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Although basing your Memory Palaces on buildings you’ve seen with your own eyes will always be a best practice, it’s not your only option.
Sure, buildings are generally best.
That’s because remembered locations let us easily “offload” what we want to learn onto walls, corners and furniture as if they were hard drives.
But you can also develop thousands of Memory Palace options simply by utilizing art. And there are countless works waiting to be discovered using the phone in your pocket.
Using art is in fact one of the most elegant and pleasing ways to expand your memory practice.
From paintings and photographs to album covers and book jackets, I’ve long expanded my Memory Palace collection by using art.
There is a trap, however.
If you use art in the wrong way, you’ll double your cognitive load and confuse yourself faster than you can say “Giordano Bruno.”
(In case you don’t catch the reference, Bruno was the Renaissance memory master who used many statues in his Memory Palaces to expand them.)
In this tutorial, I’m sharing with you how to use any piece of art as a Memory Palace effectively, including the one “golden rule” you definitely don’t want to break.
Believe me, I’ve tried and it’s not worth the hassle.
Ready to massively expand your use of mnemonics by drawing upon art you’re already familiar with?
Let’s dive in!
Paintings as Memory Palaces: Architecture Within Architecture
Let’s start with the basic concept first.
When you use a painting as a Memory Palace, you are opening up a number of options.
The simplest involves either using a painting that is already in a building that you are using. Or you place a painting inside of a Memory Palace you’ve used before to expand it.
As a third option, you can refer to a painting and use it as a Memory Palace unto itself without reference to where it exists in space.
Finally, as I discuss in my post about visiting art galleries to help improve your memory, you can turn galleries and museums into Memory Palaces. By using the various artworks that stood out to you, it’s possible to wind up having an exceptionally strong Memory Palace.
One of the Memory Palaces I used to memorize a Sanskrit mantra used Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, for example. Many pieces from one particular exhibition formed part of the encoding process, assisted by an effect memory scientists call context dependent memory.
Either way, as I discuss in my main tutorial on how to use the Memory Palace technique, the key is to avoid increasing cognitive load.
There’s always the risk of putting pressure on your brain instead of reducing it unless you use the painting variation of the Memory Palace technique carefully.
To that end, let’s go through some best practices, starting with the most important.
Metivier’s Golden Rule: Do Not “Memorize” Any Memory Palace
Some people will hear that I use paintings in my Memory Palaces and start looking at art and memorizing it.
Although you can certainly do so, this is not what I mean.
Rather, I mean to suggest that if you use any of the possible options I listed above, you make sure that the painting or artwork is already in your memory.
This point seemed to be very important to Giordano Bruno, whom I mentioned above.
In his book, Thirty Statues, Bruno places his mnemonic associations on mythological figures he already knows.
He’s following a principle crucial to all ancient memory techniques that distinguish them from the processes of some memory competitors that have led to a lot of confusion.
Whereas memory competitors may learn a lot of associations assisted by techniques like the Major System and the PAO System, that’s for accomplishing short-term retention.
For this reason, I wince whenever someone tells me that they’re going to memorize a bunch of locations to use as Memory Palaces.
Even after looking at my massive collection of Memory Palace ideas and Memory Palace examples, some people still charge forward and memorize despite learning that the most accomplished mnemonists did not do this.
So the point is that if you’re going to use the Mona Lisa as a Memory Palace, make sure you already have a basic mental image of this artwork in your mind.
The Mona Lisa Test
I’m mentioning the Mona Lisa because it’s both relatively simple and very famous. It’s almost certainly in your long-term memory.
But a great way to start using a variety of paintings is to create an inventory. The following activity is a powerful memory exercise unto itself.
Step One:
- Write A-Z on a piece of paper
- For each letter name an artwork or artist that comes to mind
- When you’re just starting, I recommend sticking with portrait paintings or photographs
You might not be able to complete the whole alphabet. So if Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Cafe du Tambourin by Van Gogh doesn’t leap to mind, move on to B and the other letters until you have at least a few artworks listed.
The key to this exercise is to work with what you’ve got. Do not look up any of the artworks using a search engine. Just list what you can come up with on your own by name, or the name of the artist if that’s all you remember.
If you can’t remember the name of either, just list down where you remember seeing the artwork. Or jot down anything else about it that will help you recall the image you mean at a glance.
Step Two:
Pick one of the paintings and sketch it out from memory.
You don’t have to be an artist to complete this step. Just look at how basic my example is for Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait I is:
Keep going with this exercise until you have 5-6 of these sketches based on your list. Don’t stress it if you can’t come up with that many.
Likewise, feel free to produce many more.
The key is to produce examples and test that you remember enough of each image so that it can function as a Memory Palace.
