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Upgrade Your Memory

Room 2 · The Gym

Build your first memory palace

The memory palace is the oldest memory technique we know. Cicero tells how the Greek poet Simonides discovered it, and Roman teachers of rhetoric used it to deliver long speeches without notes. It works because you already know some places perfectly: your home, your street, your office. You use them as shelves.

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01

How it works

  1. Pick a place you know by heart. Your home is the best start.
  2. Choose ten spots along a route. Walk through it in your mind, always in the same order: the front door, the coat hook, the mirror, the kitchen table…
  3. Put one item in each spot, as a vivid image. Make it big, make it move, make it funny. A sea of milk pouring through your front door is hard to forget; a carton of milk on a shelf is not.
  4. Walk the route again and collect what you left. The places give you the items back, in order.

Step 1 · Your route

Name ten places in your home, in the order you would walk past them. The example route is a starting point: change it to your own.

02

Make the images stick

  • Use your senses. What does it smell like, sound like, feel like?
  • Exaggerate. Giant, tiny, too many, the wrong colour.
  • Add movement. Things that run, burst, sing or fight are easier to recall than things that sit still.
  • Keep the first image that comes to mind. Change it only if it doesn’t come back when you walk the route.

If you don’t see pictures in your mind, that’s fine: some people don’t. Describe the scene to yourself in words, or imagine how it would feel or sound. What matters is the link between the place and the item.

03

Next steps

When ten items feel easy, add a second room, then a second palace for a different kind of list. Keep each palace for one kind of information, so lists don’t get mixed up.