How good is your memory? How effectively can you learn new information that you can reliably call upon? If you are like most people, you want to improve your memory. I know I did. My natural memory is pathetically poor, and I often felt hamstrung by my inability to recall dates, names, places, vocabulary. The inadequacy of my natural memory made me feel hemmed in and deeply frustrated: there was so much information just barely beyond my grasp. And my memory made it difficult to learn something new, since it often seemed like it would slip through my fingers the moment I had a handle on it. But no longer: I have learnt the tricks of the memory trade.

You are a member of the only species on the planet that can store information in a way that has enabled humans to constantly adapt to new situations, new environments and, for better or worse, inhabit every continent on the planet. This required the storage of vast amounts of information and, for almost 99 per cent of the existence of modern humans, we depended on our memories for everything we knew. It’s only very recently in the story of our species that we outsourced our knowledge to writing. Without writing, how did our ancestors do it?

In our literate world, very few people practise the memory arts other than those who compete in memory competitions. A number of studies have explored whether memory champions were born with some kind of exceptional memory ability. The Swedish psychologist K Anders Ericsson concluded that natural ability might help but it is actually practice in the use of memory techniques that granted champion memory abilities. A better memory can be achieved with the right techniques.

I’ve competed in the Australian Memory Championships as a senior (over 60). I took the title in 2017 and in 2018, the last time the competition was held. I managed to memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards in less than five minutes. At the time of writing, the world record for memorising a shuffled deck of cards is 12.74 seconds, held by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, a software engineer in San Francisco. The British memory champion, Katie Kermode, was shown hundreds of faces with their names, over a period of 15 minutes. She correctly associated 224 names with faces.

You may not want to become a memory champion, but there is a suite of techniques that we could all adopt from their toolbox. The most valuable of these is also the most ancient: the memory palace.

Simonides

A commonly cited story attributes the invention of memory palaces to the ancient Greek oral poet Simonides of Ceos. Simonides was born around 556 BCE and plied his trade as a dinner entertainer, as was common for poets in his time. During a banquet put on by Scopas, a nobleman of Thessaly, Simonides briefly left the room. Then tragedy struck: the roof suddenly collapsed, killing everyone including Scopas. They were crushed beyond recognition. As distressed families arrived to claim the bodies for burial, Simonides was able to identify their loved ones by recalling the physical location of each guest. He realised it was the orderly arrangement that was key to his feat. From this experience, we are told, he developed the ‘method of loci’, the memory method based on locations. Today it is known as a memory palace.

The ancient Greeks differentiated between natural memory and artificial memory. The former refers to what you can remember when you’re not really trying – the information that seems to come to you easily. For some people, this is a great deal. For others, like me, it is very little. By artificial memory, the ancient Greeks were referring to a trained memory. Everyone can improve their memories by using memory-training techniques, and the most effective of all were the memory palaces put to extraordinary use by great thinkers and speakers of the ancient world.

What is a memory palace?

A memory palace is a mental technique where you visualise a familiar location and associate specific pieces of information with distinct spots within that space. You can then mentally ‘walk’ through the locations recalling that information whenever you want. I’ll explain exactly how to set up a memory palace later, but at this stage all you need to do is imagine walking around your home. At every window, door, bookcase or sink, you contemplate some piece of information. The association between the location and the information will stick. Your home has now become a storehouse for your memories. It’s like a library: neat, organised and structured so that your brain can retrieve that information with nothing more than a thought.

In ancient times, the use of memory palaces was ably demonstrated by Greek and Roman orators such as Isocrates, a renowned rhetorician, and Cicero, the legendarily eloquent statesman. These charismatic speakers planned their lengthy oratory by creating imagined journeys through the streetscapes and buildings of their cities. As they performed their great speeches, they would mentally walk these journeys recalling the prepared spiel from each location. Their ability to persuade crowds gave them power and influence – which were founded upon their memory palaces.

This method was thoroughly documented by Cicero and Quintilian, a rhetorician who lived a couple of generations later, but it is best-known from the extraordinary writings of some guy (it almost certainly was a guy) around 85 BCE. We have no idea who wrote the Rhetorica ad Herennium (‘Rhetoric for Herennius’), but it was widely used right through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.

