Memory Palaces

A memory palace is an imagined place used to organise information. Items to be remembered are associated with locations along a familiar route. Returning through the route in the mind provides a sequence for retrieving them. The method has a long history, traced by Frances Yates through classical rhetoric and later systems of knowledge.

The story traditionally associated with it concerns Simonides, who was said to identify victims of a collapsed banquet hall by recalling where they had sat. Its enduring interest lies in the relationship between information and position. A location gives a memory somewhere to be found again.

Research on spatial knowledge offers another reason to take that relationship seriously. Maguire and colleagues' 2000 comparison of London taxi drivers found hippocampal differences associated with their extensive navigational experience. The work concerns learning a city, while the mnemonic technique concerns deliberate association. Both give spatial organisation an important role in how certain kinds of knowledge are acquired and used.

Architecture can make real places easier to learn. Distinguishable rooms and recognisable turns give directions a structure. Someone can refer to the room beside the courtyard or the stair visible at the end of a passage. Those features help a person find a position in the building and explain it to someone else. The memory palace is an especially deliberate use of spatial sequence; a legible building makes sequence available in ordinary life.