I discovered the technic 3 years ago, after having mastered it I use it every time I want to remember something important.
But I’m surprised that it’s not more popular. And when I talk about it in outer circles, to people wanting to learn but not familiarized with mnemonic technics, it gets little to no interest.
Do you know why ?
The memory palace? Many find it takes a lot if work to come up with associations for everything. An aphantasic I know says it doesn’t make sense to her to remember both the image and what it stands for. In short, not everyone finds it worth the effort.
I only speculate but I actually do not know. Many people seem to not be interested in it and me trying to change their mind actually worsens the situation.
I myself got frustrated due to mismatch from my expectation(agressive marketing like it is a party trick mastered in days) to reality(Serious work to hone the skill).
Knowing ‘why’ also does not seem to resolve the mental conflict we are in. The simple truth is mainstream people do not care so do I for fencing, karate, horse riding, painting, circus, gymnastics and a dozen more. I just laugh it off and so is my expectation from you.
I have taught memory techniques including memory palaces for more than 3 years to many people for free, what I did notice most of the times are I am the only one who is more interested in explaining it, the other person doesn’t value it much.
many aom’s community also asked many doubts and they are genuinely interested but outside aom many not.
When my financial situation went down, I was trying everything, so I wasn’t in position to teach for free. I just thought I should charge money for it as well even though I was determined to never take money in it.
And people actually are more interested, you know when they pay even little, they give more focus, they also remain determined to learn it, like something valuable is coming, when I used to do it for free, nobody was interested.
And If you do wanted to teach for free, you can also put paid tag on it, but write there 100% discount, you know people will still be little interest since it was paid initially.
Making these elaborate memory palace requires a lot of skill which takes time to master.People are looking for a shortcut but they don’t wanna work hard
The “if I paid for it, it must have value” thing is real. (Like the IKEA effect “because I built it myself it’s a great piece of furniture”)
But also people are more interested in advantages right here and now. Like for everything there is a learning curve, so for people to be motivated they need to see that it would be much more effective that the methods they are already using now, that it’s worth the upfront investment.
And sometimes we tackle the problem by the wrong end, starting with the tool and trying to find uses for it: we tell people “look at how great the memory palace is” and they like “yeah it’s cool but what’s the point for me?” It’s more motivating to start from their needs and show them the tools to answer to it. You need to bring people to the place where they say “how did you do that, I want to do this too!”
Hi. Ive read that People do not valorate things cheap or free. They think its not worth. But if it cost something they respect more. Besides when you asked money you filtered. And only interesed People came. The others only wanted that for fashion. Or because was free.
Regarding mnemonics not being as popular today, it’s necessary to understand what happened to them.
There’s a very good book that explains the history of memory and mnemonics. It’s called “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates.
I discovered while reading the book that in the past, mnemonic techniques were the basis of learning in various cultures, especially in academia. Particularly the memory palace and the techniques from the book Ad-Herennium. For a long time, the Catholic Church used mnemonic images, which originated the images of saints in churches. It was a way of explaining who that saint was and what they did through a visual image. It was almost considered a sacred way of learning. Many said that by creating memory palaces, you were accessing a supernatural world, and they even created religions based on this, where memory was the foundation.
However, as far as I remember, a member of the Catholic Church who knew the technique wrote about the techniques WITHOUT INCLUDING the religious aspect. It was one of the first books on the subject that didn’t mention anything religious. This book was successful, along with others, and the Catholic Church began to prohibit the use of mnemonics, saying it was something profane.
Much later, Protestants in England also prohibited the use of mnemonics because, by creating images considered impure in the mind (sexual, for example) to remember things, we would be creating “idols.” And the goal was to eliminate idols both inside and outside the mind.
Along with this, a Protestant named Petrus Ramus developed Ramism, which is a way of learning WITHOUT USING MNEMONICS. This method was considered pure and was based on finding logic in things, creating a structure similar to a mind map, and then memorizing through repetition.
Ramism was the most widely used study method in England at the time, and later, when England colonized other countries, it passed the Ramism method on, until it reached the present day.
Here in Brazil, where I currently live, the Ramist method is used in the classroom (obviously it doesn’t have that name, but the structure is practically the same).
I’ve summarized it very simply, but this is the essence of how mnemonic devices went from being quite common to being demonized and almost extinct.
I recommend reading the book so you can better understand how this happened. In addition, the book covers many other things, such as Giordano Bruno and how mnemonic devices survived throughout the centuries.
Hi. There are a lot of things. Mnemonics after Rome was seen by religion as suspect. Because was used to teach things outside the system. Besides it helped imagination. That religion don’t like. Then the educative system didn’t like it because it means imagination and the same. Then when education evolved mnemonics was attacked by considering it like pure memorization without thinking. A stupid thing. And finally now that psychologic research says that is not bad and helps. Anyway is not taught because… Something.
Hi,
Someone posted about the Art of Memory here and how it developed in the “West.”
The Protestant ethos around images and not using lewd images was to blame but the Ramian method did use Tree diagrams but left the connection of the parts of the diagram to the student.
By the time the initial Protestant “push” against images was over, the modern school system never perceived the need to teach how to memorize subject matter which leaves us in the same 400 year detriment.
Stefos
Something that really interests me is whether these years of persecution against using imagery caused an adaptive shift in human brain against using “mnemonical” associative memory and related faculties of the mind.
Another question is, would such change be good or not? On paper, rote memory seems superior. Read once and remember, no clutter, no images floating around, no latency on recall. In practice, however, rote memory seems to be what becomes of associative memory once the thing memorized is recalled enough times. In other words, memories settle.