The ancient textbook extols its readers to create visual impressions of incredible intensity. They should be extraordinarily striking, vivid or shocking. The characters should be either hideously grotesque or stunningly beautiful, in blood-smeared rags or gloriously extravagant finery. There should be great tragedy and even greater heroism, humour and immorality, bizarre creatures and supernatural interventions. Mythology and ancient stories the world over follow this formula because the more your emotions are stirred, the more likely you are to remember the story.

Why bother? Can’t we just use Google?

Many seem to think that we simply don’t need to use our memories any more. We have everything we need at the tips of our fingers in this wonderful technological age. I strongly disagree.

New solutions to problems require creativity. New understanding comes from linking ideas that no one else has linked before. The human brain is a pattern-seeking device, but it needs to have information remembered in order to ponder disparate ideas and reveal the patterns. Exercising your memory also has well-known cognitive benefits, such as enhanced attention, lower stress and higher quality of life. Beyond that, being able to recall information with ease offers a far richer experience of the information that floods us every day. If you have a memory palace with a location for every country in the world, for example, then any new knowledge of the country, its politics, geography, cities or events can be added efficiently.

There is a common misconception that memorisation is the same as rote learning. The latter is achieved through repetition with no requirement for understanding. To structure a memory palace in a valuable sequence requires imaginative engagement and understanding. The only way you can add that information into your memory palace is to focus on it. I can read a page of text while thinking about what’s for dinner, taking in none of the words. I cannot take the information in that text and convert it to the images required for my memory palaces unless I really engage with that information.

Useful memory palaces

I have spent the past decade creating memory palaces to assist my weak memory. I have more than 10 kilometres of memory palaces now, including one for every country in the world that I will detail below. I have a palace for the first 1,000 digits of pi, which is of no use whatsoever other than to show off. There are many really useful palaces that I have tried and found invaluable.

If you are into the history of our planet, you can create a palace for the geologic timescale including all the aeons, periods, eras and epochs. It would start more than 4,600 million years ago in the Hadean, the first geologic aeon of Earth’s history. Once established, you can add the dinosaurs, the emergence of our hominid ancestors and when humans arrived at various locations as they gradually spread around the planet.

If you are more interested in human history, you can have a palace starting around 100,000 years ago up until the present. It needs to change scale as you go. By the time I get to 1900, I have a location for every year. For most events, you only want to know the date within a few decades to give you approximate dates and the sequence of events. Between my two historical palaces, I can stand at any point in time and look around to see what has just come before and what is soon to happen. Everything has a place and it is all in sequence.

For learning foreign language vocabulary, I depend on my memory palaces. For languages based on an alphabet, such as French, you can use the alphabet to structure your palace, one location per letter. A lone palace will soon become crowded. I have a set of alphabetic memory palaces. There is one for the nouns, another for adjectives and a few for the different types of verbs. You can even split your noun palaces to have one for feminine and a separate one for masculine nouns. I’m also learning Chinese, which has no alphabet. Instead, I base my palace on the primary component of the characters, the radical. Words with more than one character are located according to the radical for the first character. I then use animals and actions to encode the pinyin and tones. I cannot imagine how I could learn Chinese without it.

Any topic can be represented in a memory palace. It just requires you to organise the information into some kind of sequence. It sounds like a huge amount of work, but it is fun setting them up, and the increased efficiency and effectiveness in learning more than makes up for the extra work up front.

You can work with memory palaces entirely in your imagination. There is no need to visit the locations physically if you can picture them in your mind. But because I enjoy my palaces so much, I walk part of them every day, adding information or revising what is already there. I get both physical and mental exercise, which I consider a very efficient use of time. By visiting my palaces in my imagination, I can always recall encoded knowledge or add more at any time I want.

You will soon find that not only is your focus greatly enhanced by using the palace, but that your curiosity will be piqued far more often because you have a hook on which to hang new knowledge, relationships to make with whatever is already there, and new patterns to discover.

