USING THE METHOD OF LOCI FOR MEMORIZATION

Willy Wood

Introduction Willy Wood is a writer and editor at Open Mind

Technologies, Inc. Willy Wood’s weekly e-newsletter, Neuro News, covers topics about learning that may be beneficial to teachers, including the use of mnemonic devices.

Mnemonic devices are a memory technique that helps people associate information with a certain image, sentence, or word. Some examples of mnemonic devices are the method of Loci, acronyms, acrostic sentences, rhymes, embedding information in a story structure, and keywords. The method of Loci is one of the earliest used mnemonic devices, dating back to the ancient Greeks.

Loci for Memorization The method of loci is a very simple mnemonic

device. It is done by imagining a familiar place and using this location to remember information. One may use their house as the place, and associate each room in the house with a different piece of information to be memorized. To use the method of Loci, one must first make a list of words or concepts that need memorization and then associate each word or concept with one location, going in the same order each time.