The Method of Loci, or ‘Mind Palace’—and the Gruesome Story Behind It
The Mind Palace is simple—and fun too.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.
Before autocues, slides, and even paper, an orator had to be able to stand before an audience and deliver an elaborate speech from memory. The Romans accorded such importance to memorisation that memoria became one of the five canons of rhetoric, alongside invention, arrangement, style, and delivery.
Fortunately, they had a simple and effective technique for remembering almost anything in sequence. More than two thousand years later, the same technique is still used by actors, public speakers, memory champions—and anyone who would rather connect with an audience than read out a script.
Simonides of Ceos and the Banqueting Hall
Although mnemonic devices far predate the written word, both Cicero and Quintilian name Simonides of Ceos (c. 556-468 BCE) as the first teacher of an art of memory.
Simonides is perhaps best known for composing the epitaph for the three hundred Spartans who died at Thermopylae:
Go tell the Spartans, passerby That here, by Spartan law, we lie.
According to Plutarch, Simonides once dismissed the northern Thessalians as ‘too ignorant’ to be moved by poetry. But after the assassination of the tyrant Hipparchus in Athens, he had to swallow his words and work for the Thessalian aristocrat Scopas.
One day, at a banquet, Simonides sang a lyric poem in honour of Scopas. But the poem contained so many references to the gods Castor and Pollux (the Dioskouroi, or Gemini) that Scopas told Simonides that he would only pay him half the agreed fee, adding, “You can go and claim the other half from Castor and Pollux.”
A little later, Simonides was called out of the banqueting hall to meet two young men who had just arrived and were asking for him. When he went out, he saw no one, but as he turned around the banqueting hall collapsed, killing Scopas and everyone within it.
Their bodies were so mangled as to be unrecognisable. But because Simonides remembered everyone’s position around the table, he was able to identify their remains. This gruesome experience led him to develop a system of mnemonics based on images and places called the method of loci.
The Method of Loci, or Mind Palace
The method of loci, also called the memory palace or ‘mind palace’ (as popularised by Sherlock Holmes), involves placing a mnemonic image for each item to be remembered at a defined point along an imaginary route.
First, choose a very familiar environment, for example, your house or garden or favourite walk. This is your backdrop: it is fixed, and you can reuse it for talk after talk.
Within this setting, there will be a number of distinct locations, or loci, such as your front door, the doormat, the entrance hall, the stairway, your study to the left and the snug to the right… You do not have to have a mansion with many rooms, like Jesus’ father. Instead, you can think of the snug as, say, three separate loci: the fireplace, the sofa, and the alcove. But you must always make the same journey through your memory palace and come to the loci in the same sequence.
Then, in each locus, place a mnemonic image that represents the thing to be remembered at that point in your talk, for example, a goose, to trigger your story about visiting a goose farm in Extremadura. The more striking the image, the easier it will be to remember. If your next point is about inflation, don’t picture a graph or a number: picture an enormous loaf of bread swelling until it bursts through your kitchen ceiling.
Once you’ve furnished your memory palace, just keep on running through it until you’ve memorised your talk.
The method works because it turns an abstract sequence into a journey through familiar space. Instead of trying to remember one thought after another, you simply walk through your house, garden, or favourite street and ‘see’ each thought waiting for you in its appointed place.
Because the images represent ideas rather than sentences, the method encourages you to speak rather than recite. You remember the structure and substance of your speech while remaining free to tailor your words to the moment.
Try it out on something small, and see how well it works.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 11 August 2026.
Three is an oddly persuasive number. If I tell you that I have one reason for believing something, you may think I’m impressionable. If I have two reasons, you may suspect that I couldn’t think of a third. But if I tell you, ‘Here are my three reasons,’ the argument feels intelligent and complete.
The same pattern crops up everywhere. Genies grant three wishes, the newborn Jesus was visited by three magi, and Goldilocks had to contend with three bears. Not one, nor two, nor four, but exactly three.
