CHAPTER EIGHT

Method of Loci

Back in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, before the availability of paper allowed people to write things down at their discretion, a number of the early philosophers and politicians took their ability to memorize very seriously. They had no easy way to capture their thoughts as they considered the meaning of life or composed brilliant orations for delivery to the senate. This forced them to rely on memory.

The most innovative and effective method originated with a poet known for composing epitaphs as well as for remarkable adventures and narrow escapes. Simonides of Ceos found himself one of the only survivors of a roof collapse at an event, when he was called out of the building moments before it was destroyed. (This is every bit as suspicious as it sounds, but that’s a story for another book.) As workers excavated the ruins of the hall, Simonides proved invaluable in identifying the broken bodies of those who were killed, by remembering exactly where everyone was sitting at the tables.

This feat so impressed those who witnessed it—including Simonides himself—that it found its way into a short Latin rhetoric book called Rhetorica ad Herennium, written anonymously. This is the only discussion about the system he had invented: a mnemonic system called the method of loci. “Loci” is the plural of “locus,” which is Latin for location. The method links items to a familiar location, helping the user to visualize these items in the context of a place he knows well. By mapping out a location, pinpointing specific areas for linking, and matching these areas with thoughts they wanted to memorize, orators and philosophers memorized speeches and complex thoughts about logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. Later they would capture these ideas on papyrus, but the method of loci served them well in the meantime.

It says a great deal about this method that it has withstood the test of time and is still in use twenty-one centuries later. It became the leading memory method in the ancient world and into the Middle Ages, continuing its popularity all the way to the Renaissance (around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when the Major System method discussed in Chapter Eleven was developed). The use of other mnemonic devices became prevalent then, but so effective is the method of loci—today called the “memory palace,” “mind palace,” “memory theater,” or the “Roman room”—that it has become the most widely used method by competitive memory experts throughout the world.

The method of loci has even found its way into popular culture. Today you can see Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC television series Sherlock using the mind palace to recall clues he observed earlier in the episode. On American television, the character Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker) uses the method to help people remember crime details in several episodes of the CBS series The Mentalist.

Why does this age-old method still have such credence and popularity? A 2002 study published in Nature Neuroscience gives us a glimpse of the reason. Researchers examined some of the top competitors in the World Memory Championships, using neuropsychological measures as well as brain imaging. They discovered that “superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain difference. Rather . . . superior memorizers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus that are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular.”

The study notes that a whopping 90 percent of these memory champions use some variation of the method of loci. Spatial memory, it turns out, is the key to winning memory challenges at the world championship level.

The method of loci is particularly effective for remembering lists of items for short periods of time; once you fill your memory palace with new information, the old images fade away or are forgotten almost immediately. “If you want to use your memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading,” wrote New York Times journalist Joshua Foer, who turned himself into a memory competitor in an exercise in participatory journalism in 2011. “In fact, mnemonists,” as these mental athletes call themselves, “deliberately empty their palaces after competitions, so they can reuse them again and again.” Presumably, these memory experts spend time taking that “mental stroll” through their mind palaces to envision themselves removing each of their carefully placed images, leaving the rooms empty for the next competition.

How It Works

The method of loci is elegant in its simplicity.

Choose a place you know very well—your home, your campus, a favorite nature spot, a neighborhood in your community. The important thing about the place is that you can visualize everything about it without effort.

Visualize a number of places in this location, in logical order. If you’re using your house, start visualizing as you come in the front door and walk through the house on a standard route. Go through the house mentally from room to room, just as you would if you were coming home at the end of the day. What’s important here is that you keep moving forward, establishing a route that you will use over and over as you employ this tool to strengthen your memory.

As you establish this route, look around each room in your mind and determine what places you will use in the room to place things you want to remember. You may have several places in each room: on the couch, on the coffee table, on top of the bookcase, on the dining room table, on the stove, in the sink, and so on. When you have a list of items you want to remember, visualize your house and the route you’ve established. Place (mentally) one of the items at each of the locations you’ve chosen.

