A palace inside your head

Memory champions store their memories inside places they already know. The technique is called the memory palace, or method of loci; tradition attributes it to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, and Roman orators used it to recite entire speeches.

It works like this: you pick a route you know by heart (your house, your street) and you place each thing you want to remember at a point along the way, turned into an image the more absurd the better. To recall, you take a mental stroll and gather the images in order. Spatial memory is ancient and robust; the technique simply recycles it.

When researchers at University College London scanned the brains of elite memorizers, they found nothing anatomically special: just spatial-navigation regions lighting up. Nearly all of them used this technique.

Source: Maguire et al., Nature Neuroscience (2003)