For the following exercise, I need you to sit in a comfortable position, relax, and take a deep breath. This is going to seem a bit bizarre, but I need you to keep an open mind and trust me.
First, I’d like you to imagine that you’re standing in the doorway to your childhood bedroom, looking in. If you moved around in the middle of your childhood, then choose the most nostalgic one. Perhaps you haven’t been in that room in a few years. Maybe you haven’t been back to that room in a few decades. No matter. In your mind’s eye, I’d like you to travel back in time, and picture yourself standing right there in the doorway.
Next, I want you to turn to the right, and walk to the first corner of the room. If you grew up in a castle turret or a lighthouse, you can picture any other square room you’re familiar with. What is in that first corner? Is it a desk? A closet? Or perhaps it’s your bed. Whatever it is, right on that piece of furniture, I want you to picture two seahorses. These aren’t just two regular seahorses, though. As you picture them, they’re shamelessly engaged in an elaborate and messy mating ritual. It’s a scene straight out of National Geographic. Gross! Now, I want you to get rid of those perverted seahorses by imagining them getting sucked up by a vacuum hose.
Right now, you might be scratching your head. Have faith, and do it anyways. Using your newly converted, “all electric” memory, actually visualize this happening. Right there, on your childhood furniture.
Do you see it?
Great. Good luck getting that image out of your head.
Now, traveling counterclockwise along the perimeter of the room, let’s take a trip to the next corner. I want you to imagine that in this second corner, there’s a delicious container of chunky peanut butter, tantalizing you. If there’s a desk in the corner, you can imagine the container on the desk. If there isn’t, imagine that someone has smeared the chunky peanut butter up against the walls in the corner. Yuck!
Up next, move over to the third corner, where I want you to visualize a big, messy, tangled, ball of wires. You know, the kind of ball of wires you have in that one drawer somewhere in your house? In this corner, you’re going to picture that bundle of wires…and use some detail. Picture that old phone charger cable you have from the 1990s and those broken iPhone cables you still haven’t thrown away. Get specific. I want you to imagine that the wires are strung all along the corner or furniture like Christmas lights. For example, if it’s a closet, imagine that the wires are tangling up all of your clothes hangers, making one BIG mess.
Still with me?
All right, let’s go on to the fourth corner of your bedroom…
In this one, I want you to imagine that there’s a picture hanging right next to the corner. But it’s not just any picture. It’s your favorite historical picture of all time. You know the one. It’s that picture you saw in history class and thought, “Wow…I wish I’d been there to see it!” For me, it’s a famous picture of the American athletes protesting at the 1968 Olympics. For you, it might be the tanks in Tiananmen Square or the iconic photo of Marilyn Monroe. Any picture will work. Now, I want you to imagine that picture hung right there, in the fourth corner of your bedroom.
Can you see it?
By now, unless you grew up in a very fancy, postmodern-looking house, you’re back at the exit to your bedroom. Once there, there’s just one more visualization I want you to create. In the doorway, as you’re exiting, I want you to imagine a massive “location” pin. It looks just like the kind you see on Google Maps—and it’s blocking your exit. Get vivid: imagine that this pin is so big that you have to squeeze under it to escape the room.
Do you have each of those visualizations in your mind’s eye? Let’s review:
In corner one, you have two X-rated seahorses getting vacuumed up.
In corner two, you have a bunch of chunky peanut butter.
In corner three, you have a mess of tangled cables.
In corner four, you have a famous historical picture.
And, back at the doorway, a big “location” pin blocking your exit.
If you have all those visualizations, then once again, congratulations are in order! This time, you’ve created your first memory palace—and memorized the key fundamentals of why it works too.
***
At its core, the memory palace technique, or method of loci, is a powerful system for memorizing massive amounts of information quickly and easily. Discovered over 2,500 years ago by Simonides of Ceos, it stands out in a few very distinct ways.
Unlike other techniques, the memory palace allows users to not only memorize large amounts of information, but to do so in perfect order. In fact, once you begin using memory palaces, you won’t believe how easy it is to recite information both forward and backward. This, among other reasons, is why every single memory competitor and record holder uses some variation of the technique. Best of all, it works for anyone and everyone. Study after study has shown how this simple technique can transform average people into memory superhumans. Memory palaces are so powerful, some historians believe they were used to pass along the works of Homer and other Greek philosophers. Even St. Augustine himself wrote about the technique in Book X of his Confessions. (Alas, the Catholic Church, which shunned the idea of obscene visualizations, was less of a fan. They burned Giordano Bruno, an outspoken proponent of the technique, at the stake in 1600. This, some suggest, may have contributed to the method’s disappearance from popular use.)