I don’t see it talked about, for some reason, but rote memory does not bypass associative memory. To remember a verse by the school method, you repeat it many times, so instead of using your “imaginative” memory, you use your muscle memory, where certain muscular movements are associated with the lines in the verse. And you repeat it until this muscular associative memory transitions into rote memory. This is the same principle as using images, but far inferior in its efficiency.
No amount of rote memory training will allow me to learn 100+ new words in less than 3 hours.
Memory Palaces are just associative mnemonics where one of the associations is a location. For people who travel around a lot and know the land really well, they travel in groups and can associate each story with locations everyone in the tribe knows about. I suspect this is part of what’s going on with a lot of bible stories. For example, there really are a bunch of salt pillars around the Dead Sea, where Sodom and Gemorrah were supposed to be. Maybe there was a split rock people used to walk by to remember how Moses hit the rock instead of speaking to it. Maybe there really is a rock shaped like a pillow which people used to remember the story of Jacob’s Ladder.
So, without a deep connection to the land, what do you use? One of the few memory palaces in wide use, among modern people alive today, is the sky, with the associated constellations. Another way to solve this was architecture, Victor Hugo seems to talk a bit about this, where the “Eyes of Notre Dame” are meant to be the kings of Jerusalem. This seems to have failed though, as by the French Revolution mobs of people thought they were supposed to be the kings of France.
So, without a shared culture, without a shared religion, with a corpus of knowledge that is supposed to apply to all people of all lands, not just your local tribe, how are you supposed to have a shared memory palace?
There are many people who’ve tried to solve the problem of course. There was a guy who tried to used Noah’s Ark as a memory palace, there was another guy who tried to use a cashier’s box. Robert Fludd had this elaborate system with stages in a theatre. I think the problem is that these are bad memory palaces. Memory palaces work partially because they are full of idiosyncratic but coherent crap that provide friction while comporting to our intuitions of traveled space.
This isn’t an impossible problem to solve, you could imagine an instructor that went around with a giant dollhouse that he mapped every fact in his textbook to, and expected his students to do the same, but nobody has done it yet, and so a shared memory curriculum is hard to have.
Now that I think about it, this is basically what a Lukasa is. Hmmm.
I think you miss the point. Teaching people by having them learn your memory palace is bound to be highly counterproductive, especially with the more clever and willful students. In the case of schools, I believe all that needs to be done is explaining the principles of associative memory. This isn’t popular among professionals, because it’s relatively inefficient, but I was able to memorize a list of around 1000 foreign names without any memory palace at all, just by linking them one after another, in about 6 days. Two lessons a week for a year when they’re around 9-11 years old should do all that’s needed.
simply because people can’t grasp it, i don’t mean theyre unable to understand it but that they don’t understand the process itself and find it more work than necessary.
Memory palace is in itself comprised of different techniques like the exaggerated imagination, substitute system, linking and peg systems, mnemonics etc. They want the magic but not the persistence to be able to perform them.
When first hearing about the memory palace, the first thought is that it’s magic, once the trick is revealed its no longer interesting as much either for most.
Hi. I don’t now well how to use MP. I prefer others systems. But why could be wrong to teach it to students. That’s the speech of education systems and don’t work very well it seems. The content of this blog it’s impossible to be taught in a school. Even though when the scientists say that it works to remember. May be using theories of 500 years ago is so good. The mnemonics works. You could realize in 5 minutes.
In my psychology classes, during neuroanatomy class, I learned about the Papez circuit, which is responsible for memory consolidation. Basically, when you need to learn something, you have to repeat the information multiple times, causing it to loop through the circuit over and over. At night, when the hippocampus reviews this information, it deems it important and ultimately transfers it to long-term memory.
HOWEVER, the hippocampus and the Papez circuit are directly influenced by the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that generates emotions like fear. If a memory enters the circuit and a very strong emotion is triggered at the same time, the information BYPASSES the circuit and goes straight to the cortex. This serves an evolutionary purpose: “If you see a red snake biting someone and causing severe harm, that information CANNOT be forgotten, which is why our brain has this system.” Basically, this explains why mnemonics work, as they act as a kind of evolutionary mental shortcut.
Some interesting scientific studies about that:
McGaugh, J. L. (2004). The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27(1), 1-28.
Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90-95.
When I first learned this, I was really surprised too. I think the book Moonwalking with Einstein talked about what other people said regarding this. Even though almost everyone knew and used this technique in ancient times, the number of people using it today has dropped significantly compared to back then. I’m still amazed that there’s a technique that boosts efficiency so much, makes recalling information easier, and simplifies encoding, yet so few people actually use it.
On top of what others have said, I want to share a slightly different point just my own perspective. Up until 2–3 weeks ago, I had no idea how it worked either. I remembered hearing its name mentioned in videos before, but the very first place I saw it was a clip from the Sherlock TV series, which made it feel like pure fiction to me. When people said “Memory Palace,” I imagined having just a single location where you cram, organize, and compress everything you need to learn. Because of that perception, I never thought it could actually work, and I didn’t even bother researching it.
Seeing Sherlock Holmes use it, I told myself, “This is a technique used by a brilliant mind, something only geniuses can pull off.” At the same time, I thought, “Most people aren’t using this, they don’t even know it exists. If something like this genuinely worked, everyone would be using it, right? Why wouldn’t they?” From that point on, I dismissed the memory palace as just a trope invented for TV shows to make characters look hyper-intelligent.
I honestly think pop culture plays a big role in this perception. I’ve never seen a side character use this technique; it’s always reserved for insanely fascinating, exceptionally smart characters. I feel like plenty of people have heard of the concept. If you ask a friend, “Remember that thing Sherlock Holmes used when he said he had to go to his memory palace?” they’d probably remember it if they watched the show. But I bet they have the same misconception: that it’s an elite tactic far beyond the reach of average intelligence. They just don’t realize an ordinary person can do it too. I myself heard the name for years without ever knowing the theory behind it.