Recommended Prerequisite Post: Sensory Details, peg list two.

One can find a massive amount of information on the memory palace these days, and it is well worth your effort to dive in.

As and educator, this site will provide you with the basics you need to facilitate some engaging activities in your classroom.

The Greeks. They called it the Method of Loci. However, there is growing evidence that this technique is far older than the Greeks, spanning the millennia’s of indigenous non-literate people as well.

Regardless of what you call it, the memory palace is the most powerful memory technique ever devised. It is the technique of choice for world champion memory athletes and for good reason.

It works phenomenally well.

For those of us who do not currently compete in memory competitions, it is a way we can memorize pretty much anything at any time in our daily lives. From speeches, professional development, books, hobbies, religion — the possibilities are endless.

Many of us in the memory world think it is high time that this technique be an international mainstay in global educational curriculums.

This post will show you the basics of how it works, and other posts on this site will show you different ways to use it in the context of a classroom.

Step One: Map It

One of the posts on this site discusses teaching the students how to use the classroom to remember important information. If you read that, then you have a pretty good idea of how the process works.

IN this case, we are going to use each room of your home, or another place you are VERY familiar with, as your first memory palace.

Please keep in mind that this is exactly how I, and you, will begin to teach your students how to use this technique. So, what you do here, is exactly what I would recommend you do with your students.

Imagine taking someone on a tour through your home. You would want to take them on the most efficient path possible. You most certainly would not want to back track to often.

Take a moment a picture, or if you are sitting in your home take a tour, of layout of your home. What route would you walk through your home to ensure the most efficient tour?

Take a few minutes a map out your floor plan as if you are looking at a blueprint, or a view from a bird’s eye above your home. No need for a ruler, compass or protractor. Your picture can be a rudimentary crayon drawing. Just get it on paper.

After you have completed the drawing, I am going to make one recommendation: Start your tour from the back. In other words, start form the back of the house and work toward the front door. In the case that you have a back door, then work from one door to the other. This will be explained soon.

Once you have your map, make sure to number your rooms to ensure you have the most direct path. Remember, the number one rule is to not backtrack. It is universally considered sound to make the flow just as fluid as possible.

Congratulations! You have made your memory palace. Is that it? Well, pretty much. Of course, we need to stock it full of information.

The specific example of how you load content material in the format of the memory palace will be explored throughout this site. For the purpose of demonstration, let’s use your number peg list, which you should have completed at this point.

Step Two: Stock It

Write random numbers that equal the number of rooms in your palace. If you have five rooms, then write down five numbers. If you have 15 rooms, then write down 15 numbers, or less. Your choice.

If the first number is one, then put the peg for number one, such as a candle, in the first room of your palace.

IMPORTANT: This is where you need to put emotional action: crazy, sad, funny, scary – it’s all memorable. What is the candle doing in the room? Make it interact. If the first room in your palace is a living room area, then perhaps the candle is lighting your beloved television or leather couch up in flames. Scary? Probably. Dark? Maybe. Memorable? Definitely.

In the next room you put the second number, in this case we will use the number eight. In the second room of your palace, you will place your peg for number eight, which may be an octopus. I imagine this octopus could cause quite a bit of havoc in this room. Let it. Whatever comes to your imagination, let it flow.

Imagine how much your students will appreciate memorizing using the stories in their heads as opposed to repetition of words, which are laden with nothing more than symbolic curves and lines that represent pictures.

Continue this process until you have done as many as you want or as many as you can.

Remember when we stopped at a front or back door earlier? Well, you can always keep going into your front or back yard. Trust me, you will want to finish the map when you realize that you need more space. Trust me, at some point, you will want more space.

When you have completed the process, simply take a walk back through your home, and take a look at what happened to your house. Difficult to forget, isn’t it? Hopefully, you had some laughs as your property was ravaged by whatever critters ran amok.

I am guessing you remembered most , if not all of the numbers. If not, strengthen your stories or your sensory details. Can you hear it? Can you smell it?

This is the point where the memory palace can truly amaze: go backward. Whatever you put in a palace is just as easy to remember backward as forward. I have had some wide-eyed students marvel at what they did when encountering this wonderful pattern for the first time.

That is all that is going to be said with regard to instruction at this point. Anything more that you need to know will be in the posts marked for specific lessons; however, if you (and you should have) read the post on using the classroom as a storage container for information, then you have already seen how you can expand your locations to include several pockets in each room to store information.

In the case of the classroom, you are using eight locations, though in a pretty large space. It is not recommended to use 10 locations in each room. Most experts will tell you no more than five per room.

But I am getting ahead.

If you followed the instructions above, you are ready to move on.