How to construct a memory palace for the countries of the world

The memory palace that I use almost every day is about the countries of the world. I could organise the countries in alphabetical order, but I already know what letter they start with. I’ve organised the countries according to their population.

Now imagine using your current residence as your memory palace. The first country on the list is India, the most populous. At location one, just inside your front door, you place an image to represent India, using something that resonates with you. I would have Indian dancers, but you may be keen on Indian cuisine, and imagine your local Indian restaurant making a delivery. Your next location, a wall or a bookcase, becomes China. Here I imagine a collection of fine china, but again it will be far better if you use your own ideas. At location three, a table, I had to place the United States. My brain insisted on sitting Donald Trump there. Don’t bother fighting your brain if it comes up with something instantly. You’ll lose, and the image will persist. Despite my best efforts, Trump is still seated there. These are the building blocks of your memory palace – to which a nearly limitless amount of information about countries and dependencies throughout the world can eventually be added.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium recommends marking every fifth location in some special way. This ensures that you don’t lose any locations when you are recalling your palace. I recommend using a door for these locations. There has to be four countries between each door, which creates a rhythm when recalling.

After India, China, the US and Indonesia, you get to the next door: Pakistan. In my palace, I imagine a packed suitcase blocking my entry to the bedroom because puns work well for me. Into this second room, you’ll get to Nigeria, Brazil, Bangladesh and Russia before you get to Ethiopia at the next door. Add a few new locations and new countries every day, and you will soon have a complete list of more than 220 countries and dependencies in the world (at the time of writing). Once the palace is firmly grounded, you can mentally jump to any location. In fact, your brain will do it naturally when a country is mentioned.

You are now ready to add further information to every location. Let’s say you decide to include the capital cities. Through the window, which for me is Brazil, I have glorious imaginings of the Carnival in Rio. Suddenly, all my dancers stop and look at me and say: ‘You do realise that this isn’t the capital, don’t you? That’s Brasilia.’ My story starter for Brazil is the Carnival and I can encode all the information I like about Brazil into that story triggered by that image. And so a memory palace comes alive.

As long as you can organise a set of information, you can memorise almost anything using memory palaces: kings and queens, prime ministers, presidents, plant classification, sporting champions, or every one of Agatha Christie’s dozens of books. But I have a warning: if you don’t revise information, the information will be lost, no matter what memory method you employ. The eight-time world memory champion Dominic O’Brien coined the ‘Rule of Five’. In his many excellent books, he recommends that you review at least once immediately, do a second review 24 hours later, a third a week later, a fourth a month later, and a fifth three months later. I have found that following O’Brien’s advice leaves me with a permanent memory even if I don’t mentally visit that location for years after.

Even with aphantasia, memory palaces work

Memory palaces work even if you don’t have a strongly visual imagination. I should know: I have aphantasia. This means that I can’t ‘see’ my images in my mind’s eye. I have a concept of them, but no actual image. It was a real shock, about a decade ago, to find out that most people create actual visualisations of their thoughts.

Having been involved in aphantasia research, it seems that I use story and logic for my images more than those who are strongly visual. Each of my locations focuses on one aspect: the door of a house, the tree at the front. Those items become my story starters. When I want to associate the location with new information, I add to the story. Often, I will go physically to the location and see something new that works well. I needed to add a dragon to one location in my Chinese memory palace. When I got there, I noticed a tree root that looked just like a dragon’s claw. That tree root, and my dragon, are now part of my story for that location.

I have no doubt that memory palaces are even more effective for those of you who can see the places in your visually strong imaginations. But whatever your ability to visualise, your brain will naturally adjust to its preferred way of dealing with all your locations. If you are really good at visualisation, you might enjoy creating memory palaces that are entirely imaginary. You can even create palaces based on buildings or landscapes from a video game, movie or book. You can populate your virtual memory palace with any information, just as you would a physical palace, adding extra rooms wherever you need them, unconstrained by reality. ​

Why do memory palaces work so well?

The reason memory palaces have remained among the most effective memory techniques for millennia is because they powerfully exploit how our brains work. The hippocampus is the area of the brain where short-term memories are consolidated into long-term memories. It is excited by information that is spatial; any knowledge you associate with a position in space gets it going. If you are thinking of a location in your memory palace at the same time as you memorise new information, your neural pathways will actually link the two concepts. This is what neuroscientists call ‘associative binding’. Think of the information, and your brain will recall the location. Think of the location, and the information will spring back to mind.

