What is a memory palace?
A memory palace is a place you already know well, used as a filing system. You picture yourself walking through it along a fixed route, and at each spot on the way, called a locus (plural: loci), you leave a vivid image of something you want to remember. To recall the list, you walk the route again and see what is waiting at each stop. Psychologists call it the method of loci. Memory champions call it the most useful trick they own.
Why it works is almost embarrassingly simple. Your brain is poor at holding a list of unrelated words and remarkably good at remembering places and the order you move through them. The palace borrows the second skill to do the first job. The route hands you the order for free, and every stop becomes a cue you cannot forget to check.
The trainer above lets you feel the difference in about five minutes. This page belongs to our guide to how to learn, which collects the study methods with the strongest evidence behind them.
How to use the memory palace technique in five steps
- Pick a place you know cold. Your home is ideal. You should be able to walk it with your eyes closed, room by room.
- Fix a route and its stops. Choose 10 distinct spots in the order you would pass them: front door, coat hook, mirror, and so on. Always walk in the same direction. Distinct beats fancy, because two chairs that look alike will blur into one.
- Make each item do something to its stop. Do not just set a pineapple by the door. Nail it to the door, let it knock back, smell it. The scene should move, make noise or break something.
- Walk the route to recall. Start at stop one and look around in your mind. The place brings back the picture, and the picture gives you the item.
- Review, then reuse. Walk the palace once more after a break to lock it in. A palace can hold a new list later, although old images tend to linger for a while, which is why many people keep a few palaces in rotation.
Where the method of loci comes from (and why it is probably a legend)
The founding story is too good not to tell. Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos was performing at a banquet in Thessaly when he was called outside: two young men wanted to see him. While he was gone, the roof of the hall collapsed and crushed the guests so badly that their families could not identify them. Simonides could. He remembered where everyone had been sitting, walked the room in his mind and named them, one by one. From that, the story goes, he realised that ordered places are the key to a good memory.
Treat it as legend. Our main source is Cicero, who told it in De Oratore around 55 BC, more than four centuries after the fact, and in his version the two mysterious visitors are the gods Castor and Pollux, repaying Simonides for a poem in their honour. Quintilian, the Roman teacher of rhetoric, retold the tale about 150 years later and noted that the old writers could not even agree whose banquet it had been. What is not legend is how the technique was used. The oldest surviving manual, the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium from the 80s BC, already lays out the rules, such as choosing places that look clearly different from one another, and Roman orators walked imagined buildings to keep long speeches in order.
Does the memory palace actually work? What the studies say
The classic lab studies
Modern psychology started taking the old trick seriously in the late 1960s. In a 1970 paper in American Scientist, Gordon Bower of Stanford took the method apart and argued that its power comes from two pieces working together: a set of familiar, ordered cues (the places) and vivid images that tie each new item to one of those cues. A decade later, Henry Roediger pitted four mnemonics against each other with 150 students learning 20-word lists. All of them helped. But when recall was scored strictly by position, so that a word only counted in its correct place, the method of loci and the peg system came out on top. The biggest gain was in order, not just in quantity, which is exactly what the trainer above scores.
Memory champions have ordinary brains
In 2003, Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at University College London studied ten people who excel at events like the World Memory Championships and compared them with matched controls. The superior memorisers were not unusually intelligent on standard tests, and their brains showed no structural differences. What differed was strategy. Nine of the ten used the method of loci, and while memorising they leaned on brain regions involved in spatial memory and navigation, including the hippocampus. That is the encouraging part: their edge looked learned, not born.
Forty days to double your score
The strongest modern evidence comes from Martin Dresler and colleagues, published in Neuron in 2017. They first scanned 23 of the world's best memory athletes, who recalled almost all of a 72-word list (about 71 words on average, against about 40 for matched controls). Then they trained people with no mnemonic experience for 30 minutes a day over 40 days, using the method of loci, an ordinary working-memory drill or nothing at all. According to the researchers, the loci group went from about 26 to about 62 words out of 72, far more than either comparison group, and four months later, with no further practice, their recall was still well above where they started. Their brain networks had also shifted toward the patterns seen in the athletes. A 2021 follow-up in Science Advances by Isabella Wagner and the same team found that the training mainly made memories more durable.
