A Visual Place for Data —A.K.A a Memory Palace

Memory engineering began with the Greeks — and a little insight that physical objects are easier to remember than information, dates, or concepts. By Linda Holliday, CEO/Founder, Citia

We really are “lost in space,” spending hours each day in abstract experiences, playing, learning, working, shopping, managing. It’s rich and fun, but it’s often disorienting. And overwhelming. And hard to keep mentally organized. In one of the original brain hacks, ancient Greeks used what were later called memory palaces — mental constructs like houses or temples (based on reality, or not). Into these buildings they sorted all of their ideas, poetry, relationships, anything.

They couldn’t know it then, but they were probably tapping into the brain’s location system of Grid cells to organize and retain abstractions (ideas, poetry, etc.). It worked so well some practitioners were convicted as necromancers — conjurers of the dead.