For all D’Artagnan’s heroism, Alexandre Dumas did not entitle his novel The Four Musketeers. If asked, ‘How many ghosts visited Ebenezer Scrooge?’ most people will answer, ‘Three’—completely overlooking the fourth ghost, that of Scrooge’s partner, Jacob Marley.
Trilogies and trinities are a lot more common, and popular, than tetralogies and quaternities (I had to check this word even exists).
The Rule of Three in Rhetoric
Writers and speakers have long understood the peculiar power of three. In rhetoric, three parallel words, clauses, or lines make up a tricolon, a particularly effective type of isocolon, or parallel construction.
Some of the most memorable lines in history are tricolons:
I came, I saw, I conquered. —Julius Caesar upon crossing the Rubicon
Government of the people, by the people, for the people. —Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. —The United States Declaration of Independence
Similar to tricolon is hendiatris, which involves the juxtaposition of three words to express a single idea or total concept, for example, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (the national motto of France) and ‘wine, women, and song’ (or, nowadays, ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’).
Winston Churchill’s first speech to the House of Commons as prime minister is remembered as Blood, Sweat, and Tears, even though he said, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.’ As prime minister of the United Kingdom, Tony Blair did not make his top priority ‘education’ or even ‘education, education’, but ‘education, education, education’.
When asked a question, Joe Biden often responded by making just two points (“Number 1… Number 2…”), leaving everyone wondering what happened to Number 3.
Number 3 does something that Number 2 cannot: establish a pattern. Once the first two beats have created an expectation, the third fulfils it, giving a tricolon both rhythm and a sense of completion.
Sometimes the third element is also the longest or strongest of the three, creating a rising effect traditionally called a tricolon crescens.
Three is a Pattern
Why is three so much more engaging, satisfying, and memorable than one or two or four? ‘Here are my three reasons.’ ‘I’ll give you three examples.’ ‘These are the three lessons I learnt.’
One is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Four is one too many—to the extent that if you must have four, it may be better to present them as two linked pairs, and then maybe add a third pair.
Three, however, is the smallest number required to create a pattern and rhythm.
Triple goddesses or deities in groups of three are common in world myth: the Holy Trinity, the Tridevi, Hecate, Artemis, the Fates, the Furies, the Graces, the Graeae, the Morrígan, the Norns… and, I believe, originally stood for fate and the passage of time—the past, the present, and the future.
In Greek myth, when Demeter discovered that her daughter Persephone had been kidnapped by her brother Hades, she abandoned her divine duties and wandered from city to city, bringing by her absence a blight onto the land. Arriving in Eleusis in Attica, she took the form of a crone by the name of Doso and fell upon the good King Celeus for sanctuary.
Persephone, Demeter, and Doso may be regarded as the three aspects of a triple goddess—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone—that stand for the phases of the moon and the stages of life.
No wonder, then, that the number three is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche.
Does Language Merely Express Our Thoughts—or Does It Help to Create Them?
Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 22 August 2026.
Time heaved a gentle sigh as the wind swept through the willows. Punting in Oxford on a late summer evening. Can you hear it?
Communication does not require language, and many animals communicate effectively by other means. However, language is closely associated with symbolism, and so with conceptual thought, problem solving, and creativity. These unique assets make us by far the most adaptable of all animals and enable us to engage in highly abstract pursuits, such as philosophy, art, and science, that define us as human beings.
Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine what it would be like to live without language—not without the ability to speak, but without language itself. Given the choice, would you rather lose the faculty of sight or the faculty of language? This is probably the first time that you have faced this question: The faculty of language is so fundamental to what it means to be human that, unlike the faculty of sight, we take it completely for granted. ‘Monkeys’ quipped Kenneth Grahame, ‘very sensibly refrain from speech, lest they should be set to earn their livings.’ Monks, too, are the same.
If rhetoric, the beauty of language, can so bend us, how about language itself? In other words, how does the language you speak influence the way you think? The ostensible purpose of language is to transmit thoughts from one mind to another. Language represents thought, that’s for sure, but does it also determine thought, as claimed by Sapir and Whorf?
