The memory palace (method of loci)

1. Choose a place you know by heart, like your home.
2. Fix a route through it and ten stops along the way, always in the same order.
3. Turn each item you want to remember into an image and put it at a stop. Make it big, strange, moving, funny.
4. To recall, walk the route and look at each stop.

Build your first palace with the Palace Builder

• It works, in controlled studies. A 2021 review of 13 controlled trials found a medium-sized benefit for the memory palace over ordinary study. The authors also warned that many of those studies were small or had design weaknesses (Twomey and Kroneisen, 2021).
• Beginners can learn it. In a 2017 study, 51 people with no training practised the method for 30 minutes a day for about six weeks. Their recall improved more than in two control groups, the gain was still there four months later, and their brain activity began to resemble that of memory athletes (Dresler and colleagues, 2017).
• Champions use it. When researchers scanned ten top memory competitors, they found no differences in the structure of their brains. Nine of the ten used the memory palace (Maguire and colleagues, 2003).

It shines with lists and sequences: a shopping list, the points of a speech, the order of a deck of cards. It is less useful for understanding a subject. For that, test yourself and space your practice (Retrieval and spacing).