When you think of a country, you will jump to the right place in your memory palace and all the data you placed there will be available to you. By playing these cognitive games, you will create new neurons from neural stem cells. Novelty is a fantastic trigger for neurogenesis.

Our brains record places that we know well as actual physical pathways made of neurons. Your home, office, school and neighbourhood are already recorded in your brain’s physical structure. The better you know these spaces, the more your brain physically records them. Using a memory palace is piggybacking on the ability of the hippocampus to remember physical locations.

The wilder and more vivid, the more unusual and grotesque the images you associate with the locations in your memory palace, the more you will excite your hippocampus to remember them. Sitting still, studying mundane pages of typed notes will not have anywhere near the same impact.

The basic techniques used by memory palaces are far more ancient than the Greeks and the Romans. Indeed, memory palaces are a simplified version of the journeys through landscape that Indigenous cultures have been using for millennia.

Indigenous knowledge-holders stored vast amounts of information in memory. Without writing, they had to, and in many cases still do. As well as hundreds of plants and animals, First Nations knowledge-holders need to remember geology, genealogies, history, navigation, healing and a pharmacopeia, astronomy, laws and obligations, ethics, annual cycles, climate science, philosophy, spirituality, and so on. Good memories are absolutely necessary. One recent study shows that Navajo elders could identify 701 invertebrates, all from memory.

Indigenous knowledge systems utilise a sophisticated version of memory palaces. In Australia, the knowledge-associated-with-place format underpins songlines. These are sacred paths across the land that record the creation stories and practical knowledge of Aboriginal Australian cultures that have lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years. One Aboriginal Australian elder described songlines to me as a set of subheadings to the entire knowledge system.

At each of those subheadings – the sacred locations along the songline – rituals are performed. Each performance reflects one portion of the complex knowledge system. The memory locations are linked in sequence by story and song: every location has a story, and everything is sung. The knowledge is performed with dance and rhythm, while costume and art enhance the information even further. The Seven Sisters Songline, for example, tracks through the country of many Aboriginal language groups. Covering more than 500,000 square kilometres, it is surely the largest memory palace in the world.

Native Americans use pilgrimage trails, while the same method is clearly identified in the ceremonial roads in other parts of the Americas. The Inka created ceques, roads dotted with locations used to store information. The ceque system was documented by the Spanish conquistadors before they destroyed it all. The common factor is the human brain, the same brain that you are using right now.

So, start singing your knowledge, dancing at your locations, telling stories about the characters who are enacting everything you want to know. The more creative you are, and the more relaxed about letting your imagination fly, the more you’ll discover what blissful fun you can have escaping into your palaces.

My book Memory Craft (2019) details many memory methods not covered here. In a podcast from the ABC show Conversations, Richard Fidler and I talk about all things memory-related from Memory Craft.

In my latest book, The Knowledge Gene (2024), I show that a broad range of memory methods including memory palaces are innate, universal, uniquely human and very ancient. The book also discusses how the arts are fundamental to human knowing.

The full system for my Chinese memory palace is documented in a free booklet available from my website.

There is a long list of books that have had a major influence on my thinking about memory palaces. The English historian Frances Yates brought the art of memory to the attention of the modern world, and there are few books I rate as highly as her volume The Art of Memory (1966). Although Yates is pivotal in the recognition of the power of memory palaces, she did not use them herself. ‘There is no doubt that this method will work for anyone who is prepared to labour seriously at these mnemonic gymnastics,’ she wrote. ‘I have never attempted to do so myself …’

Mary Carruthers’s academic tome The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (2008) is a fascinating exploration of what happened to the memory techniques during medieval times.

You can also join Memory League, a wonderful free online resource. There is a forum, talking all things memory, with resources to back it up. There is provision for you to train in the memory competition categories: images, numbers, words, cards, and names for faces. Four of these categories depend on memory palaces. You can compete with yourself or with others.