Choose Your Palace

First and foremost, you’ll need to pick a place that you’re very familiar with. The effectiveness of the technique relies on your ability to mentally see and walk around in that place with ease. You should be able to ‘be there’ at will using your mind’s eye only.

A good first choice could be your own home, for example. Remember that the more vividly you can visualize that place’s details, the more effective your memorization will be.

Also, try to define a specific route in your palace instead of just visualize a static scene. So, instead of simply picturing your home, imagine a specific walkthrough in your home. This makes the technique much more powerful, as you’ll be able to recall items in a specific order, as we’ll see in the next step.

Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique

Define a route

If you will need to remember things in a certain order, it is essential that you follow a specific route through your palace, both in the real world and in your mind. Thus, once you’ve decided what your memory palace is, decide how you will travel through it. If you don’t really need to remember things in order, this step is unnecessary, but still useful, as it makes memorizing your palace easier.

Imprint the Palace on Your Mind
For the technique to work, the most important thing is to have the place or route 100% imprinted on your mind. Do whatever is necessary to really commit it to memory. If you’re a visual kind of person, you probably won’t have trouble with this. Otherwise, here are some tips that help:

Physically walk through the route repeating out loud the distinctive features as you see them.

Write down the selected features on a piece of paper and mentally walk through them, repeating them out loud.

Always look at the features from the same point of view.

Be aware that visualization is a just a skill. If you’re still having trouble doing this, you may want to develop your visualization skills first.

When you believe you’re done, go over it one more time. It’s really important to “overlearn” your way in your Memory Palace.

The Secrets of Sherlock’s Mind Palace

Associate

Now that you’re the master of your palace, it’s time to put it to good use.

Like most memory enhancement systems, the Memory Palace technique works with the use of visual associations. The process is simple: you take a known image — called the memory peg — and combine with the element you want to memorize. For us, each memory peg is a distinctive feature of our Memory Palace.

You have to get the knack of the method. Get some degree of experience in converting everyday objects (like lettuce) into long-lasting impressions (like Kermit the lettuce-head). This only comes with practice, like walking around your images of memory palaces. Practice, practice, practice!