I’ve been long fascinated by memory palaces. As a primary school kid and again as a teenager when I encountered the concept, I concluded that, while fascinating, they were more effort than what I would gain. My memory was fine, and first conjuring up a set of locations and then visualising evocative things in them to remember something seemed an awful lot of upfront trouble.

In recent months I’ve looked at memory palaces and other mnemonic techniques again. Reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond gave me insights into the role of the spatial brain in remembering, but also mental health and ageing. Reading Lynne Kelly’s Memory Craft gave me lots of insights both in various memory methods, as well as the effort and repetition that goes into them and which thus supports learning. Both were fun reads.

I decided to create a memory palace in my home office, which now has 45 loci.
Which leaves me with the question, what do I want to remember in it? And, I don’t know!

I find it quite hilarious that I can’t come up with something worthwhile to put in a memory palace! 😀
However I suspect that it might be the same for others. Searching forums for memory techniques, most applications are focused on showing off how well the methods work. Memory competitions to remember a random deck of cards in sequence in a few minutes.

Not a whole lot examples of memory palaces used for something ‘real’ and significant to its user.

Do use memory palaces? What do you remember with them for the long term? Why that? Would a note to link to be enough too?