Building a Memory Palace 'On the Fly'

I recently heard the phrase “create a memory palace on-the-fly”, and this was the first thing that came to mind:

If you haven’t created a memory palace before, the process is simple.

First, take a location that you know well enough to picture in your mind. It can be a room in your house, or even something like the picture of the fly above. The important part is that you can mentally walk around the space in the location.

In the case of the fly image above, we can mentally walk around the parts of the fly in order, starting at 1 and going up to 11.

Then take a list of things that you want to memorize, and create a mnemonic image for each item.

The final step is to place each of the mnemonic images in one location of the memory palaces.

For more information on how to build a memory palace, see the memory palace and method of loci pages. It can also help to brush up on basic mnemonics. You don’t have to use a fly for your memory palace — that’s just a joke.

You can even use computer games, movies, books, and 3D VR tours as virtual memory palaces.

For a video explanation of how to use a memory palace, check out the video on how to memorize numbers below.