Roman orators used it to deliver hours-long speeches with no notes. Modern memory athletes use it to memorize entire shuffled decks of cards. It’s called the Method of Loci, or the Memory Palace, and it’s simply this: you already have a near-perfect memory for spaces you know well, so you store new information by walking a familiar route in your mind and dropping images along it.
Pick a place you know cold, your own home works best for your first palace. Walk through it in your mind and choose five distinct, fixed stops in a consistent order: front door, entryway table, living room couch, kitchen counter, bedroom dresser. These are your “loci” (Latin for places). The order never changes, that’s what makes the palace reliable.
To store something, picture it interacting violently or absurdly with each loci: not sitting near it, but crashing into it, growing out of it, or destroying it. Then to recall, you simply walk the route again in your mind, stop by stop, and each loci hands you back what you left there.