The memory palace

What is a memory palace?

A memory palace is a place you know well that you use as a mental filing system, with one item to remember stored at each spot. Psychologists call it the method of loci; memory competitors also call it the journey method.

It builds on two things people are already good at: remembering places and remembering striking pictures. The order of the places keeps the items in order, and the images tell you what each item was. Cicero compared the places to a wax writing tablet and the images to the letters written on it.^[1]

How do you build a memory palace?

Choose a place you know well, fix a route through it, then put one vivid image at each stop. Here is how you would remember a shopping list (eggs, milk, bread, apples, coffee) using your home:

1. Choose the place. Your home, your street or your school all work, as long as you can walk through it in your mind without effort.
2. Fix the stops. Pick distinct spots in a fixed order: the front door, the hallway mirror, the kitchen table, the sofa, your bed.
3. Turn each item into an image. Make it odd, large or moving: eggs smashing against the front door, milk pouring out of the mirror, a loaf of bread reading the paper at the table, apples bouncing on the sofa, coffee soaking your pillow.
4. Walk the route to recall. In the shop, start at the front door in your mind and look at each stop in turn.

Roman teachers gave much the same advice: use places that are distinct and spaced apart, and images that are active and striking.^[2] Start with a short route and add stops once it feels easy.

Where does the memory palace come from?

The memory palace comes from the speakers of ancient Greece and Rome, who used it to remember long speeches. Its origin story is a legend told by Cicero in De Oratore (55 BC): the poet Simonides of Ceos was called out of a banquet moments before the roof fell in, and he identified the crushed guests by remembering where each had been sitting.^[1] From this, the story goes, he realised that ordered places are the key to a good memory.

Even Roman writers doubted the details. Quintilian, in the first century AD, noted that authors disagreed about where the banquet took place, and found part of the story fabulous.^[2] He also described the technique itself: turn each part of a speech into a symbol, such as an anchor for a passage about sailing or a weapon for one about war, and place the symbols in order through the rooms of a large house.^[2] The oldest full description is in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, an anonymous Roman textbook from the 80s BC, and the method stayed in use through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.^[3]

Does the memory palace work?

Yes: in controlled studies, people taught the method of loci remember more than people who are not. A 2021 meta-analysis, which pooled randomised trials mostly run with university students, found a medium-sized benefit.^[4] A 2025 review agreed, but rated the quality of the evidence as low to very low, mainly because of a high risk of bias in the studies.^[5]

The method also explains much of what memory champions do. In a 2003 brain-imaging study, top memory competitors scored no higher than a matched control group on intelligence tests and had no unusual brain structure, but nine of the ten used the method of loci.^[6] In a 2017 study, people with ordinary memories who practised the method daily for six weeks improved far more than two comparison groups. The improvement was still there four months later, and their brain networks shifted towards the patterns seen in memory athletes.^[7] In a small classroom study, medical students who built memory palaces about insulin and diabetes scored higher on a quiz than classmates who studied the topic on their own.^[8]

What is a memory palace good for, and what is it not?

A memory palace is best for remembering separate items in a fixed order, and of little use for understanding how ideas connect.

• Good for ordered lists: shopping lists, sequences, names, numbers and playing cards.
• Good for the key points of a speech, one image per point. Quintilian already noted that it helps less with learning a speech word for word, because small words such as “and” cannot be turned into images.^[2]
• Possible for vocabulary, with effort. Each word needs its own image linking its sound to its meaning, which is slow for hundreds of words.
• Poor for understanding. A palace stores items, not the reasons behind them. To learn how a concept works, explaining it and answering questions about it, as in active recall, do more.
• Slow to set up. Building palaces takes time, and placing items quickly takes a lot of practice. Reusing the same stops for a new list can also mix old and new images.^[5]

The method also benefits some people more than others. In one study, older adults gained less from it than young adults, partly because they applied it correctly less often.^[9]

How does a memory palace fit with spaced repetition?

A memory palace helps you store information quickly; spaced repetition helps you keep it. Images in a palace fade like any other memory, as the forgetting curve shows, and the strongest evidence for the method concerns recall shortly after learning: the pooled estimate in the 2025 review covers immediate recall only.^[5]

To keep a palace, review it like any other material. Walk the route from memory the next day, then again after longer and longer gaps, which uses the spacing effect. You can also turn the stops into flashcards, such as “What is on the sofa?”, and let an app such as Anki schedule them. For other memory aids, such as acronyms and rhymes, see mnemonics.