According to myth, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos invented the ‘mind palace’ technique (seen in the TV series Sherlock) after attending a banquet. Simonidies stepped outside to meet with two young men. But the men were not there and the hall began collapsing behind him. Though his fellow banqueters were too badly crushed by the collapse for their remains to be identified, Simonidies was supposedly able to put a name to each body based on where they had been sitting in the hall. That ability to remember based on location became the method of loci, also known as memory theatre, the art of memory, the memory palace and mind palace.
To use the technique, visualize a complex place in which you could physically store a set of memories. That place is often a building such as a house, but it can also be something like a road with multiple addresses. In the house version, every room is home to a specific item you want to remember. To take advantage of the mind’s ability to hold onto visual memories, it often helps to embellish the item being stored—the milk you need to buy at the grocery store might become a vat of milk with a talking cow swimming in it. When those memories need to be recalled, you can walk through the building in your mind, seeing and remembering each item.
Greeks and Romans, such as the orator Cicero, employed the mind palace technique to memorize speeches, marking the order of what to say within a complicated architectural space. To write something down in that era was expensive and time consuming, a luxury not to be wasted, even on rhetoric The method of loci continued to flourish through the Middle Ages, when monks and other scholastics used it to commit religious texts to memory.
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