Learn How to Use Sherlock's Mind Palace Technique

The mind palace technique is a method for memorizing large amounts of information by placing facts into locations inside of an imaginary “palace” in your mind. The palace can be any space that you are familiar with, like your home, school, workplace, or neighborhood. It can even be a virtual space, like a painting, computer game, or a scene that you invent yourself.

There’s a great TV show called Sherlock that features the mind palace technique in several episodes.

In episode 2 of season 2, called The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock Holmes utters the famous line:

“Get out. I need to go to my mind palace!”

Watson, his sidekick, groans and says to another character:

“Mind palace — it’s a memory technique sort of a mental map. You plot a map with the location — it doesn’t have to be a real place — and then you deposit memories there, and theoretically you can never forget anything. All you have to do is find your way back to it.”

Here’s a video clip of Sherlock’s famous mind palace scene:

Does the Mind Palace Technique Work?

First, does the mind palace technique actually work?

The answer is yes — mind palaces work amazingly well, especially for long lists of information!

“Mind palace” is another term for memory palace, also known as the method of loci. The technique has been used since prehistoric, hunter-gatherer times and by the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Cultures that didn’t have access to nearly unlimited amounts of paper, like we do today, needed to use other methods for remembering things.

For example, the Ancient Romans used mind palaces to memorize information, including speeches and rhetoric.

Today, in the 21st century, mind palaces are used by busy students, professionals, and memory champions to memorize vast amounts of information quickly.

Here is one of the world’s fastest memorizers using a mind palace to perfectly memorize 30 random pictures in less than 10 seconds on Memory League:

How to Create a Mind Palace Like Sherlock

Mind palaces are often created in places that you know well, like your home, workplace, school, parks, stores, or anywhere that you’re familiar with. It’s also possible to create virtual mind palaces from pictures, which is what we’re going to do below.

For this example, we’ll use a photo of the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London.

Here are the four steps to memorize information with a mind palace:

1. Create the Mind Palace Locations

First, we’ll pick some locations in the room to create a journey. I find it easiest to generally try to go from left-to-right and from top-to-bottom.

When you have a cluttered room like this, it’s possible to create many locations, but to keep this tutorial simple, we’ll make only 10 locations.

Here’s a list of the mind palace locations that are marked in the picture above:

1. On the painting
2. On the clock
3. On the candle
4. On the violin
5. On the middle chair
6. On the lamp
7. On the dresser
8. On the other chair
9. On the small table
10. On the rug

If you needed more locations, you could use every object in the room as a location. You could even turn every object in the room into a small mind palace of its own!

You should mentally walk through the picture until you can close your eyes and visit each location in the mind palace in order from memory.

2. Create Mnemonics for the Information You Want to Memorize

The second step in using a mind palace is to create an image for each fact you want to memorize.

To keep this introductory tutorial simple, we’ll use the mind palace to memorize a shopping list, because a shopping list consists only of simple objects that can be visualized.

Here’s the shopping list:

1. bread
2. potatoes
3. carrots
4. almonds
5. onions
6. pickles
7. cabbage
8. apples
9. oranges
10. lettuce

We now have 10 mind palace locations and 10 objects to place in the mind palace — one object per location.

We’ll combine the two lists (locations and shopping list) in the next step.

3. Place the Information in the Mind Palace

Now we’re ready to place our mnemonic images of the shopping list into our mind palace locations.

Take an item from the shopping list and visualize it interacting with the corresponding location in the mind palace.

Example:

1. The first location of the mind palace was “on the painting”.
2. The first item in the shopping list is “bread”.
3. Visualize bread interacting with the painting. You could picture rubbing a loaf of bread on the the painting so that pieces of the loaf start to become sanded off. Weird images tend to be memorable, so be creative.

After you place the first mnemonic image in the first location, move on to the second item and second location.

The second item was “potatoes”, and the second location was a clock. You could picture yourself throwing potatoes at the clock, trying to knock it off the mantle.

The third item was “carrots”. You could picture making a candle out of a carrot and using it for light in that location.

Continue through the list of 10 items and locations until all of them are placed. Here are both lists together:

Once you have all the items placed in your mind palace, mentally walk through the locations and see if you can remember everything. If you forgot an item, try to change the mnemonic image so that it’s stronger.

At this point, the shopping list is memorized in order. Don’t worry if you have to review it a few times. Mind palaces usually don’t eliminate the need to review the material occasionally, but they make retention vastly stronger — “impossible” memory feats become possible.

4. Recall the Information from the Mind Palace

Whenever you need to recall the information (in this case a shopping list), mentally walk through the locations of your mind palace and ask “what was happening at this location?”

The first location was a painting. You might remember that you were rubbing a loaf of bread on the painting, and pieces of the loaf were falling off. So that tells you that the first item in your list was a loaf of bread.

The second location was a clock. You were throwing potatoes at the clock, so the second item in your shopping list was potatoes.

Here’s the table of the locations, and the picture of the virtual mind palace, again — see if you can recall all 10 items:

Learn More About Mind Palaces

For more-detailed instructions on how to create a mind palace like Sherlock, see How to Build a Memory Palace and Memory Palace Tips pages. Also take a look at the Roman Room technique.

The fastest way to learn how to use a mind palace is to join the Art of Memory Community — it’s free! You can ask questions and learn about powerful memory techniques from memory enthusiasts and champions.