What Is a Memory Palace? How the Method of Loci Works

A memory palace, also called the method of loci, is a technique for remembering things in order. You picture a place you know well, choose a series of spots along a route through it, and leave a vivid mental image of each item at one spot. To recall the list, you walk the route in your head and “see” what you left at each stop (Ondřej, 2025). It’s one of the oldest memory techniques on record, and studies show it works, especially for lists that have to be remembered in order.

How to build a memory palace

1. Pick a place you know well. Your home, your street or your route to work all work. The places should be distinct from one another (Ondřej, 2025).
2. Fix a route. Choose the stops in an order you’ll always follow, such as front door, coat hook, hall mirror, kitchen sink. The order of the places keeps the order of the items, as Cicero put it (Cicero, De Oratore 2.354).
3. Turn each item into a striking image. An ancient Roman handbook on the method notes that everyday, ordinary sights are easily forgotten while extraordinary or laughable ones stay with us (Rhetorica ad Herennium 3.22). To remember “milk,” you might picture a cow standing at your front door.
4. Put one image at each stop. A recent review suggests no more than about two items per location (Ondřej, 2025).
5. Walk the route to recall. Go through the stops in order, and the images should come back with them.

Your palace doesn’t have to be a real place you’ve lived in. In one study, people new to the method did just as well with a virtual building they’d explored for a short time as with a place they knew very well (Legge et al., 2012).

Where the technique came from

The usual origin story is about the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, in the fifth century BCE (Ondřej, 2025). Cicero tells it in De Oratore. Simonides was dining at the house of a man named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly when he was called outside, and while he was gone the hall collapsed. The bodies couldn’t be recognized, but Simonides identified the guests by remembering where each one had been sitting (Cicero, De Oratore 2.351 to 2.353).

The Roman teacher Quintilian retold the story and noted that the old sources disagree on some details (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 11.2). He also described the method much as people teach it today: choose a large house with many rooms, place a symbol for each thing to remember, such as an anchor for something about ships, then walk through it in your mind. He thought it suited lists of things in order better than learning a speech word for word (same source).

What the research says

Formal research on the method began in 1968 (Ondřej, 2025), and the findings since then point the same way.

Memory champions use it. A 2003 study in Nature Neuroscience looked at ten people with superior memory, eight of them leading competitors in the World Memory Championships. Nine of the ten said they used the method of loci for some or all of the tasks. They didn’t differ from a matched comparison group in IQ or brain structure. The difference was the spatial strategy they used (Maguire et al., 2003).

Ordinary people can learn it too. In a training study, people with no memory training practiced the method for 30 minutes a day, 40 sessions over six weeks (Dresler et al., 2017). Before training, the group recalled an average of 25.2 of 72 words 20 minutes after studying them. Afterward, the average was 62.2. Four months later they still recalled 50.3, about 23 words more than at the start. A comparison group that trained on an n-back working memory task for the same amount of time went from 30.7 to 41.7 and was back to 30.4 at four months (Wagner et al., 2021, Table 2).

A 2021 meta-analysis of 13 randomized controlled trials, mostly with university students, found a medium-sized benefit (Twomey & Kroneisen, 2021). A larger 2025 review of 68 studies found a large effect on recalling items in order right after studying, compared with simply repeating them (Ondřej, 2025). The two size estimates differ because the reviews pooled different comparisons, but they agree that the method works.

Both reviews also warn about study quality. The 2021 analysis found that most trials didn’t report how they randomized participants, and the 2025 review rated the overall evidence as low to very low quality, mainly because of high risk of bias. It’s newer and much broader, so that caution is worth taking seriously: the effect is consistent, but many of the studies behind it are small or loosely run.

Limits worth knowing

Building palaces takes time, and using them quickly requires considerable practice (Ondřej, 2025). Putting a new list on a route you’ve already used can also interfere with the old list (same source).

Older adults may find the method harder to stick with. In a large five-year study of older adults, about a quarter of those given memory training used the method afterward. Those who did improved more than those who didn’t, and the authors called the method attentionally demanding (Gross et al., 2014).

The gains also stay with the kind of material the method suits, mainly lists in order. Brain training in general shows little carry-over to other abilities, which our guide on whether brain games improve memory covers in more detail.

Try it now

Write down ten unrelated words, such as kite, lemon, piano, sock, candle, rabbit, hammer, cloud, ticket, salt. Pick ten spots along the walk from your front door to your bed. Spend about a minute placing a vivid image of each word at its spot: a kite tangled on the door handle, a lemon floating in the bathtub, and so on. Then put the list away, wait ten minutes and walk the route, writing down each word as you reach its spot.

If you’d like to see how far your plain short-term memory goes without a technique, try the digit span test first, then again using a short memory palace.