Concept
Method of loci
The method of loci is an ancient trick: you remember things by placing them, in your mind, at places you know well.
- 1
Lay out the route
Take a route you know, such as your home, and lay it out place by place: front door, hallway, kitchen, living room. The order is your route.
Lay out the route
Take a route you know, such as your home, and lay it out place by place: front door, hallway, kitchen, living room. The order is your route.
- 2
Place a memory image
One tap on the picture sets a marker. It holds what you want to remember and the image for it. “Generate AI image” puts it right into the place: a seer at your front door.
Place a memory image
One tap on the picture sets a marker. It holds what you want to remember and the image for it. “Generate AI image” puts it right into the place: a seer at your front door.
- 3
Walk it in your head
The walkthrough takes you back place by place. You look for the marker, reveal it and say honestly whether you still knew it.
Walk it in your head
The walkthrough takes you back place by place. You look for the marker, reveal it and say honestly whether you still knew it.
“Loci” is Latin and simply means “places”. With the method of loci, you walk in your mind along a route you know well, say from your bed to the front door. At each spot along the way you put a picture of something you want to remember. To remember, you just walk the route again.
The story behind it is over 2,000 years old. The poet Simonides of Ceos was at a feast, got called outside for a moment, and right then the roof caved in. The dead could no longer be recognized, but Simonides still knew who had sat in which seat. The Roman Cicero wrote this down around 55 BC. Roman speakers used the trick to give long speeches without notes.
Your head has always been very good at remembering routes and places. The method of loci borrows that strength for everything else. Researchers found that the best memory artists in the world almost all use exactly this trick. And completely ordinary people could remember more than twice as many words after six weeks of practice.
In Mnemorya, the Memory Palace is the method of loci. You build a route out of places you know, for example your home or your way to school, using photos or a map. At each place you put something you want to remember, together with a memory image. Then you walk the route in your head.
The research behind it
The studies this method rests on. Each one is verifiable through its DOI — looking them up is very much the point.
Memory champions don't have different brains and aren't smarter than others; almost all of them use the same trick, which is placing things at locations in their mind.
Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90–95.
doi.org/10.1038/nn988Completely ordinary people who practiced with a memory palace every day for six weeks could then remember more than twice as many words, and their brains worked more like those of memory champions.
Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227–1235.e6.
doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.003Medical students who stored their study material at places using the method of loci did better on exams than their fellow students.
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.
doi.org/10.1152/advan.00092.2013
Keep watching
See the idea in motion.
Selected videos for going deeper. Each link opens the original creator on YouTube.
