The memory palace: how it works and how to build your own
The technique memory champions use is 2,500 years old and requires no special talent. How to build a memory palace step by step, plus the four mistakes that ruin it.
Every year at the memory championships there are people who can recall the order of a full deck of cards in under a minute. When you ask them whether they have a photographic memory, the answer is usually disappointing: almost none of them do. What they have is a technique, and it's the same one people have used for twenty-five centuries.
It's called the memory palace, or the method of loci. The interesting part is that it demands no gift at all — it demands understanding why memory fails.
Where it comes from
Cicero tells the story. The poet Simonides of Ceos was at a banquet when he was called outside; while he stood at the door, the roof of the hall collapsed and crushed everyone at the table, so badly that the bodies couldn't be identified.
Simonides found that he could say who each person was: he remembered where each guest had been sitting. He didn't remember the list of names, he remembered the place. That's where the idea came from.
Why it works
Your memory is mediocre at abstract lists and extraordinarily good at two specific things: places and images.
Think about it. You couldn't recite twenty words back to me if I said them now, but you can walk mentally through the house you grew up in and tell me what was in each room, even though you haven't set foot in it for twenty years. Nobody made you study that house. It stuck by itself.
The memory palace cheats using that: it takes the information that won't stick and hangs it off a place you already know.
How to build one, step by step
1. Pick a route you genuinely know
Your home, the walk to work, your old school. It has to be somewhere you can walk through mentally without hesitating, and always in the same order. If you're unsure whether the bathroom comes before or after the kitchen, that palace is no good.
2. Fix ten stations
Ten specific points along the route: the front door, the coat rack, the sofa, the lamp, the kitchen table. Write them down once, in order, and walk them mentally three or four times until they come automatically.
Make them distinct from each other. The most common mistake is picking four similar chairs: they blur and you lose the order.
3. Turn each item into an image
This is where the real work is. An abstract word won't stick to a place; a ridiculous image will. Three rules multiply retention:
- Exaggerated. Not an apple: an apple the size of a car.
- Moving. Have it do something, fall over, explode.
- Interacting with the place. Not the apple next to the sofa: the apple smashing through the sofa.
4. Walk it, don't revise it
To recall, don't try to remember the list. Take the walk. Come in the front door, look at the coat rack, move on to the sofa. The information appears on its own, because it's hanging off each place.
A worked example
Shopping list: milk, batteries, light bulbs, bread, detergent.
- Front door: a river of milk pours down the steps and soaks your shoes.
- Coat rack: giant batteries hang there instead of coats, clinking.
- Sofa: an enormous light bulb is sitting on the sofa watching TV.
- Lamp: instead of a bulb, a loaf of bread dangles from it.
- Kitchen table: the table is buried in foam pouring out of a detergent box.
Read that once, close your eyes and take the walk. All five are there.
The four mistakes that ruin it
- Stations that look alike. Four identical windows don't count as four different places.
- Polite images. If the image is reasonable, it won't stick. It has to be absurd, and the more embarrassing it is, the better it works.
- Reusing the palace too soon. Put a new list on top of a recent one and they overwrite each other. Keep two or three routes and rotate them.
- Trying to memorise understanding. This is for ordered facts, not for grasping a concept. Confusing the two is the classic student trap.
What it's good for, and what it isn't
It works very well for things in order: the shopping list, the points of a presentation, an exam syllabus, vocabulary in a new language, numbers.
It's no use for understanding. You can memorise the steps of a mathematical proof and have no idea why any of them work. And that distinction — between being able to recite and actually knowing — is exactly the one that separates passing an exam from learning something.
Keeping the underlying machinery in shape
The palace is a storage technique. What sits underneath it — the ability to hold something for a few seconds while you manipulate it, what's called working memory — is trained differently: with short, regular exercises. There's a set of them in exercises to improve memory, and a selection aimed at adults in memory games for adults.
In MenteBrillante the Memory puzzle trains exactly that: sequences that grow and have to be played back in order. You can try it in the web version.