How to Build a Memory Palace: A Beginner's Step-by-Step Guide

What you need before you start

You need three things: a place, a list and a quiet few minutes. The place can be your home, your school hallway or the route from your door to the bus stop. Pick somewhere you could walk through with your eyes closed.

The place does not have to be grand. In one short study, beginners who briefly studied a virtual environment did about as well as people using the traditional method with a highly familiar place (Legge et al., 2012). That hints that a small, simple place can do for a first try, though that is our practical reading. The study used word lists and does not show long-term retention.

The seven steps

1. Choose the place. Start with a small one, such as your apartment or one floor of your house.
2. Fix a route. Walk it in your head from the front door onward and always in the same direction. Do not skip around.
3. Pick the stations. A station is a distinct spot on the route, such as the doormat, the coat hooks or the sink. Aim for five to ten, each easy to tell apart from its neighbors.
4. Turn each item into an image. Make it specific, a little silly and involved in some action. The guide on mental imagery covers how.
5. Place the images. Put one or two images at each station and picture them there, in that spot, for a few seconds.
6. Walk the route. Close the list. Walk from the door and say each item aloud as you reach its station.
7. Check and repeat. Compare your answers with the list, then re-place any item you missed.

The order of your stations gives you the order of the list, so you do not need to memorize the order separately. These steps are practical advice, not a tested protocol.

Worked example: ten items in five rooms

Here is a made-up list of ten things to pack for a camping trip: tent, flashlight, map, kettle, rope, sleeping bag, compass, matches, water filter, notebook. The route runs through five stations of a home, with two items at each.

To test it, close this page and walk the route. At the front door you should see the tent and the flashlight, in that order. Say the items out loud, then check them against the list.

Fixing the problems beginners hit

Keep the palace alive with spaced review

Building the palace is the easy part. Keeping it usable takes returning to it. A policy-oriented review of spacing research says that spreading repeated encounters with material over time produces better long-term learning than massed repetition, and that adding tests to spaced practice amplifies the benefits (Kang, 2016). In two laboratory experiments with prose passages, repeated testing led to better recall than repeated restudying when the final test came 2 days or 1 week later (Roediger and Karpicke, 2006).

Neither paper tested a memory palace, so the advice below is our practical reading, not a finding. Walk the route from memory instead of rereading the list. Then open Practice, create your own deck with one card per station, such as What is in the kitchen? (the ready-made Memory Palace Steps deck covers the steps). Practice brings each card back after a wait of 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16 days, depending on its box. If you would rather chain the items than place them, try the story method.

Common mistakes

• Choosing a place you cannot picture clearly. Use a place you can walk through in your head without stopping to work out the layout. If you have to stop and think, the route is not ready.
• Making images that sit still. Give every image an action and an odd detail, and tie it to the exact station, such as a kettle whistling on the shoe rack.
• Putting too many items at one station. Keep to one or two. Crowded stations make the images crash into each other.
• Never walking the route again. Walk it from memory the next day and again at spaced gaps, so you can see which images have slipped and rebuild them.

Frequently asked questions

How many stations should my first palace have?

Five to ten is a sensible start. Our worked example uses five stations for ten items, with two items per station. Add stations only after the route feels automatic. That is a starting suggestion, not a tested number.

Does the palace have to be a real place?

Not necessarily, but the evidence is thin. In one short laboratory study, beginners did about as well with a briefly studied virtual environment as with the traditional method using a highly familiar place (Legge et al., 2012). That study used lists of unrelated words, and the abstract we read says nothing about invented places, so treat it as one data point, not a rule.

Can I use the same palace for different lists?

You can, but older images may get in the way of newer ones. A second place for each new list is a simple workaround. This is practical advice that the studies we cite did not test.

Is the memory palace good for studying every subject?

In our practical view it suits ordered lists and sequences of points, and it does less for understanding an idea. Our guide on when mnemonics fall short explains where else it struggles. Results vary between people, so try it on a small list first.

Sources

We opened each source below before citing it. See Methodology and Sources for how we check them.

1. Legge, E. L. G., Madan, C. R., Ng, E. T., & Caplan, J. B. (2012). Building a memory palace in minutes: Equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci. Acta Psychologica, 141(3), 380-390. Open the source
2. Kang, S. H. K. (2016). Spaced Repetition Promotes Efficient and Effective Learning. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 12-19. Open the source
3. Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255. Open the source