The memory palace
The oldest memory technique on record, and still the one memory champions win with. It works because you already have a huge, well-organised memory of places. You borrow that memory and hang new things on it.
Where it comes from
The story, told by Cicero, is about the Greek poet Simonides. He left a banquet moments before the roof fell in, and the bodies were too crushed to recognise. Simonides could name every guest by remembering where each one had been sitting. From that came the idea: memory for places is strong, orderly and almost effortless, so put what you want to remember in places. It was taught to orators for centuries as the method of loci ("loci" is Latin for places), and it's how people memorise a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute today.
How to build one
- Pick a place you know cold. Your home is best. You must be able to walk it in your head without effort.
- Fix a route and ten stops along it, always in the same order: front door, shoe rack, hall mirror, sofa, TV, kitchen table, sink, fridge, bathroom door, bath. The stops should be different from each other; two identical chairs are one stop.
- Walk the route in your head two or three times until the stops come without thinking. You only do this once per palace.
- Put one image at each stop. Make it interact with the stop, and make it too much: not "milk in the fridge", but the fridge bursting open and a tide of milk washing you back into the hall.
- To recall, walk the route. Each stop hands you back its image, and the image hands you the item.
An example: a talk with no notes
Five points for a five-minute talk about a new project:
| Stop | Point | Image |
|---|---|---|
| Front door | Why we started | A newborn baby is knocking on your front door, holding a briefcase. |
| Shoe rack | What went wrong | Every shoe is on fire, and a smoke alarm is screaming. |
| Hall mirror | What we learned | Your reflection is wearing a mortarboard and lecturing you. |
| Sofa | The budget | The sofa is stuffed with banknotes, bursting at the seams. |
| TV | What we need from you | A giant finger points out of the TV screen, straight at the audience. |
Walking into the talk you don't need notes, you need your hallway.
Tips from people who do this competitively
- Start with ten stops, then extend the route. One house can hold fifty.
- Build more than one palace: your home, your old school, your walk to work. Don't reuse the same palace for two lists on the same day, or the images blur.
- Put the image right on the stop, and make it change the stop: melt it, flood it, set it on fire.
- For something you want to keep, walk it again the next day and a week later. For a one-off, let it fade.
For vocabulary
A palace can hold a topic's words. Put kitchen words in your actual kitchen: at the fridge, nevera ("never a…"): a fridge that will never open however hard you pull, while the food inside laughs at you. Each word still needs its own sound-alike image; the palace adds order and a place to look when a word won't come.