Does Language Determine Thought?
Wittgenstein famously wrote that ‘the limits of my language stand for the limits of my world’. Taken at face value, that seems too strong a claim. There are over seven thousand languages in the world—with, by some estimates, one dying out every two weeks or so. The number of basic colour terms varies quite considerably from one language to another. Dani, spoken in New Guinea, and Bassa, spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, each have no more than two colour terms, one for dark/cool colours and the other for light/warm colours. But, obviously, speakers of Dani and Bassa are able to perceive and think about more than just two colours.
More subtly, there is no English equivalent for the German word Sehnsucht, which denotes dissatisfaction with reality and yearning for a richer, ‘realer’ ideal. But despite lacking the word, the American poet Walt Whitman (d. 1892) was able, quite successfully, to conjure both the concept and the emotion: Is it a dream? Nay, but the lack of it the dream, And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream, And all the world a dream.
The English language has a word for children who have lost their parents (‘orphan’), and a word for people who have lost their spouse (‘widow’ or ‘widower’), but no word for parents who have lost a child. This may mean that parents who have lost a child are less likely to enter our minds, but not that they cannot enter our minds or that we cannot conceive of them. We often think about or remember things that cannot be put into words, such as the smell and taste of a mango, the dawn chorus of the birds, or the contours of a lover’s face or other part of their anatomy. Animals and pre-linguistic babies surely have thoughts, even though they have no language.
How Does Language Interact with Thought?
If language does not determine thought, how, if at all, does it interact with thought? Russian, Greek, and many other languages have two words for blue, one for lighter shades and the other for darker shades—goluboy and siniy in Russian, and ghalazio and ble in Greek. A study found that, compared to English speakers, Russian speakers were quicker to discriminate between shades of goluboy and siniy, but not shades of goluboy or shades of siniy. Conversely, another study found that Greek speakers who had lived in the UK for a long time see ghalazio and ble as more similar than Greek speakers living in Greece. By creating categories, by carving up the world, language supports and enhances cognition.
In contrast to modern Greek, Ancient Greek, in common with many ancient languages, has no specific word for blue, leaving Homer to speak of ‘the wine-dark sea’. But the Ancient Greeks did have several words for ‘love’, including philia, eros, storge, and agape, each one referring to a different type or concept of love, respectively, friendship, sexual love, familial love, and universal or charitable love. This means that the Ancient Greeks could speak more precisely about love, but does it also mean that they could think more precisely about love, and, as a result, lead more fulfilled love lives? Or perhaps they had more words for love because they led more fulfilled love lives in the first place, or, more prosaically, because their culture and society placed more emphasis on the different bonds that can exist between people, and on the various duties and expectations that attend, or attended, to those bonds.
Philosophers and academics sometimes make up words to help them talk and think about an issue. In the Phaedrus, Plato coined the word psychagogia, the art of leading souls, while discussing rhetoric—which, it turns out, is another word that he invented. Every field of human endeavour invariably evolves its own specialised jargon. There seems to be an important relationship between language and thought: I often speak—or write, as I am doing right now—to define or refine my thinking on a particular topic, and language is the scaffolding by which I arrive at my more subtle or syncretic thoughts.
While we’re talking dead languages, it may come as a surprise that Latin has no direct translations for ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Instead, one either echoes the verb in the question (in affirmative or negative) or expresses one’s feelings about the truth value of the proposition with adverbs such as certe, fortasse, nimirum, plane, vero, etiam, sane, minime… This may have led to more nuanced thinking, as well as greater interpersonal engagement, though it must have been a nightmare for teens—if they even had teens in those days.
More than a century before Sapir and Whorf, Humboldt (Wilhelm, not Alexander) arrived at a similar insight: every language embodies a particular Weltansicht, or view of the world. Language is not simply a system of labels for an already divided reality, but a way of dividing and organising reality.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from the Bibémus Quarry (c. 1897).
Built-in Bias and Prejudice
As I argue in Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that—or, at least, subconsciously.
Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. Here’s another, more substantial example. When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasise the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events—and, I surmise, to attach blame.
Some languages seem more egocentric than others. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. Unlike Spanish and Italian, French has lost many of the spoken distinctions between its verb endings, making the personal pronoun necessary: je parle, tu parles, il parle… all sound essentially the same. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… [Me, I think that] with the stress on the moi. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu? [And you, what do you think about it?]. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon allez, moi j’en ai marre [Whatever, I’m fed up me]. Because je is obligatory, French calls for the additional moi to place special emphasis on the speaker. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasise or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness.
In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasises modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’—ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. There used to be a similar distinction in English, with ‘thou’ used to express intimacy, familiarity, or downright rudeness—but because it is archaic, many people now think of it as more formal than ‘you’: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate… It stands to reason that, compared to English speakers, Turkish speakers have to pay more attention to evidentiality, Russian speakers to completion, and Spanish speakers to modes of being and social relations. In the words of Jakobson, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.’ Language may not prevent us from thinking certain thoughts, but it may make those thoughts more unlikely, and compel us, every time we speak, to notice certain features of the world.
In many languages, nouns are divided into masculine and feminine. In German, there is a third, neutral class of nouns. In Dyribal, an Aboriginal language, there are four noun classes, including one for women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals—or, as Lakoff put it, ‘women, fire, and dangerous things’. Researchers asked German speakers and Spanish speakers to describe objects with opposite gender assignments in German and Spanish and found that their descriptions conformed to gender stereotypes, even when the testing took place in English. For example, teutophones tended to describe bridges (feminine in German, die Brücke) as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender, whereas hispanophones tended to describe bridges (masculine in Spanish, el puente) as big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering.
Another study looking at the personification in art of abstract concepts such as love, justice, and time found that, in 78% of cases, the gender of the concept in the artist’s language predicted the gender of the personification, and that this pattern held even for uncommon allegories such as geometry, necessity, and silence. Compared to a French or Spanish artist, a German artist is far more likely to paint death [der Tod, la mort, la muerte] or victory [der Sieg, la victoire, la victoria] as a man—though all artists, or at least all Western artists, tend to paint death in skeletal form. So grammar, it seems, can directly and radically influence thought, perception, and action.
It is often said that, by de-emphasising them, language perpetuates biases against women. For example, many writers in English continue to use ‘mankind’ to talk about humankind, and ‘he’ for ‘he or she’. Similarly, many languages use masculine plural pronouns to refer to groups of people with at least one man. If a hundred women turn up with a baby in a pram, and that baby happens to have a penis, French grammar dictates the use of the masculine plural ils: ils sont arrivés, ‘they have arrived’.
Language changes as attitudes change, and sometimes politicians, pressure groups, and others attempt to change the language to change the attitudes—but, on the whole, language, or at least grammar, serves to preserve the status quo, to crystallise and perpetuate the order and culture that gave rise to it. It’s quite a thought: many of the words in our mouths are thousands of years old, or built from shorter words that are. They are by far the oldest thing about us.
Language is also made up of all sorts of metaphors. In English and Swedish, people tend to speak of time in terms of distance: ‘I won’t be long’; ‘let’s look at the weather for the week ahead’; ‘his drinking finally caught up with him’. But in Spanish or Greek, people tend to speak of time in terms of size or volume—for example, in Spanish, hacemos una pequeña pausa [let’s have a small break] rather than corta pausa [short break]. More generally, mucho tiempo [much time] is preferred to largo tiempo [long time], and, in Greek, poli ora to makry kroniko diastima. And guess what… According to a study of bilingual Spanish-Swedish speakers, the language used to estimate the duration of events alters the speaker’s perception of the relative passage of time.
