Pick a route you already know. Put one thing at each stop. Walk it in your head.
The memory palace — the method of loci — is the oldest documented memory technique there is, described in Roman rhetorical texts and still used by competitive memorisers today. It works by borrowing something you already have: an almost perfect memory for places you know well. This builds one and keeps it in your browser.
Pick a route you could walk in the dark — your home, your commute, a shop you know. Fix a specific order of stops along it and do not change it.
Put one thing you need to remember at each stop, as a vivid mental image. Not a note attached to the place: an image of the thing physically there, doing something odd.
To recall the list, walk the route in your head. The places come back without effort, and each one hands you what you left there.
Make it absurd. A quiet, sensible image of a shopping list item on a table is forgettable. The same item the size of a car, blocking your front door, is not.
Make it move and make it interact with the place. Static images fade; something doing something to the location survives.
Use more than sight. A smell or a sound attached to the image gives you a second route back to it.
Spatial and scene memory is unusually durable compared with memory for lists — you can walk through a house you left twenty years ago. The method exploits that directly rather than trying to improve list memory.
It also imposes order for free. Because the route has a fixed sequence, you get the items back in order without doing anything extra, which is the part people find hardest with ordinary rehearsal.
Walk the route once without looking, then check. Retrieving it is what fixes it — testing beats re-reading, and it is one of the best-supported results in learning research.
A route you know well, used as a set of storage locations. You place a vivid image of each thing you want to remember at a stop along the route, then walk the route mentally to get them back in order.
It is the oldest documented memory technique there is, described in Roman rhetorical texts, and it is still the standard method among competitive memorisers. It works by using spatial memory, which is far more durable than list memory.
One you could walk in the dark. Your home is the usual starting point because the order of rooms is fixed and you never have to think about it.
Yes, though old images can interfere with new ones for a while. Serious users keep several routes and rotate them.
Yes. It is stored in your own browser and nothing is sent to us. Clearing your browsing data removes it, and it does not sync between devices.