As you place the item, pay attention and develop a strong visual image of that item in that location. Let’s think about that shopping list we started talking about back in Chapter Five. If tomatoes are the first item on the list, place a big pyramid of tomatoes on the foyer table as you “come in” through the front door. Imagine sliced onions covering your couch cushions, and bulbs of garlic rolling back and forth on your coffee table. Make sure each image is vivid, colorful, and somehow unusual. Keep going until you run out of items.

If you have things to remember that are large or overly detailed, come up with a symbol that will remind you of the item. For example, if you need to remember to pick up Georgian oak at the lumberyard, picture a wooden board with a peach and a peanut sitting on top of it. If you want to remember all the ingredients in a Long Island iced tea, picturing an assortment of liquor bottles won’t be memorable enough—but remembering a room full of potatoes dancing with worms in sombreros will make it easy to recall that you need vodka and tequila.

One of the ways that top memory competitors remember so much information is to make the mental images as outrageous as possible. That pyramid of tomatoes on your foyer table will stay with you longer if you imagine yourself smashing them into a juicy, seedy pulp with the umbrella in the stand by the front door. Imagining such an act does not make you a psychopath—it simply cements an image in your mind that becomes unforgettable.

Later, when you want to remember the items, visualize your house again, and go through along your established route. You may be surprised at how easily the items come to mind as you move mentally through your house and look at the places you’ve placed them.

In a number of ways, the method of loci draws upon several of the memory devices discussed in previous chapters of this book. As you place your items to remember through your familiar environment, you create associations between the item and the place you’ve put it. Visualization is key, of course, and so is chunking—you may want to place several things together in one of the locations along your route, if you have a large number of items to remember or if you want to associate several things as a group. You’re also creating a chain of linkages, using your selected location to bring all of the items together. Perhaps this usage of so many memory tools is what makes the method of loci such a strong device.

A Memory Palace Example

Sticking with the ingredients for a Long Island iced tea, let’s walk through a memory palace and see how this works. This drink uses vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sweet and sour mix, and cola.

Using your own home as the memory palace, imagine yourself coming through the front door into the foyer. What’s all this commotion? You’re imagining at least a dozen potatoes (the main ingredient in vodka), waving their arms and dancing madly. Perhaps they’re painted like those nesting Russian dolls, with brightly colored shirts and vests and wide, floor-length skirts or pants. It’s your memory, so whatever will make these potatoes remind you of vodka will work.

Wait—the potatoes have partners! Dancing around them, arms crossed over their chests, are bright pink worms wearing wide-brimmed Mexican hats. What’s this about? They’re drunken worms from the bottom of the tequila bottle. Maybe they look like the extraterrestrial worms that serve coffee in the movie Men in Black. You can hear them whooping it up as they dance.

Continue to the living room. What have we here? A pair of Caribbean visitors, dressed in brightly printed floral shirts and long shorts, is lounging on your sofa, toasting one another with the coconut half-shells they’re using as drink cups. Each of the coconuts has a little paper parasol sticking out of the top. If they’re from the islands, they must be drinking rum. They’ve got their bare feet up on the coffee table, and you can see sand falling from their toes onto the polished surface.

Who’s that in the recliner? It’s Al Capone himself, with his tie loosened and his feet high on the recliner’s footrest, his shoes gleaming black and his suit a perfect fit. He’s got a machine gun lying across his midsection, and he hoists a glass filled with clear liquid at you as you pass. Naturally, he’s got to be drinking gin—the forbidden beverage of the 1920s, and the source of his fortune.

Coming around the corner into the dining room, three clowns in full circus garb, from big red noses to huge shoes, juggle oranges and toss them from one to the other. There are three of them, and the oranges are a quick reminder of triple sec (the three clowns emphasize the “triple,” so you don’t confuse it with Cointreau, which is also orange flavored). If you happen to find clowns frightening, the sight of three of them in your dining room will burn itself into your memory. And if you love clowns, you’ll have a happy time with this one.

