What Are Memory Palaces And How Do I Build Them?

The Magnetic Memory Method is my specific strategy for building

networks of Memory Palaces and then storing and retrieving information
within them. The procedures are based on ancient and universal
principles, but through experimentation, practice, reflection and further
experimentation and practice, I have innovated and identified completely
new principles that no other books on memory skills contain. Many of
them are specific to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, but even
these apply to how you can approach memory as a whole.
Let’s start with the foundation of the Magnetic Memory Method: the
Memory Palace.
A (Really) Brief History of Memory Palaces
There are many books that cover the inception and history of the Memory
Palace and Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein is among the best.
In brief, there was once upon a time a fellow named Simonides of Ceos
who went to a banquet. The roof collapsed on the building where
everyone was chowing down and he was the only survivor. However, he
had the habit of using an unusual memory technique to store the names of
the people he met and could therefore tell the city officials the names of
all the victims whose bodies had been rendered unidentifiable by the
collapse because he could also remember exactly where they were
standing in the building.
The story is probably mythical, but more importantly, it’s memorable. The
story involves a collapsing building fills the myth with exaggerated action
and the violence of an accident. We’ll get to why action, accidents (and
possibly scenes of cartoonish violence) are important to improving your
memory soon.
Some people call the Memory Palace the “method of loci,” because “loci”
is the Latin plural for “location” as found in the anonymous book
Rhetorica ad Herrenium, amongst other ancient texts dealing with Ars
Memorativa (the art of memory). The basic concept that has lasted
throughout history is this: Memory Palaces contains a number of “loci” or
locations and that the person memorizes material by creating associative
imagery and leaving it at various locations within the Memory Palace.
Just as Simonides of Ceos could tell the authorities where various victims
had been standing when the building collapsed, we can “find” information
we’ve memorized by looking for it at the place we left it in our Memory
Palaces.
Since ancient times, different terms have been used to describe this
process, including “the Roman Room method” and “the journey method.”
Although the technique has never gone away, it has recently been
revitalized on a larger scale in contemporary culture through Thomas
Harris’s fiction about the serial killer Hannibal Lecter (from Silence of the
Lambs, amongst other films and novels) and various memory
championships around the world. Sherlock Holmes has used a Memory
Palace on television as has the character Patrick Jane in The Mentalist.
What is a Memory Palace?
A Memory Palace is a mental construct, one that is typically based on a
location you are familiar with. The sole purpose of a Memory Palaces is
to store and retrieve information that you want to remember and later
recall at will in a way that is easy, effective, elegant and fun.
As you’ll learn later, you can also use “virtual” locations, such as the
homes of television characters, video game environments and fantasy
locations that you dream up entirely on your own. You can use outdoor
locations in Memory Palaces based on both real and imagined locations,
but typically we use indoor locations because they are well-structured and
allow us to create natural journeys. Although virtual Memory Palaces are
useful, they do risk the unnecessary expenditure of mental energy –
energy that you could be using to enjoy instant recall.
When we say that Memory Palaces are mental constructs built from
locations we know intimately, the typical place to begin is our own home.
It doesn’t matter if you live in a house, apartment or trailer home because
all of these structures feature two key elements: rooms and hallways.
Some homes will include staircases and storage closets while others will
not. Regardless of the type of housing, we use as many rooms as we can
because the mind has a natural ability to remember where these are
situated in a house and we can move from one place to the next without
having to think much about the journey.
For example, get a quick image of your current home in your mind. What
is immediately to the left of the bathroom door? Chances are you can
instantly see in your mind, or simply say without having to imagine it that
your home features a bedroom door, a hallway or a closet or perhaps a
window. In all cases, unless you haven’t paid much attention to your
surroundings or just moved in without looking at the place first, these
simple details will leap out at you without having to spend a shred of
mental energy.
Building your first Memory Palace and creating Memory Palace
“stations”
Building your first Memory Palace is a simple matter, but there are some
fundamental principles to pay attention to if your goal is maximum
success.
The first step is deciding upon a Memory Palace. Most books that teach
readers how to use Memory Palaces suggest that you start in your own
home, but this is not strictly necessary. You could use your workplace,
your school or your favorite bookstore. So long as you are deeply familiar
with the first place you use, any number of possible Memory Palaces will
serve.
