Memory Palaces: Simonides' Collapsed Banquet Hall to 48 Blindfold Games

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The method of loci, also called the memory palace or mind palace, stores information as vivid images placed along a familiar route, such as a tidal wave of orange juice at the front door and a ten-foot loaf of bread in the hall. The episode traces it to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who stepped outside a banquet just before the roof collapsed and identified the crushed guests by recalling where each had been sitting. Roman orators adopted the technique to deliver hours-long speeches without notes, placing images on pillars and steps of the Forum. Cicero described it in De Oratore in 55 BCE, Quintilian in the Institutio Oratoria around 95 CE, and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium around 90 BCE served as a manual.

In the Renaissance the method split. Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci used it in Ming China to master Chinese characters by breaking them into image scenes and published a treatise on mnemonics in Chinese in 1596. Giordano Bruno, in On the Shadows of Ideas in 1582, built revolving mental wheels of astrological and mythological symbols to mirror the cosmos. Frances Yates revived scholarly interest with The Art of Memory in 1966, after Harry Lorayne's 1957 popular guide. Modern memory athletes such as Dominic O'Brien and Joshua Foer combine palaces with the person-action-object system, and Uzbek grandmaster Timur Gareyev played 48 blindfold chess games at once.

• The person-action-object system compresses three playing cards into one image, such as Elvis kicking a basketball.
• Gareyev encodes chess moves as images, such as a peasant feeding a clover to an elephant.
• Foer became the 2006 U.S. memory champion and wrote Moonwalking with Einstein.
• Thomas Harris gave Hannibal Lecter a mental Great Hall of the Seasons full of shocking tableaus.
• Sherlock, The Mentalist, the Finnish series Bordertown and the game Alan Wake 2 all depict mind palaces.