She memorized a poem she’d never read in two minutes, using a trick from ancient Greece

Celia, a cognitive scientist who posts on Instagram as @celiaonpsychology, picked a Robert Frost poem she had never read, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and set out to memorize all 40 words of it in about two minutes. But instead of reading the lines over and over, she mentally walked through her apartment. The technique is called the Method of Loci, and it works by hanging each item you need to remember on a physical spot in a place you know well. Celia started at her front door and moved inward, assigning a visual image to every word in the poem and leaving it somewhere specific. A green sofa in the living room held the word “green.” For “hardest,” she pictured a woman holding a diamond. A color gradient stood in for “hue,” and a mother holding a baby represented “hold.” Once every word had an image and a spot, she closed her eyes and walked the route again, reading the poem back off the furniture. She got 35 of the 40 words on the first pass. The method is roughly 2,500 years old, and its origin story is grim. Credit usually goes to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, who stepped out of a banquet hall just before the roof collapsed on everyone inside. The bodies were crushed beyond recognition, and Simonides could identify them because he remembered exactly where each guest had been sitting. Roman orators later built the technique into their formal training. Cicero used it to deliver long speeches without notes, and the Sherlock Holmes stories popularized the term “mind palace” for modern audiences. Unlike most study hacks that circulate on social media, the method of loci holds up in controlled trials. When researchers scanned the brains of ten of the world’s top memory competitors, it turned out that nine were using the technique, and their brains lit up in regions associated with spatial navigation. A 2021 meta-analysis by Twomey and Kroneisen in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology pooled 13 randomized trials and found a medium effect on recall. A separate 2021 study in Science Advances found that six weeks of training produced longer-lasting memory than working-memory training or no intervention at all. The technique isn’t 100% effortless, as the video’s comments quickly pointed out. “I wonder why do so much; just read. [Do] it 3 times and memorize. This method seems more difficult,” one viewer wrote. For a short eight-line poem, that commenter has a point: setting up dozens of mental images takes work, but the method makes more sense for longer material that has to come back in a fixed order. That’s why you’ll see it show up in medical school, in speech preparation, and at the World Memory Championship. It’s also reusable. Once you no longer need the poem, the same apartment can hold something else. You can follow Celia (@celiaonpsychology) for more psychology-related content.