The first step is to create a journey, but not just any old journey if you’re
using the Magnetic Memory Method. Instead of simply creating a helter
skelter path throughout the building you are using, obey these four
principles to create effective Memory Palace journeys that will be fun to
use:
1) Don’t trap yourself
2) Don’t cross your own path
3) Peer versus enter
4) Select your “stations” with care
Let’s deal with each of these principles individually.
1) Don’t Trap Yourself. Over the years, I have found that many people
I’ve worked with wind up trapping themselves in their Memory Palaces.
This is because they start anywhere in their home at random instead of
thinking the journey through.
For example, I’m presently writing in the kitchen, but this would not be an
appropriate starting point in this Memory Palace because in order to have
more than two or three stops along my journey, I would have to move
deeper into the Memory Palace. On the contrary, I want to move outward,
towards the exit so that I can get outside and add new stations or stopping
points along the journey at any point I wish.
We always want to be able to add more stations so it is very important not
to trap ourselves in a Memory Palace. Although a subtle point for true
Memory Palace aficionados, we also want to avoid “Memory Palace
Claustrophobia.” This condition also describes the feeling that there isn’t
enough space for the images we have created and left at a particular
station.
I would be saying this tongue in cheek, but I have actually heard from one
of my readers that this is a problem for her, and anything that causes you
to concentrate on matters other than the information you’ve stored in your
Memory Palaces needs to be avoided. Not trapping yourself along any
point of the journey is a good place to start.
2) Don’t Cross Your Own Path. This point is strongly related to the
point about not trapping yourself. If you have a computer nearby, I
discuss this at length in a free video on YouTube I created to help a reader
who sent me a map of one of his Memory Palaces:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ6j5d7Dvgo
(If you’re reading the print edition, or listening to the audio edition of this
book and don’t feel like typing this address, just search for “Metivier
youtube avoid memory palace confusion” and it should pop up).
On the map, he shows how in order to move through his house, he felt he
had to cross his own path. However, as you’ll see, based on the drawing
he supplied, we found a solution together.
You can easily follow these two principles by creating your first Memory
Palace station in a “terminal location.” This term indicates the innermost
room in your home that you can move outward from throughout the
dwelling towards a door leading outside. Main bedrooms situated in the
back corner of a home usually fit this description. In the first home in
which I created a Memory Palace, my office was the terminal location.
The path I created was as follows:
1. My office
2. Laundry room
3. Bathroom
4. Bedroom
5. Wife’s office
6. Living room
 7. Hallway
8. Kitchen
 

As you can see, it was possible for me to mentally move through the
Memory Palace in a linear line without crossing my own path or trapping
myself. I also did not need to pass through walls like a ghost, nor did I
simply jump through the Kitchen window out onto the street. We avoid
movements like this because such actions require mental energy.
Unnatural elements create “blips” in your journeys, instances that you will
not want to deal with when you use your Memory Palaces later to recall
information.
I should point out that you don’t have to follow my advice here. I’m
making this recommendation based on years of experience of my own and
countless interactions with readers of my books who confirm that passing
through walls is the equivalent of crossing your own path because it
distracts from the primary goal, which is finding information you’ve
memorized.
However, it is important to experiment on your own. It is impossible to
rule out that such unnatural strategies won’t work for some people. I am
providing tried and tested guidelines, but ultimately each person needs to
adapt the principles to their own use. But if in doubt, move through your
Memory Palaces in the same way you would if you were to walk through
them along a linear path along which you do not cross your own tracks.
3. Peer versus Enter. Of course, if you’re moving from room to room,
how on earth do you avoid not crossing your own path, especially if you
want to use multiple places inside of each room to store memorized
information?
The problem is easily solved. Instead of entering any room, simply
imagine that you are peering into it. If you identify and create multiple
micro-stations within the room, instead of walking from station to station,
simply cast your eyes (in your imagination) around the room. There
should be no need to enter it.
The important point is that you want to make sure that you circle the room
clockwise or counter-clockwise depending on the linear progression of the
rest of your journey.
4. Select your “stations” with care. Instead of calling each location
within a Memory Palace “loci” (Memory Palaces are already locations), I
call these stops along the journey “stations.” And these stops literally are
stations where you leave the information you’ve encoded using the other
strategies discussed in this book.
