The Memory Palace (Method of Loci): How to Build One

Some things you just have to memorize: the order of the cranial nerves, the steps of a process, a list of causes, the twelve items on a checklist. Repeating them over and over is slow and the order tends to slip. The memory palace, also called the method of loci (Latin for "places"), is a technique for exactly this kind of material. You attach each item to a place along a route you already know, and recall them by walking the route in your head.

The bottom line: it works, with a medium-sized benefit in controlled trials, and people who train with it can get very good at it. But it is a tool for holding lists and sequences, not for understanding ideas, and it costs practice before it pays off. Use it for the handful of things that are pure memorization, and use recall and spaced review for everything else.

What a memory palace is

The method has three parts:

1. A route you know well. Your home, your walk to school, the inside of a building you use every day. What matters is that you can picture it easily and that it has a fixed order.
2. Stations along the route. Distinct places you pass in order: the front door, the coat hook, the kitchen table, the window. These are the "loci".
3. Images placed at each station. For each item you want to remember, you make a vivid picture that stands for it and imagine it sitting at the next station.

To recall, you walk the route in your mind and look at each station. The place cues the image, the image cues the item, and the route keeps everything in order.

The method has been in use for thousands of years and is used by many successful memory athletes (Twomey & Kroneisen, 2021). One brain-imaging study of people known for memory feats in contests such as the World Memory Championships found that their superior memory was not explained by unusual intelligence or unusual brain structure. Instead, they used a spatial learning strategy, which engaged brain regions important for spatial memory, such as the hippocampus (Maguire et al., 2003). In other words, it is mostly a learned skill, not a gift.

What the research says

It reliably improves recall in trials. A 2021 meta-analysis pulled together 13 randomized controlled trials, most of them run with university students. People who used the method of loci recalled more than those in comparison conditions, with a medium effect size (g = 0.65). The effect held up when the authors adjusted for publication bias and removed studies one at a time (Twomey & Kroneisen, 2021).

The same review is candid about the limits. Most of the trials didn't report how they randomized participants or kept allocation hidden, so the risk of bias was rated high. And 13 trials is not a large evidence base. The authors call it "good initial support," which is a fair way to put it.

Training makes ordinary people much better at it. In a study published in Neuron, Dresler and colleagues (2017) first compared 23 memory athletes with matched controls. On a list of 72 words, the athletes recalled almost all of them 20 minutes later, while controls recalled about 40. Then 51 people with no mnemonic experience were split into three groups: six weeks of method-of-loci training (40 sessions of 30 minutes), training on a working-memory task, or no training. The loci group improved their word-list recall significantly more than both other groups, and the gain was still there at a four-month follow-up. Their brain connectivity also shifted toward the pattern seen in the athletes.

Two things are worth noticing. First, the training was substantial: about 20 hours over six weeks. Second, every participant in the training study was male, and the test was a list of unrelated words, which is the method's home ground.

Classroom evidence is thin. One study with medical students taught insulin and diabetes either through lectures plus a self-directed learning session, or through lectures plus a session in which students built memory palaces for the topic under a teacher's supervision and taught them to each other. The memory-palace group did better on the assessments, and the students found the method helpful (Qureshi et al., 2014). It's an encouraging result, but it is one topic at one school, and the memory-palace group also got a supervised, interactive session the other group didn't. So it can't tell you how much of the gain came from the palace itself.

Why it works

• It borrows a memory you already have. You don't have to learn the route; it's already well stored. You only add new links to it.
• Places come with order built in. You can't walk to the kitchen before the front door, so the route keeps the sequence for you.
• Images are easier to hold than labels. A strange picture at a familiar spot gives you more to grab onto than an abstract word.
• It gives you a retrieval plan. Instead of searching your memory at random, you walk station by station, and a gap shows up as an empty spot.

How to build one, step by step

1. Pick a place you know very well. Start with your own home. You should be able to walk through it in your head without effort.
2. Fix a route. Choose a direction and always walk it the same way, for example front door, hallway, living room, kitchen, bedroom.
3. Choose 10 stations. Pick distinct, well-separated spots along the route: the doormat, the mirror, the sofa, the TV, the fridge. Avoid two stations that look alike. Walk the route in your mind twice and list the stations from memory.
4. Turn each item into an image. Make it concrete and a bit absurd. For a list of causes of a war, a crown might stand for monarchy and a stack of coins for debt. For a term, use a picture of what it sounds like or what it means.
5. Place one image at each station. Make it interact with the place: the crown jammed in the doormat, coins pouring out of the mirror. Spend a few seconds on each.
6. Walk it back. Close your eyes, walk the route, and say each item. Note any empty stations and fix the image.
7. Review it later. Walk the route again the next day, then a few days after that. A palace you never revisit fades like anything else; see spaced repetition.

Once one route works, build a second and third (your school, a friend's house, a street). Reusing the same route for different lists on the same day can make them interfere, which is why the participants in the training study above built several routes.

What it's good for, and what it isn't

The research above mostly tests recall of lists, and that is where the method is strongest. Nothing in it shows that a memory palace helps you understand a concept or apply it to a problem you haven't seen. Knowing that the Krebs cycle has eight steps in a given order is useful. Knowing why each step happens is a different job, better served by explaining ideas in your own words and working through examples.

For vocabulary, a palace can work as a hook for a few words that won't stick, but it doesn't scale to thousands of words. The guide on how to learn vocabulary covers what does: recall in both directions, spaced over time, and words met in context.

Common mistakes

• Using it for everything. Building images takes time. Save it for material that is genuinely a list or a sequence.
• A route you don't really know. If you have to think about what comes next on the route, the route itself becomes something else to remember.
• Bland images. "A book on the table" is easy to forget. Make the image strange, specific and interacting with the place.
• Stations too close together or too similar. Two chairs side by side blur into one.
• Building it once and never walking it again. A palace is a memory like any other and needs spaced review.
• Expecting results on day one. The training study ran for six weeks. Early attempts are slow; they get faster.

Doing this in Atheneum

Write each palace as a note in the subject's notebook (Notes, in the notebook's rail), listing the stations in order and the image at each, so you can check yourself after a mental walk. Notes are Markdown, so a short table of station and image works well. Then turn the list into recall practice: make a flashcard deck for the notebook, or import your own cards from a text file through Anki import, and study them in Review, where each rating decides when a card comes back. See Notes in a notebook and Flashcards and spaced repetition.

If you're memorizing lists for an exam, the guide on how to use past papers shows how to find out which ones actually come up.

A quick start

1. Pick a list of 8 to 10 items you need to know in order for a class.
2. Choose 10 stations along a route through your home and walk them in your head twice.
3. Make one vivid image per item and place it at the next station.
4. Close your eyes and walk the route, saying each item. Fix any blank stations.
5. Walk it again tomorrow and again in three days, without looking at the list first.

Use the palace for what it's built for, keep testing yourself, and leave understanding to the methods that build it.

Sources

• Twomey, C., & Kroneisen, M. (2021). The effectiveness of the loci method as a mnemonic device: Meta-analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(8), 1317–1326. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021821993457
• Dresler, M., Shirer, W. R., Konrad, B. N., Müller, N. C. J., Wagner, I. C., Fernández, G., Czisch, M., & Greicius, M. D. (2017). Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227–1235.e6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.003
• Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn988
• Qureshi, A., Rizvi, F., Syed, A., Shahid, A., & Manzoor, H. (2014). The method of loci as a mnemonic device to facilitate learning in endocrinology leads to improvement in student performance as measured by assessments. Advances in Physiology Education, 38(2), 140–144. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00092.2013