On to the plant in the corner of your living room—which has suddenly become a lemon and candy tree, covered in sweets of many colors and gorgeous yellow fruit. Pass this sweet and sour display and continue into the kitchen, where someone has crushed a cola can on top of the faucet, creating a sink that provides hot and cold running cola.

This all takes a little time to establish in your mind, though you might find that it takes far less times than you think. Once you’ve placed all of these images in your memory palace, take the time to explore it repeatedly to rehearse the route and make these people and objects seem entirely natural in their designated locations.

Journeying Beyond the Palace

Since the method of loci’s effectiveness became widely understood, other spatially based memory techniques have emerged.

The Journey Method places objects to be remembered along a route that you know well: your commute to work, your running course, the route you take to visit family members or friends, or a vacation that you can remember in detail. Your route does not have to be part of the physical world—if you have a favorite video game or simulated reality site, you can follow the familiar route you take through it. It can even be a route through a favorite story or book—the well described District 12 in The Hunger Games, for example. What path you take is entirely up to you, as long as it’s memorable and easy to follow.

As you would with the method of loci, prepare the route in advance of your needing it. Choose obvious landmarks and follow the route in your mind to establish them as the places where you will put the symbols, objects, or words you need to recall.

Some memory experts prefer to use the Journey Method because it is essentially boundless, allowing them to remember long lists of items like the elements on the periodic table or all of the presidents. It can even be used to memorize long-form text, like poetry, historic documents, or speeches.

To use the Journey Method to memorize a speech like the “Gettysburg Address,” place images or symbols to represent keywords from the text along your route. These words become triggers that remind you of the cadence of the speech, allowing your mind to fill in the connecting words—all those articles and prepositions—as you remember the next keyword in the text.

Take the opening of this famous speech: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Choose keywords that will prompt your memory. The keywords are not necessarily the biggest words or even the most important words—they are the words that will remind you of the next phrase, so you can connect the dots between one segment of the speech and the next. In this case, virtually everyone knows that the first words of this speech are “Four score and seven years ago,” so you may not need to use these at all. Instead, move on to the next bit and choose the keywords: fathers, forth, nation, liberty, dedicated, proposition, men. (These may not be the exact words you would choose—in all cases, use the keys that will work for you.)

Now, just as you imagined the ingredients for the Long Island iced tea throughout your memory palace, place these words along your journey route. For the purpose of this example, let’s use a route to work.

Picture your father and your best friend’s or spouse’s father (so you have a plural) escorting you out your door as you leave your house. As you reach your car, you find it draped in red, white, and blue bunting, with a big number 4 painted on the hood. Together, the 4 and the bunting remind you of forth (as in July 4th). Who’s in the front seat with you? It’s Uncle Sam, holding up a big map of the United States—the nation.

Begin your drive to work. On the street corner as you leave your neighborhood, the Statue of Liberty bows and waves to you as you pass.

So far, so good. Now, however, you get to the word “dedicated.” How do you represent that in a symbol or image that will bring it to mind? Think of someone whom you would describe as the most dedicated person you know. This can be someone in history, or a person in your family, or someone you admire. Don’t think about it too hard—take the first person who comes to mind, because that person will bring to mind the word “dedicated“ later. Put that person in the next landmark along your journey route.

Proposition is an easier word to represent. Perhaps you see a sleazy-looking barfly, putting the moves on someone. Abraham Lincoln may not have enjoyed this image, but it’s not his memory you need to worry about.

Finally, at your next landmark—let’s say it’s the pharmacy on the corner as you pull into the parking lot at your job—you place an image of a big group of men in various styles of clothing, of various ages and economic backgrounds, and all waiting for a bus. Here are “all men,” as Lincoln said.

You can continue this process through the entire speech, lengthening your route if you choose so that you can include many more keywords. Rehearse this sequence of keywords as often as you can—every day as you drive to work, for example—to retain the images you’ve created and keep the entire text of the speech at the forefront of your mind.