Memory Palace: what does this memorization technique consist of?

Not everyone has the same ability to retain knowledge. However, there are ways to improve memory.

One of the best known techniques to achieve this purpose is what is known as the memory palace.. We are going to dedicate this article to analyze this method, knowing the characteristics that make it different from the rest and where its effectiveness apparently lies.

• Related article: "11 vital study techniques to learn more"

What is the memory palace. Definition and history

The memory palace, also known as the loci method, the mind palace technique or even the memory trip, is a resource to increase the retentive capacity, whose basis is the mental generation of a spatial scenario known to the subject, which will act as a guide to facilitate memory.

Although it may seem like a modern and cutting-edge method, the truth is that this system is one of the oldest known mnemonic methods. Its origin dates from between the 6th century and the 5th century BC. C. The person who made it known was none other than Cicero, jurist, writer and personality in general of the Roman Empire.

Cicero learned the palace system from the memory of another author, Simonides of Ceos, a classical Greek poet, who was the one who, unknowingly, developed a method of recollection through a fortuitous event. Simónides was in the house of Scopas, a wealthy man who had found him to write a poem in his honor and to relate it in front of his guests.

However, when Simonides finished, Scopas was not satisfied, claiming that other (mythological) personalities were cited in the text rather than himself, who was the protagonist, so he decided to pay him only half of what was agreed, summoning Simónides to get the rest of the money in the homes of the other characters mentioned in the poem.

But, as soon as they left the place, an earthquake took place, which reduced that and other houses in the area, to rubble. When it came to finding out who had died in the Scopas house, Simónides' work was of great value, thanks to the memory palace. How was this possible? Thanks to the way Simonides stored the memories.

This man was able to identify all the bodies found, because he remembered the exact position occupied by each of those present in Scopas's house. Therefore, making use of the memory palace, he just had to take a mental tour of through the room he had been in a while before, and place one by one all the present.

This is the origin of the so-called loci method, which also receives this name since, In Latin, the term loci means “of the places”, and refers to the use of the spatial reference, that is, to the specific place, as a system to be able to remember in a simpler way and with more detail.

• You may be interested in: "Types of memory: how does the human brain store memories?"

Recovery of the method in the Middle Ages

But that has not been the only historical moment in which the memory palace has been used. Several centuries later, placing us already in the Middle Ages, there were several groups of monks, whose task was retain different parts of the Bible in order to narrate these scriptures later without the need for read them.

Even the theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, mentioned this methodology and recommended it as one of the means to study, meditate and achieve the goal that Christians had in piety.. He was not the only one who reinvigorated the use of the Loci method. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary, used this system to try to transfer the knowledge of Christianity to the countries of the East.

In fact, it was Ricci himself who baptized this methodology with the expression of memory palace. Later, towards the end of the 15th century, the astronomer Giordano Bruno tried to use the zodiacal constellations as spatial regions with which to memorize concepts.

However, not everyone approved of the use of the memory palace. For some authorities, this way of creating knowledge did not conform to what the divine mandates ordered. This was the case with the Protestant extremists in England, known as Puritans, whose arguments were supported by Erasmus of Rotterdam.

For another long season, the memory palace fell into disuse. But it was in the nineteenth century when it recovered and began to be applied progressively, reaching its maximum popularity in the United States, throughout the twentieth century. In fact, this was the methodology used by the winners of the USA Memory Championship, held in 1997.

How the memory palace works

We already know the history of the memory palace or loci method. Now we are going to delve into the elements on which it bases its effectiveness as a mnemonic. The system is as follows: the person who wants to remember a series of elements, the first thing he must do is choose a spatial place that he knows well, for example a house or the living room of a building.

Those images are stored in long-term memory, so they are quality memories. The person will make a mental tour of this place establishing a series of landmarks, or locis, that is, of places. At each of these points, you will try to visualize one of the elements that you intend to remember, seeing it physically there.

The next step will be, of course, that of recovering the memory. To do this, the subject will go back through the mental images of the place that he had used as a guide. As he "walks" through the room or the evoked space, he will stand in front of each of the locis. In each of these places, he will “observe” the element that he had memorized.

This is how the full potential offered by the memory palace system is exploited. If you train enough, it can be used to remember long strings of items. Obviously, the individual capacities that each subject has as a base will also make a difference.

In this sense, we find world memory champions such as Clemens Mayer, who used a mental tour with 300 stops in which he distributed 1040 numbers to be able to recover them after 30 minutes of memorization. Dominic O'Brien has used this technique to proclaim himself memory world champion no less than eight times.

Another master of mnemonics, Gary Shang, was able to memorize more than 65,000 decimal places of the number pi, taking the virtues of the memory palace to the extreme.. This feat, logically, is within the reach of very few, no matter how much the loci method is mastered.

Memory Palace Training in Six Weeks

In the 2021 study by the team of researchers led by Wagner, the memory palace is used to test performance that could be experienced by a group of people versus individuals specialized in the use of different rules mnemonics.

In a first phase, the authors focused on the group of mental athletes, studying the methods used by these individuals, who in some cases were among the top 50 people in the world in the records of memory capacity, so we are talking about the individuals with the highest abilities in this discipline.

Regarding individuals with medium memorization abilities, two groups were established, one to which a training was applied of six weeks in different methods to facilitate the memory through images, among which was the palace of the memory. The other was the control group, which did not receive such training.

The interest of the study fell on the application of the magnetic resonance technique, to observe what happened in the brains of these people when they recovered the memories that they had encoded through this methodology. The activation of the lateral prefrontal cortex decreased throughout the process.

On the other hand, activity was observed especially in the area of ​​the hippocampus and neocortex throughout the memory consolidation phase through the memory palace. The study lasted 4 months to review the long-term results. The research allows to know graphically the brain processes underlying this memory method.

Bibliographic references:

• Hale-Evans, R. (2006). Mind performance hacks: Tips & tools for overclocking your brain. O'Reilly.
• Legge, E.L.G., Madan, C.R., Ng, E.T., Caplan, J.B. (2012). Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci. Acta psychologica. Elsevier.
• López, M., Jústiz, M., Cuenca, M. (2013). Methods, procedures and strategies to memorize: reflections necessary for efficient study activity. Medical Humanities.
• López, M. (2016). The memory palace. Writers Circle. Ibero-American University Puebla.
• Wagner, IC, Konrad, BN, Schuster, P., Weisig, S., Repantis, D., Ohla, K., Kühn, S., Fernández, G., Steiger, A., Lamm, C., Czisch, M., Dresler, M. (2021). Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci. Science.