There are at least three kinds of stations and a person using the Magnetic
Memory Method could certainly identify more. These are:
* Macro stations
* Micro stations
* Virtual stations
A macro station is an entire room. If you use your bedroom to store one
piece of information, then that is technically a macro station. However, if
you use the dresser, the window sill, the left bedside table, the bed, the
right bedside table, the closet and then the bookshelf before exiting the
room, then these are all micro stations within the room and the room itself
no longer technically qualifies as a station at all. It’s simply part of the
route where you pause and peer in the door to take a journey with the eyes
in your mind around the room.
“Micro” and “macro” stations are not terms I use often, but I have created
them for this chapter in order to highlight the difference between using an
entire room as a station and the elements within a room that can be used
as stations (beds, bookshelves, etc). If you dislike being overburdened
with terminology, then you can think of a station as a station regardless of
whether it is an entire room or not.
There will be a section devoted to virtual Memory Palace stations and
elements, but for now, these are invented pieces of furniture, nooks and
crannies that do not actually exist in the location upon which the Memory
Palace is based. These are to be used caution, even for advanced
memorizers because (not to be a broken record), everything you introduce
into the form of your Memory Palace journey that is not natural to it will
distract you from proceeding from station to station quickly and rapidly.
These stations will more than enough strange and wonderful features that
to which you will be paying attention when the time comes to memorize
and recall information.
Here’s how to get started building your first Memory Palace:
1. Identify a location with which you are deeply familiar. At this point,
you should use a building to which you currently hold some connection.
Again, it doesn’t have to be your home. It could be your office or your
school. However, avoid things like large campuses. Use a relatively
contained structure with a number of rooms connected by hallways and/or
staircases.
2. Try and fine 10 “stations” within the location, which is now officially a
Memory Palace in your mind. You will use these stations as “drop-off
points for the information you want to memorize.” A station can be an
entire room or just part of a room. I recommend starting with entire rooms
at the beginning of your experimentation with the Magnetic Memory
Method, but if you feel ready to “peer” into rooms by giving them
multiple stations, by all means do so. You will learn about your thresholds
and limits as you explore the Magnetic Memory Method. And as you
explore, your mental abilities will extend.
3. It helps to draw out the floorplan of the Memory Palace on blank paper
or graph paper. Again, visit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ6j5d7Dvgo
or search for “Metivier youtube memory palace confusion” and you’ll
find a video depicting exactly how one of my readers has drawn out his
Memory Palace and how to troubleshoot a small problem he had.
As an alternative to drawing out your Memory Palaces, you can also
create a top-down Excel file. I usually do both, but it depends on the
purpose for which the Memory Palace is intended.
To see an example of how you can use an Excel file as a Memory Palace,
visit:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMPMuOyfke4
(or search Google using the keywords “Metivier YouTube Excel file
Memory Palace).
Whether you draw or use an Excel file (or both) number each station in
the Memory Palace in sequential order. Ensure that your journey starts in
a terminal location (i.e. you’ve eliminated the possibility of trapping
yourself within the Memory Palace), and make sure that your journey
moves in a linear line without crossing your own path.
4. Do all of these activities in a state of relaxation. There is an entire
chapter in this book on the role of relaxation in imaginative Memory
Palace work (which is really a kind of play) and you will benefit greatly
by engaging in just about everything you do in life from a position of
relaxation.
5. Test your Memory Palaces. Mentally wander through them and make
sure that you can move from station to station without spending undue
focus on the journey. The journey should be natural and closely resemble
how you would move from station to station if you were really going to
walk through the building.
6. Amplify your Memory Palaces. As you’re going to learn in the chapters
and lessons on using images to memorize material like foreign language
vocabulary, lists, poetry and even music, mentally “turning up the
volume” on your mental constructs is key.
This means that you take a small amount of time to concentrate on your
journey to make sure that it is vivid in your mind. A lot of people skip this
step, assuming that because they are so familiar with the locations upon
which they base their Memory Palaces that this isn’t important. In many
cases this is true. However, personal experimentation and the feedback
I’ve received from those experiencing monumental success from the
Magnetic Memory Method demonstrates that taking just a few seconds to
mentally walk through the Memory Palace and concentrate on the colors,
the lighting and even the materials along the way greatly enhances the
Magnetic “stickiness” of the Memory Palace. Personal experience will
undoubtedly demonstrate that this is true for you too.
One very interesting reader and a participant in my video course, “How to
Learn and Memorize the Vocabulary of Any Language,” shared the
experience that her Memory Palaces were intensely vivified by walking
through the Memory Palace and running her hands along the walls. I’ve
experimented with this myself and it works gangbusters. Depending on
the layout of your house, you can do this with your eyes closed for extra
imaginative benefit.