In short, in the world of memory improvement, the memory palace is the undisputed champion. Of course, it’s not appropriate for everything. Would I use a memory palace to memorize a handful of names or the key points of a book? Probably not. That would be like scaring off a bully with a hydrogen bomb. It’ll definitely do the job, but you probably shouldn’t get carried away. For this reason, I often refer to the memory palace as “the mnemonic nuclear option.” There simply is no other technique that can even come close, whether in speed, ease of use, or reliability.
How can any one method be so powerful, you ask? A happy coincidence of neuroscience. You see, when used properly, the memory palace technique checks off nearly every criterion of memorability.
First, the memory palace encourages us to create novel, bizarre visualizations. These visualizations “trick” the hippocampi into remembering otherwise unimportant or unrelated information. Think back for a moment to your very own memory palace. Remember those two seahorses and their very inappropriate mating ritual? They represent your brain’s two hippocampi, named after the Greek word for “seahorse” (Ιππόκαμπος) because of its peculiar seahorse shape. And the vacuum? That’s there to remind you of the hippocampus’ role: to clean out information your brain deems unrelated, unimportant, or irrelevant.
Second, the memory palace helps us “chunk” information into manageable units. Sure, we can add additional detail to each location, such as the multiple seahorses and the vacuum. But when used properly, this technique ensures that we are breaking information down into groups of one to four individual units. Any more would be confusing to remember in a single location. To remind you of this “chunking” effect—and how it makes memories much stickier—I asked you to visualize chunky peanut butter smeared onto your walls.
Third, the memory palace takes advantage of something we’ve already learned about: Hebb’s Law. As we create memory palaces, we associate new information with existing, deeply held memories: the layout of locations we know. This creates strong connections between existing memories and new ones, dramatically increasing their memorability. That tangle of messy, old wires in the third corner? You guessed it—those are your neurons and synapses wiring together. The more tangled and intertwined the new and the old become, the harder it is to take it all apart, and the harder it is to forget.
Fourth, the memory palace keeps us honest. While you may occasionally forget to create novel visual markers for everything you want to remember, with a memory palace, there’s no other way. To create your palace, you must imagine each visualization in enough detail to see it in the right spot. This, of course, leverages the picture superiority effect. It’s also why I had you hang a famous historical picture—pre-existing knowledge—in the fourth corner of your bedroom.
Finally, the memory palace leverages yet another one of our brain’s deeply embedded evolutionary skills: spatial memory. As we learned in Chapter 3, our Paleolithic ancestors survived thanks to their ability to navigate their environment. This is why, unbeknownst to you, your brain automatically remembers the layout of your surroundings. It doesn’t matter if it’s a house you’ve lived in for years, a hotel room you’ve stayed in for days, or a store you step into for a few minutes. While you might struggle to remember names, numbers, or other important information every day, your brain is constantly creating strong, lasting memories of everywhere you’ve ever been. It knows every apartment you’ve ever lived in, every office you’ve ever worked in, and even many places you’ve briefly passed through.
The result?
You have hundreds, even thousands, of memory palaces inside your head, lying dormant and unused.
Even if you try, you can’t help but memorize these new locations. In a 2017 study conducted on mice, researchers found that when we enter a new place with novel sensory stimuli, a small region of the brainstem known as the locus coeruleus is activated in response.7 This, in turn, triggers a flood of dopamine into the CA3 region of the hippocampus, causing it to store a memory of the location and its details. Researchers now believe that this influx of dopamine boosts the CA3 region’s ability to strengthen the synapses and form a memory of the new location. Perhaps most interestingly of all, researchers found that this response was not triggered for other types of memories. Instead, it actually appears to be specific to the memorization of new environments. In other words, research has finally figured out why the memory palace works so well. It all boils down to neurochemical changes that occur when we activate the parts of our brains concerned with location. In 2014, another study from Dartmouth and the University of North Carolina focused on a little-studied part of the brain called the retrosplenial cortex. Their goal was to test out an even bolder hypothesis. They now believe that our memories may actually be inextricably linked to location in our brains.
This makes perfect sense. Think back to any memorable event in your life, such as the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks. The question we ask one another is never “What news station were you watching,” but rather “Where were you when you heard?”
