Memory Palaces and why they work

Take your childhood home for example – close your eyes as you take a trip from room to room – around every corner of the house.

As you do, I’ll bet the memories come flooding back of where the best hiding spots were or where you stored your secret stash of rocks.

This ability stems from the hippocampus – the same region of the brain involved with spatial and episodic memory.

Memory Palaces are an ancient hack that allow us to tap into the hippocampus and actively store important information, and recall it at will.

What is a Memory Palace?

Memory Palaces, also know as Method of loci, date back to ancient Greece. It is a technique used by monks and emperors alike, to link facts to imaginary physical locations – turning abstract data into something which your brain is naturally gifted at storing and retrieving.

In 2002, 8-time World Memory Champion, Dominic O’Brien recited 54 decks of cards using a variation of the Memory Palace technique coined the “Dominic System”.

How does it work?

A Memory Palace is a space – usually a real location know well – where you place memorable, often bizarre, images associated with the information or item you want to remember. The stranger the image, the stickier it becomes.

These images act as mnemonic anchors which are triggered as you mentally step through your ‘palace’. Using the brain’s natural aptitude for space, story and image – we’re not remembering the item itself, but instead, we remember the scene which we’ve built around the item.

Memory Palaces tap into several core strengths of human memory:

1. Spatial memory – we’re hard-wired to remember places. It’s the reason you can still navigate around your first school but forgot to take out the bins last night.

2. Visual encoding – the brain is better at recalling images than abstract words.

3. Chunking and association – by embedding random facts into stories, you reduce the cognitive load on the brain (akin to closing all 43 tabs in your browser and only focusing on one at a time)

Building your first Memory Palace

Memory Palaces are incredibly easy to get started with because the spaces you create are inherently yours. You might learn how to create one from a memory world champion but you can’t navigate around their house (unless you live there too).

1. Build your dataset – Try chunking it into 5-10 items to begin with. For language learners, simple verbs or vocab work best.

2. Pick your place – Make sure it’s somewhere you know well: your current house, the walk to the station.

3. Define a logical route – In order to make sense, the route should be logical and repeatable without confusion.

4. Associate vivid images with your item – the more ridiculous, the better.

5. Review and repeat – Walk through your palace regularly. The memory bonds strengthen with repeated use.

The important thing is to start small – try a shopping list or memorise the shelf of books in your bedroom. In time, and with practice, you too can be the architect of your very own memory city, stored with everything from the complete Swahili dictionary to every fact needed to take first place in your local pub quiz.