Once you’ve gone through this procedure once, you can do it again and
again. And because you now understand some of the basic principles
behind truly effective Memory Palaces, you can be certain that the
information you store in them will be easy to access each and every time
you stroll through a Memory Palace in your mind.
Gathering together a large system of Memory Palaces
One of the many elements distinguishing the Magnetic Memory Method
from other trainings is my emphasis on creating lots of Memory Palaces
and then organizing them in a particular way.
The classical method of organizing multiple Memory Palaces involves a
“Grand Central Station” Memory Palace. Imagine, for example, using
your high school. In effect, high schools are a collection of rooms
connected by corridors. When used as a central station for your Memory
Palaces, instead of mentally walking into individual classrooms, these
doors would lead into different houses you’ve lived in, other schools
you’ve attended, shopping malls, etc.
I know that this option works very well for some people, but I’ve found
that it confuses the majority. You have to remember, for example, which
door leads to which Memory Palace, and since there are so many doors
and so many Memory Palaces, people both new to the came and filled
with experience can get confused.
Ultimately, there is little to be gained from this process of linking together
Memory Palaces based on real locations using an invented Central Station
because, as you’ll recall, a fundamental rule of the Magnetic Memory
Method is that we must reduce or eliminate everything that costs mental
energy. When it comes to creating Memory Palace journeys and
maintaining our networks of Palaces, using an invented gathering place
filled with a variety of doors will certainly cause confusion for many
people. This problem and its solution can all be summed up in one simple
phrase:
The Less You Have To Remember, The More You Can Remember
It’s a paradoxical equation, but it’s a fundamental premise of mnemonics
that is never discussed. The architecture and principles we are building do
have a learning curve, but once the Magnetic Memory Method becomes
second nature, it is like a very light software code that floats in the
background. But plug it up with too many invented things and then you
have to essentially rebuild the Central Station every time you visit it.
The Better Method
If we’re not going to use a “Grand Central Station” to connect our
Memory Palaces, what other options have we? Undoubtedly, there are
countless ways, but I have found that using the alphabet as a structural
connector works the best.
First, the alphabet is not a building, and yet it is still a structure. It begins
at A and proceeds to Z in a regular and predictable manner. If you find
yourself at D, it’s easy to figure out that C precedes this letter and E
follows. If your mind magnetically zooms to Y, then it is not an enormous
feat of mental energy to see that X and Z are its closest neighbors.
But due to the nature of how we are going to assign Memory Palaces to
different letters, we will never have an issue finding them because each
Memory Palace will be alphabetically labeled.
Construction begins, then, by seeking out twenty-six Memory Palaces,
each of which beginning with a unique letter of the alphabet. For example,
when I first created a 26-letter Memory Palace system, I used shopping
malls, my high schools, but mostly the homes of friends. I now have
multiple Memory Palace systems (akin to alphabet keys on a chain that
are themselves alphabetically arranged according to subject) and here is a
representative example that you can use to start thinking about and
generating a network of your own:
A: Aberdeen Mall
B: Brock High School
C: Clark’s house
D: Dawn’s house
E: Eric’s house
F: Frank’s apartment
G: The Garage (concert hall)
H: Heather’s house
I: Ian’s house
J: Jessica’s house
K: Kane’s house
L: Liam’s house
M: Paramount movie theatre
N: Northern Face store
O: Owen’s house
P: Paul’s house
Q: Quinn’s house
R: Ryan’s house
S: Simon’s house
T: Trevor’s house
U: Uncle Lloyd’s house
V: Valleyview High School
W: Walter’s house
X: Library
Y: Yolando’s house
Z: Zoltan’s movie theatre

Let me offer a few notes on the choices here. Not all of these names
represent exactly what they suggest. For example, Zoltan didn’t own a
movie theatre. He was the contracted janitor who hired me to work there
from 12-5 a.m. while I was a young university student struggling to pay
the bills while I took the only undergraduate course I could afford that
year (thanks Zoltan!)
Likewise, “Yolando” is the nickname of a friend whose real name actually
starts with an ‘E.’ You’ll also note that “Paramount movie theatre” is used
as the “M” Memory Palace. Stretching things in this way is to be avoided,
but not denied. This is because the mind will naturally bring you ideas,
especially when you build your Memory Palace network in a state of
relaxation. It’s important not to resist unless you feel that the association
is too far out of whack and that you’ll have to expend energy memorizing
it. As mentioned several times already in this book, unnecessary
expenditures of mental energy are to be avoided at all costs.