But all in all, with a few exceptions, European languages, or even Indo-European languages, do not differ dramatically from one another. In contrast, to talk about space, speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an Aboriginal language, use sixteen words for absolute cardinal directions instead of relative references such as ‘right in front of you’, ‘to the right’, and ‘over there’. As a result, even their children are always aware of the exact direction in which they are facing. When asked to arrange a sequence of picture cards in temporal order, English speakers arrange the cards from left to right, whereas Hebrew or Arabic speakers tend to arrange them from right to left. But speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre consistently arrange them from east to west, which is left to right if they are facing south, and right to left if they are facing north. Thinking differently about space, they seem to think differently about time as well.
Language may not determine thought, but it focuses perception and attention on particular aspects of reality, structures and thereby enhances cognitive processes, and even to some extent regulates social relationships. Our language reflects and at the same time shapes our thoughts and, ultimately, our culture, which in turn shapes our thoughts and language. There is no equivalent in English of the Portuguese word saudade, which refers to the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong and so bitter as to have written itself into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal]. The three strands of language, thought, and culture are so tightly woven that they cannot be prised apart.
It has been said that when an old man dies, a library burns to the ground. But when a language dies, it is a whole world that crumbles into the sea.
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Why the Young Overdo Everything and the Old Under-Do Everything
The Three Ages of Life: The Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone (Persephone, Demeter, and Doso)
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.
In Books II.12–14 of the Rhetoric, Aristotle contrasts the characters of the young and the old with those in the prime of life.
His purpose is practical. To persuade people, we need to understand how their age affects their passions, expectations, and judgement. These portraits are, of course, generalisations—but exceptionally penetrating ones.
The Character of Youth
According to Aristotle, the young have strong but changeable passions. They are quick-tempered and lacking in self-control, and this makes them all the more likely to yield to their desires. They are eager for superiority and easily feel slighted. They love honour and victory more than money, and would rather do noble deeds than useful ones.
As the greater part of their life lies before them, they live more in expectation than in memory. Lacking in experience, they have exalted notions and tend to see the good rather than the bad. They are confident and courageous, partly because they have not yet suffered many defeats.
Although they are accepting of the conventions of their society, they have not yet learned to value their friends for their usefulness. They enjoy spending their days with others and are quick to pity because they assume that everyone is honest—or, at least, more honest than they really are.
If they wrong others, it is more to insult than to do real harm. As they are fond of fun, they are witty—wit being nothing other than well-bred insolence.
Above all, the young think they know everything, and so they overdo everything. This is the source of all their mistakes.
The Character of Old Age
In contrast to the young, the old live by memory rather than by hope. As they have a great deal of experience, they are certain about nothing and under-do everything.
They are small-minded because they have been humbled by life. They desire nothing great or extraordinary, but only what is sufficient for survival. As a result, they are driven too much by the useful and not enough by the noble.
They are cynical and distrustful, not necessarily because of bad character, but because experience has taught them how often people act badly. They neither love warmly nor hate bitterly, but love as though they might one day hate and hate as though they might one day love.
Unlike the young, they are not shy but shameless. Having come to value expediency over reputation, they feel only contempt for what other people may think of them.
Yet, paradoxically, the old cling more tightly to life. As that which is desired most strongly is that which is needed most urgently, they love life all the more as their last day approaches.
The Prime of Life
The body, says Aristotle, is in its prime from the ages of thirty to thirty-five, and the mind at about forty-nine.
The character of people in their prime lies between that of the young and that of the old. They are neither overly confident nor overly timid, neither trustful nor mistrustful. They are guided both by what is noble and by what is useful.
The young possess courage but not caution; the old caution but not courage. The young are warm-hearted but naïve; the old perceptive but cold. Those in the prime of life combine the strengths of each while avoiding their corresponding faults.
As Aristotle puts it:
To put it generally, all the valuable qualities that youth and age divide between them are united in the prime of life, while all their excesses or defects are replaced by moderation and fitness.
This is the familiar architecture of Aristotle’s ethics. Virtue lies not in either extreme but in the fitting mean between them.
Yet his deepest contrast may be the simplest: the young live in expectation, and the old in memory. The art of growing older is to preserve enough expectation to remain open to life, while acquiring enough memory not to be deceived by it.
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