This is why I suggest you start with portraits. They’re generally simple figures in space and not overloaded with all kinds of elements that probably never entered your memory.
Step Three:
Divide your sketch using the rule of threes. Just like you see in this example:
If you can do this, then the artwork has passed the Mona Lisa Test.
And it has at least three stations using the method of loci:
- Top of the portrait
- Middle
- Bottom
Placing the Artwork in a Memory Palace
Once you’ve tested that you remember the artwork will enough, place it in any room you’re using.
By following the basic principles of the journey method, you’ve given yourself at minimum three new stations.
Each painting you place can also serve as an alternative to the fifth station golden hand talked about in many of the older memory instruction manuals. These include books by Peter of Ravenna, Jacobus Publicius and even modern guides like Memory Craft.
In terms of exactly how to “place” the chosen artwork in a Memory Palace, this is done purely by the imagination.
You can imagine yourself hammering a nail into the wall and hanging the portrait, have aliens glue it in place, or just imagine it flickering into position.
Myself, I skip all of that and just mentally place it without any special fuss. Personally, I find those steps create cognitive drag because I wind up remembering what I did.
But the goal is to increase the size of the Memory Palace, not remember how it got that way.
Now let’s talk about other ways to use the artwork.
Using the Corners of the Frame
In addition to using the interior of the painting, which ranges from dividing it into threes to using multiple characters and buildings, you also have the option of ignoring the art.
This might sound strange, but I regularly use only the four corners of the frame, or the corners and the edges.
This clean application of stations to the frame using the method of loci creates a clean, numerically progressive journey.
You literally just encode your first piece of information on station one, then move to the second corner for the second piece of information, etc.
In the example above, which is 1:00 p.m. from Christian Bök’s Moons of Darwin project, I have also used the moon as a fifth station for one simple learning project.
If you don’t know how to form associations now that you’ve understood the use of frames, check out this tutorial on the best list memorization methods.
Utilizing Elements in the Art
In the video above, I discuss an image of a creature on the painted album cover of Crowded House’s Dreamers are Waiting.
Some people will look at art and think, “That’s just a rabbit.”
But to the mnemonist, or person who excels in memory techniques that I hope you’ll become, it’s a “magnetic trigger.”
For example, if you want to memorize a quote from Alice in Wonderland, and you know any piece of rabbit art, you can place the text on the art (or the frame).
You don’t need the trappings of a surrounding Memory Palace at all.
Expanding the Art on Book Covers Into Memory Palaces
Another approach I love that you can try yourself involves taking the art on book covers and expanding them based on the story.
For example, one of my ‘M’ Memory Palaces is the cover I read when I was young of Stephen King’s Misery.
It evokes the room inhabited by the characters throughout most of the story.
Having that image to refer to makes the room easy to develop into a Memory Palace. And you can use it in addition to the room and other areas portrayed in the film adaptation.
As part of my ongoing efforts to make unique memory training experiences for people who follow the Magnetic Memory Method project, I’ve deliberately had the covers of books like Flyboy designed for use as Memory Palaces.
In the image above, you can see the feather imposed over the building. Both can be used in interesting ways. The feather refers to Peter Pan, who serves as 92 in many PAO Systems. And each window on the home can be used as a Magnetic Station.
If you already have the book, more details are coming soon about how to use the story as you practice the memory arts.
But for now, keep in mind that many books in your collection have art that you can use in a variety of ways to expand your mind as you improve your use of mnemonics.
Start Simple & Avoid Artistic Overkill
As you’ve seen in the examples I’ve discussed, the art I choose is generally quite simple. I don’t use Bosch paintings overloaded with weird figures. Nor do I use chaotic scenes from Mad Magazine or Where’s Waldo books.
You certainly can, but those examples are filled with visual noise that is anathema to memory work. Even if you have studied such maximalist artworks intently, that time could wind up wasted the same way a lot of people fritter hours of their learning life away fiddling with virtual Memory Palaces.
You can also work with every single album cover or book jacket in your home library. But I don’t recommend it.
Instead, I suggest that you not overcomplicate this practice.
Choose paintings and artworks you already know. And if newly encountered artworks strike your fancy after you visit a gallery, let them arise naturally. There’s little to be gained by forcing yourself to memorize an entire exhibition.
If you want more nuances and some thoughts on using conceptual art in your memory work, scroll up and watch the video above.
Or, if you’d like more Memory Palace training tips immediately, register for my free memory improvement course by clicking the image below:
It gives you four detailed video tutorials, worksheets and exercises.
Above all, by taking action, you will join a long-standing tradition of memory practitioners who see more than just objects in space when looking at art.
They see opportunities to store more information, making the world part of a large “supercomputer” that lets them retain more information.
Tools you can use to expand your learning capacity are all around you, just waiting for you to unlock them.
