The method of loci, also called the memory palace, is a mnemonic technique in which items to be remembered are pictured as images placed in order along familiar locations, then recalled by mentally walking that route.
Classical rhetoric taught it as a trained, or artificial, memory. The Rhetorica ad Herennium builds it from backgrounds and images: small, conspicuous scenes such as a house, a recess or an arch, arranged in a series, each holding an image that marks the thing to be remembered. The name comes from the Latin loci, "places."
Cicero's De Oratore tells the story usually given as its origin. In it, the poet Simonides is called outside a banquet at the house of Scopas before the roof falls in, and he identifies the dead by recalling where each guest had reclined. Cicero draws the lesson that orderly arrangement is the best aid to memory.
In a 2017 Neuron study, Dresler and colleagues gave untrained participants six weeks of method-of-loci training. They improved memory performance significantly more than active and passive control groups, kept the gain at a four-month follow-up, and showed brain-network connectivity shifting toward that of 23 leading memory athletes.
The method is a strategy for 📝Explicit Memory, the conscious recall of facts and experiences. Where a 📝Second Brain stores knowledge outside the biological brain, a memory palace arranges it inside the mind. The open-source AI memory system 📝MemPalace borrows the method as its organizational metaphor, filing content into Wings, Rooms, Halls and Drawers.