At this point, you may be thinking that the Magnetic Memory Method is a
huge investment of mental energy just to get started.
Not so. It will take you between 2-5 hours to get set up and using the full
powers of your imagination to hold, maintain and use a system of
Memory Palaces. If you have any doubts, I encourage you to read this
article by a woman in Australia who used the Magnetic Memory Method
to memorize 200 words of Arrernte in just 10 days:
http://anthroyogini.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/learning-an-aboriginal-
language-a-quick-dirty-guide-to-learning-vocabulary/
What I like about her article is that she includes examples of her Excel
files, which allows you to see how someone has used them to achieve a
memorization miracle. Naturally, she has followed the key principles
we’ve talked about so far, including not trapping herself within her
Memory Palaces and not crossing her own path.
Where to find Memory Palaces
We’ve already touched on the use of living spaces and work places for
building and developing Memory Palaces. However, I’m often asked for
more ideas and my answer to the question boils down to the following:
Memory Palaces are surprisingly easy to discover. Although you may not
be a person like myself who has moved from city to city and moved
several times within each city while attending multiple schools and
working all manner of odd jobs during my younger years, I’ll bet that
you’ve lived in more than one house or apartment.
Assuming you have friends and family, you’ve also visited countless
homes of other people. Your personal history is likely also rife with movie
theatres, libraries, museums and if you can think in a structured manner
about outside locations, there are also parks, forest trails and
neighborhood walks at your command.
Wherever possible, it’s good to take a walk around locations that you will
use as Memory Palaces to amplify your memory. For example, if you can
visit an old school, you won’t necessarily improve your memory of the
structure, but you’ll make the location more vivid – and this means that it
will be more Magnetic.
Now that you’ve learned about Memory Palaces, the next major step is to
always keep one simple fact in mind: every place you visit can potentially
become a new Memory Palace. You can deliberately focus on the location
by paying attention to it in a completely new way, an intentional way that
will make they layout even more memorable.
If revisiting locations isn’t possible, you can look at old photographs, or in
some cases, use Google Earth or Google Maps. In the case of public
places, you can often search “blueprints” or “floor plans” and see
representations of locations ranging from public libraries to shopping
malls to casinos. In fact, I was given this idea by someone who wanted to
use a casino he’d once visited and searched the Internet for a floor plan to
help reconstitute his memory of the layout.
There are endless ways to revisit locations, and again, keep in mind that if
your past happens to be limited, you can always strike out into the future
by visiting new locations with a prospector’s eye. There is truly no end to
the Memory Palaces you can build.
Once you’ve compiled a list of candidate locations, I recommend filling
out the Magnetic Memory Worksheets. These can be downloaded here:
http://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/free-magnetic-memory-
worksheets/
It should take you only an hour or two to complete them. When you’ve
done so, you’ll have a 26-Memory Palace network with ten stations in
each Memory Palace. Because you are following the principles of not
trapping yourself and not crossing your own path in these Memory
Palaces, you’ll be able to add new stations to individual Memory Palaces
later. You can also assign more than one Memory Palace to each letter of
the alphabet. For example, you could have:
A1
A2
A3
B1
B2
B3
B4
This strategy can be especially handy when using Memory Palaces to
acquire the massive amounts of foreign language vocabulary you’ll need
to approach fluency in a foreign language. The Magnetic Memory Method
is perfectly suited for that.
Chapter Summary
In sum, the building and development of Memory Palaces takes only a
small amount of time and effort. The next step is learning how to fill the
Memory Palaces you’ve prepared with the information you want to
memorize. This could be anything, ranging from facts, lists of historical
figures, foreign language vocabulary or names and faces. We’ll be using
examples from each of these categories as we proceed.
As a final suggestion, as you are filling out the Magnetic Memory
Worksheets, concentrate on the journey and make it as vivid as possible.
You can literally close your eyes and pretend that you are “turning up the
volume” on the Memory Palace. You can try this in the room you are
currently in, reconstructing it in your mind and then making the layout
bright, vivid and pumping with energy. It should almost be as if you’re
casting some kind of spell or attempting to manipulate reality like Neo in
The Matrix. And manipulating reality you are.