Location is an immensely powerful anchoring point for creating new memories. This is precisely why I asked you to block the exit to your own memory palace with a large location pin. That marker, safely stored in the doorway, represents your brain’s ability to remember locations without even trying.
And now, it’s time to learn how to make use of those locations.
To build a memory palace, you first need a few things. Most important, of course, is a suitable location. In reality, any location will do: past homes, office buildings, even stores you’ve casually strolled through. With that said, I encourage you to remember what we learned in our chapter on preparation. Start by carefully thinking ahead and determining what information you need to know, in what order, and how you need to access it. This step alone can save you the hassle of memorizing something in the wrong way—and being stuck with it indefinitely. Ironically, the biggest “side effect” of the memory palace technique is how obnoxiously effective it is. If you memorize a speech, only to change the order of the points later on, you’re likely to deliver it as memorized—for better or worse.
When, for example, I memorized my TEDx talk using a memory palace, I spent a few minutes thinking about how to logically lay it out. How many paragraphs were there? Where were the transition points? This is something you can do “in your head,” by walking around the space physically, or even by drawing a quick floor plan on a piece of paper.
This type of preparation beforehand helped me determine what size memory palace I would use. It also helped me create a logical template. I chose to assign each paragraph or key idea to a specific room and memorize the important “transitions” in the walkways between rooms. When I needed to memorize the circle of fifths, a concept in music theory, I was careful to choose a square room for my memory palace. This made it easier to divide the room into twelve “stations,” like the hands of a clock, with a clear understanding of which side of the room was twelve and which side was six.
As you create your memory palace, ask yourself: Will you need to access the information in a specific order? This is particularly important for things like a speech, a sequence of fifty random digits, or the chronological order of the US presidents. If so, take a moment to create a linear journey along the perimeter of each room of the memory palace. This can be done clockwise or counterclockwise, as long as your path never crosses itself. This avoids confusion or getting “lost” when the pressure is on.
In other cases, you may need to access the information by some other grouping. This might be area of expertise (names and bios), parts of speech (vocabulary), or parts of the body (anatomy). In those situations, it’s best to create these logical groupings in advance. One trick I like to use is to leverage the existing logic of the location itself. I might memorize the anatomy of the reproductive system in the bedroom, the upper gastrointestinal tract in the kitchen, the lower gastrointestinal tract in the bathroom, and the brain in the office. This helps create more synaptic connections and makes it easy to find the information you’re looking for.
As you lay the foundation of your memory palace, keep in mind: there’s no wrong way to create this arbitrary logic, and it only need make sense to you. In my Russian grammar memory palace, the “accusative” case is in the kitchen. I remember this logical connection by imagining two roommates accusing one another of food theft. Silly, yes, but highly effective.
Once you have the logic and layout of your memory palace, the rest is easy. Using your new, “electric” memory, create novel, illustrative visual markers for everything you want to remember. Then, place those unique markers in designated locations. Need to memorize George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in order? Visualize a washing machine, Adam and Eve, and the characters from The Jeffersons—if you’re old enough to remember them. Remember: there’s no such thing as a “stupid” marker, and the best marker is the one that works for you.
When choosing locations for these markers, it’s best if you “anchor” your visualizations to specific areas. This could mean the corners of a room, specific pieces of furniture, drawers, or even windows. If needed, you can create very dense memory palaces by using every anchor available. If you do, though, avoid placing multiple markers in the same exact location, such as on the same shelf or pinned up to the same wall. It’s far better to expand your memory palaces outwards than to overstuff them.
Another useful trick I’ve developed is to actually incorporate the anchor into the visualization. This serves as another connection to the new memory and makes it less likely that you’ll get your locations mixed up. Instead of imagining a knife simply laying on the couch cushion, for example, I imagine it stabbing into the couch cushion and sticking out of it. Instead of imagining a washing machine sitting on the window sill, I imagine it shaking violently and breaking the window. Doing so helps me remember that the washing machine could only be near the window—and adds a bit of violence and absurdity, while we’re at it.
It might sound overly simple, but that really is all there is to it.8 Create a visualization, place it in a location, be amazed. Try it out for yourself. You’ll see what I mean.
7 Akiko Wagatsuma et al., “Locus Coeruleus Input to Hippocampal CA3 Drives Single-Trial Learning of a Novel Context,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America January 9, 2018 115 (2) E310-E316: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1714082115.
8 Though, at the highest levels, competitive mnemonists have developed complex ways to condense more information into their memory palaces. These typically entail a system to convert six to seven cards or numbers into just one compound visualization. But at the foundation, the technique remains the same.