manual that survives is the Rhetorica ad Herennium, written in Latin around 80 BCE by an unknown author. It already contains the rules most teachers still give: use real places you can picture, keep them distinct from each other, not too dark and not too bright, at a moderate distance apart; and make the images striking, unusual, funny or ugly, because ordinary things slide out of memory and remarkable things stay.
The Roman teacher Quintilian describes how a speaker walks through a house in his mind, from the entrance through the rooms, and finds the parts of his speech where he placed them. For centuries after, the technique was part of every education in rhetoric. Speakers used it to give long speeches without notes.
Does it work? What the research shows
The memory palace is not folklore. Two studies are worth knowing.
- Memory champions are not born different. In 2003, a team led by Eleanor Maguire at University College London scanned ten people with exceptional memory, several of them from the World Memory Championships. They did not have higher intelligence or a different brain structure from ordinary people. What set them apart was how they learned: most used the method of loci, and while memorising they used brain regions known to be important for spatial memory and navigation.
- Ordinary people can learn it. In 2017, Martin Dresler and colleagues published a study in Neuron. People who had never used memory techniques trained the method of loci for 40 days, 30 minutes a day. Before training they recalled on average 26 words from a list of 72. After training, 62. Four months later, without further practice, they still recalled more than 22 words more than at the start.
The reason it works is not mysterious. People are very good at remembering places and routes, and at remembering strange images. They are poor at remembering loose lists. The memory palace turns a list into a walk past strange images.
How to build a memory palace in 5 steps
- Choose a place you know by heart. Your home is the best first palace: you can picture every room without effort. A route to work, your school or a grandparent's house works too.
- Fix a route. Always walk it in the same direction: front door, hallway, kitchen, living room, stairs. A fixed route is what keeps the order.
- Pick spots along the route. Start with 10: the doormat, the coat rack, the hall mirror, the kitchen table, the cooker, the sink, the sofa, the television, the bottom stair, the window on the landing. Each spot should be different from the others. Two identical chairs side by side will mix up their images.
- Turn each item into an exaggerated image and place it on a spot. Make it big, moving, strange, funny or a little disgusting. Involve sound or smell. Make it interact with the spot: not "milk near the coat rack", but milk pouring out of every coat sleeve and pooling on the floor.
- Walk the route and review. Walk it once right away, picking up each image. Walk it again that evening, the next morning and after a week. Every review makes it stronger; without review, the images fade within days.
A worked example: a shopping list
Say you need milk, eggs, bread, apples, coffee, tomatoes, cheese and washing-up liquid. Using the route above:
- Doormat: a giant egg cracks open as you step on it and yolk squelches through your socks.
- Coat rack: milk gushes out of every sleeve.
- Hall mirror: your reflection is a loaf of bread, waving back.
- Kitchen table: apples are rolling off it like marbles, thudding on the floor one after another.
- Cooker: a coffee pot the size of a barrel, roaring and smelling so strong your eyes water.
- Sink: tomatoes bob in it and burst, splattering the window.
- Sofa: made entirely of cheese, with holes you sink into.
- Television: foam from washing-up liquid bubbles out of the screen.
In the shop, walk the route: doormat, egg; coat rack, milk. Notice that the order of the list does not matter for shopping, but for a speech it does, and the route keeps it for free.
Our free memory palace generator does steps 2 to 4 for you: type up to 20 things and it lays out a route of 20 places through a villa, with an image for each, and a test to check yourself. It runs in your browser and stores nothing.
Three exercises to get good at it
- Ten random words. Ask someone for ten random nouns, or open a book at random and take the first noun on ten pages. Place them in your home palace in two minutes and recall them in order. Then backwards. Backwards is easy in a palace and almost impossible with rote repetition, which is a good way to feel the difference.
- A talk without notes. Take a talk or toast you have to give and reduce it to 5 to 8 key points. Place one image per point along the route. Practise the talk twice by walking the route; you will find you stop looking at your notes.
- Vocabulary. For a word in another language, make an image from how it sounds and tie it to the meaning. The Dutch word boterham (sandwich) sounds like "butter ham": a ham smeared with butter on your kitchen table. Put ten such images in a palace you reserve for that language.
The mistakes that make it fail
- Spots that look alike. Two bedrooms with the same bed, a row of identical kitchen cupboards. The images slide into each other. Choose spots that are clearly different.
- Images that are too polite. "A bottle of milk on the coat rack" is forgettable. Exaggerate size, number, motion and sense. The ancient manual says the same: ordinary things are forgotten.
- Too much on one spot. One item per spot to begin with. Later you can put two or three in one scene, but start simple.
- Changing the route. If you walk it in a different order each time, you lose the order of the list.
- No review. A palace you walk once is gone in a few days. The same evening, the next day and a week later is enough for most lists.
- Using it to understand. A memory palace holds facts in order. It does not explain them. Understand first, then use the palace to keep the pieces.
What a memory palace is good for
Anything that is a list or has an order: a speech, a presentation, the steps of a recipe or procedure, vocabulary, the names of the people at a meeting, historical dates, the outline of an essay, the main points of a chapter for an exam. Memory athletes use it for decks of cards and long numbers, with numbers turned into images by a fixed code.
If you want to go further, read why we remember some things and forget others.
The Memory Palace, the app, is something else
The Memory Palace, the app, is not a memory trainer: you do not memorise anything with it. It is your own 3D palace for your own memories: your photos, recordings and stories each get a room you can walk through. Private by default; you invite family and friends when you choose. The free memory palace generator is a separate tool for the classic technique. The app is made by a small team in Leuven. Have a look at the app.
Sources
- Cicero, De oratore II, 351-354 (the story of Simonides), Latin text at The Latin Library: thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/oratore2.shtml
- Rhetorica ad Herennium, book III, 16 to 24 (rules for places and images), passages at the University of Texas at Austin: laits.utexas.edu/memoria/Ad_Herennium_Passages.html
- Quintilian, Institutio oratoria XI, 2, Latin text at The Latin Library: thelatinlibrary.com/quintilian/quintilian.institutio11.shtml
- Maguire, Valentine, Wilding and Kapur, Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory, Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003), PubMed: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12483214
- Dresler and others, Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory, Neuron 93 (2017): cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30087-9
- Summary of the Dresler study (figures for recall before and after training), ScienceDaily, 8 March 2017: sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170308131236.htm