One of the key executive functioning skills that Thinking Organized stresses is memory. We all know that many courses in school require that students memorize vast amounts of information in order to do well. The challenge is how to keep all of that information in one’s mind without looking at notes or calling up our smartest friend, Google. Thinking Organized teaches its students a number of memory enhancement strategies such as visualizing, chunking, mnemonic devices and the method of loci, more commonly known as building a memory palace.

Alex Mullen, a “memory athlete” and Johns Hopkins graduate who became the first American to win the World Memory Championship in 2015, uses this method to help himself succeed in medical school and to win memory competitions. Mullen, who currently attends the University of Mississippi School of Medicine, focuses on the method of loci for memorizing long lists of terms in his med school classes. It’s a technique used at least as far back as the Roman Empire. The method of loci, or the memory palace, is based on the fact that we all know our immediate environments very well, such as our rooms, our homes, schools, streets in our neighborhood or our favorite hiking routes. Associate the very-well known with new information, and your brain will make a link between the two that is hard to forget.

Take a look at this video as Mullen demonstrates how to easily memorize a list of 20 random words by building a Memory Palace.

Mullen’s website, mullenmemory.com, has a plethora of videos, questions and answers and in-depth looks at other memory enhancement techniques.

Next time you need to memorize a long list of names, places or formulas—remember this!