On the Belligerent Application of Memory Palaces

February 18, 2023

Article Preface:

Wrote this in response to by Joshua Foer.

On the Belligerent Application of Memory Palaces

These stories of memory prodigies and their strategies for memorizing the information that they can evoke not feelings of astonishment, but rather open a hollowing within me.

One of the techniques that these memory champions use is called the “memory palace.” The memory palace is an imagined location, wholly in one’s mind, and populates with representations of the things that they want to remember. For example, someone might choose to imagine anthropomorphized wine bottles discussing their relative merits in the living room of their own home. This image may help us remember to purchase six bottles of wine at the grocery store next time we go. If they find themselves wondering what it was that was written on their shopping list, they can simply imagine their memory palace and explore it as if it were real. Each image that they once placed inside the palace immediately reminds them of the general idea of what it is that they need to purchase.

What I find particularly upsetting about such a technique is that, to achieve an increase in the ability to remember things, one might have to populate a mentalized version of a real place with fictional images. For example, in , the sequence in which Joshua Foer is introduced to the technique, he is told to use his own house as a memory palace. After visualizing his own home, he populates it with unusual images that are meant to serve as “mental hooks” and immediately remind him of what it is that he wants to buy at the grocery store.

Suppose years later you wish to recall what your house was like as a child. Such a task is already immeasurably difficult, and even irreversible, for the threads of our memory change their form each time we reach into our murky, cortical ocean to reach for the subconscious anchor that reminds us how we felt when we were playing tag on the playground with friends in 1st grade. If we seek to recall the configuration of furniture in the living room almost thirty years ago, can we guarantee that we won’t simultaneously conjure up an anthropomorphized wine bottle that bawls us out for abandoning it in the limbo of our subconscious? We voluntarily rented out the memory of our childhood home to eerie manifestations we summoned into existence years ago in order to remember a friend’s grocery list.

A cursory solution to such a problem might be to create an entirely new place in your head that is partly or not at all based on locations in real life. For example, choosing elements of places in a particular video game you once enjoyed. Perhaps there was a film that you liked. There’s no harm in shoving in a few ridiculous-but-memorable images into a memory palace inspired by a film you watched, right?

What is implicit in the construction of the memory palace is that the inspiration used to construct the visceral features of it to aid your memory was drawn from already-familiar locations and things. By storing the items of your grocery list as ridiculous, memorable manifestations in the middle of a cathedral, you are inextricably attaching a string from that which you understand as a cathedral to a purely fictional realm; can you guarantee that the next time you imagine a cathedral that you once saw, visited, or attended that you won’t imagine bags of your groceries in the pews?

I visited last Thanksgiving to see my relatives. My aunt and uncle live a walk away from the University of Washington’s campus. So, I took that walk one early evening. The UW campus looks very different to me than it probably does to many others. As a child, I spent days on campus attending a tech camp that held activities all over campus. Years later, I found that the embers of those memories still swirl around the spot where time extinguished them. To an outsider, the campus might stand tall amongst its slow descent into the sound. To me, the campus is ablaze. Returning is dangerous.

I have no plans to live in or return to Seattle soon. So, perhaps it makes for a fine memory palace. I can send large cats in gilded armor spilling open bags of catnip on the back of their chariot in the campus streets to remind me to buy cat food next time I go to the store. I can imagine an intersection with banana peels stacked to the level of the street lights to remind me to take out the trash when I get home. I can see the letters “A N N A” with googly-eyes stuck in the large, glass window panes of the chemistry department’s building, reminding me the name of the person I had met at the party last night.

But is it worth it? If I return to Seattle, will my genuine memories of that which happened go to war against my bastardized, living and breathing English alphabet stuck to the windows of the chemistry depeartment? They say that forgetting is not because you don’t remember, but because you remember too much. Why is it hard to remember what happened two weeks ago? In part, it might be because that was a day in which everything that happened was almost identical to everything that happened just a single week ago. If I populate the UW campus with images of living numbers splashing each other and bathing in the water fountain that I once used to memorize several digits of Pi, how can I guarantee that the storage of this image won’t compromise the retrieval of my authentic memories? Will I see the fountain overtaken with ducks on the day our camp cohort went to the secret garden to play frisbee, or will I see multi-colored integers building towers of themselves, forming the digits of Pi?

Notes/References:

“…opening a hollowing …” Someone asked me what this meant. It comes from the franchise. If you run out of “humanity” (an in-game stat), then your character becomes a meaningless husk, an animated shell, even beyond Undead.
“They say that forgetting is not because you don’t remember, but because you remember too much.” by Benedict Carey, pg. 24:

The “losers” in memory competition, this research suggests, stumble not because they remember too little. They have studied tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of words, and often they are familiar with the word they ultimately misspell. In many cases, they stumble because the remember too much. If recollecting is just that—a re-collection of perceptions, facts, and ideas scattered in intertwining neural networks in the dark storm of the brain—then forgetting acts to block the background noise, the static, so that the right signals stand out (pg. 24).

Updates:

2026-09-28: Ported the writing over.
2026-09-29: Fixed a super rough and garbage phrasing of a sentence.