Across many trials
A 2021 meta-analysis by Christopher Twomey and Meike Kroneisen pooled 13 randomised controlled trials and found a medium-sized benefit for the method of loci (Hedges' g = 0.65). The authors also flagged a weakness: most of the trials, largely run with university students, did not report how they guarded against bias. So the effect is real and consistent, and the research behind it could be tidier.
Why the trainer asks for strange, moving scenes
Every memory book tells you to make your images bizarre. The research is more precise. In a classic 1972 study, Keith Wollen and colleagues separated weirdness from interaction and found that interaction, the two things touching or doing something to each other, is what drove recall. Bizarreness on its own did not. Later work by Mark McDaniel and Gilles Einstein (1986) showed that bizarre images do help, but mainly when they stand out against ordinary ones. So the prompts in the trainer aim for both: the item does something to the place, and the scene is odd enough to be distinctive. A pineapple next to the door is forgettable. A pineapple nailed to the door, knocking back, is not.
What a memory palace is good for, and what it is not
The method of loci shines whenever order matters and the items are easy to picture: shopping lists, the points of a talk you want to give without notes, the steps of a procedure, names in a sequence, a run of dates once you turn the numbers into images. It also makes a satisfying party trick, which is not nothing.
It has real limits. It works best for concrete things; abstract ideas have to be turned into a picture first, which takes practice. It stores a list, not an understanding: you can walk a palace of ten terms from a biology chapter and still not know how any of them works. And it costs effort. Building a palace is slower than reading a list twice, so it pays off for material you need in order, under pressure, without notes. For learning a subject properly, the methods with the broadest evidence are retrieval practice and spacing, which the forgetting curve explains and our science-backed guide to improving your memory turns into a routine. The palace is one tool in that kit, not a replacement for it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a memory palace?
A memory palace is a familiar place, like your home, that you walk through in your mind along a fixed route. At each stop you leave a vivid image of something you want to remember, then walk the route again to recall the items in order. The technique is also called the method of loci.
Does the memory palace technique really work?
Yes. It is one of the best-tested memory strategies there is. A 2021 meta-analysis of 13 randomised trials found a medium-sized benefit, and in a 2017 study in Neuron, people who trained for 40 days went from recalling about 26 to about 62 words out of 72.
How do I build my own memory palace?
Pick a place you know very well, choose 10 distinct spots in the order you would walk past them, and always use the same direction. Then give each item a vivid scene at its spot, ideally one where it moves, makes noise or does something to the place.
How long does it take to get good at the method of loci?
Most people notice a difference on their first try, although first walks can be wobbly. In the Dresler study, participants practised 30 minutes a day for 40 days, more than doubled their recall, and were still well above their starting point four months later.
What is a memory palace good for?
Ordered lists of things you can picture: shopping lists, the points of a speech, the steps of a procedure, names or sequences of facts. It is less useful for understanding complex ideas, where retrieval practice and spaced review do more.
Is this memory palace trainer free, and does it store my data?
It is free and needs no signup. Everything runs in your browser, and the only thing saved is your best score, stored on your own device so you can try to beat it next time.
Sources
- Bower, G. H. (1970). Analysis of a mnemonic device. American Scientist, 58(5), 496-510.
- Wollen, K. A., Weber, A., & Lowry, D. H. (1972). Bizarreness versus interaction of mental images as determinants of learning. Cognitive Psychology, 3, 518-523.
- Roediger, H. L. (1980). The effectiveness of four mnemonics in ordering recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6(5), 558-567.
- McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (1986). Bizarre imagery as an effective memory aid: The importance of distinctiveness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 12(1), 54-65.
- Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90-95.
- Dresler, M., Shirer, W. R., Konrad, B. N., et al. (2017). Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227-1235. Recall figures (26 to 62 of 72 words) as reported by the Donders Institute, Radboud University, March 2017.
- Wagner, I. C., Konrad, B. N., Schuster, P., et al. (2021). Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci. Science Advances, 7(10), eabc7606.
- Twomey, C., & Kroneisen, M. (2021). The effectiveness of the loci method as a mnemonic device: Meta-analysis. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(8), 1317-1326.
- Cicero, De Oratore II.86; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria XI.2; Rhetorica ad Herennium III.16-24.
Build a palace for something worth knowing
Type any topic you are curious about and NerdSip builds a fact-checked 5-minute course on it, with a quiz after every lesson, then brings it back for review so it sticks. Start with the method of loci, then put your palace to work on whatever you learn next.