The Memory Palace: How to Remember Long Lists in Order

A trick older than writing things down

According to a story the Romans loved to retell, the Greek poet Simonides was reciting at a banquet when he was called outside. While he was gone, the roof collapsed and the guests were crushed beyond recognition. Simonides found he could name every one of them, because he remembered where each had been sitting. From that, the story goes, he realised that memory clings to places.

Whether or not it happened, the method named after it, the method of loci (loci is Latin for places), was taught in Greek and Roman schools of rhetoric so that speakers could deliver long speeches without notes. Today it is usually called the memory palace, and it is the main technique used by competitors at memory championships who memorise shuffled decks of cards in under a minute.

Why places work so well

Most of us are poor at remembering lists of unrelated things. As covered in why a sequence slips away after four or five items, working memory holds only a handful of items, and the order is the first thing to go.

We are, however, remarkably good at remembering spaces. You can probably walk through your childhood home in your head right now, room by room, without effort. The memory palace borrows that strength. Instead of memorising a list, you attach each item to a place along a route you already know, and the route supplies the order for free.

Building your first palace, step by step

Start small. Ten stops is plenty for a first attempt, and you can grow from there.

• Pick a place you know very well. Your home, your route to school or work, your office. The better you know it, the less effort the route takes.
• Fix a route through it. Always walk it in the same direction: front door, shoe rack, sofa, television, kitchen table, fridge, and so on.
• Choose distinct stops. Each stop should be clearly different from the others. Two identical chairs side by side will blur together.
• Walk it a few times without anything to remember. The route itself needs to be automatic before you load it up.
• Place one item at each stop as a vivid image. Then, to recall, simply walk the route again in your head and look at what is waiting at each stop.

Making images that stick

The images are where beginners go wrong. A shopping list that says "milk" should not become a carton of milk sitting politely on your shoe rack. That is too ordinary to remember. Make it absurd: your shoes overflowing with milk, splashing onto the floor as you step into them, the smell of it.

The classical handbooks gave the same advice two thousand years ago: images should be exaggerated, moving, funny, disgusting or unusually beautiful. Involve senses beyond sight. Make the item interact with the place rather than just sit on it. The stranger the scene, the more reliably it is still there when you walk back through.

Abstract items need a stand-in. A name becomes something it sounds like, a number becomes an object (many people use a fixed image for each digit, such as a candle for 1 and a swan for 2), and a concept becomes a person or thing that represents it.

What the research says

The method is not just folklore. Brain-imaging studies of memory champions have found that their brains are not unusual in structure; what differs is how they use them, recruiting areas involved in spatial navigation while memorising. In other words, the champions are mostly ordinary people using a technique.

That was put to the test in a 2017 study published in the journal Neuron. People with no memory training practised the method of loci for about six weeks and more than doubled the number of words they could recall from a list, with a lasting improvement months later. The technique is learnable, and it works for most people who practise it.

Simpler tricks for short sequences

A full palace is overkill for remembering six colours in a row. For short, fast sequences, lighter techniques work better:

• The story method. Link the items into one quick, silly story: the red fox jumped on the blue car, which drove into the green pond.
• Chunking. Group items into pairs or threes and remember the groups, the way you remember a phone number as blocks rather than digits.
• Say it out loud. Naming each item in a rhythm, even under your breath, adds a second route into memory beside the visual one.
• Look for a pattern. Repeats, alternations or a colour that returns are anchors you can hang the rest on.

Put it into practice

The best way to feel the difference is to test yourself before and after. Play a few rounds of Memory Stack, which shows a sequence for five seconds and then asks which item stood in a particular position, and note your score. Then try the story method or chunking on the next few rounds and compare.

For longer lists, like a speech, a shopping list or the order of topics in a presentation, build a ten-stop palace and use it for a week. Most people are surprised by how much easier it becomes after the third or fourth time, and the same palace can be cleared and reused as often as you like.