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The method of Loci is a memory technique based on the Latin word Loci which means location. Using this technique normal everyday people have proven to increase their ability to recall everything from lists to the order of a deck of cards and in many cases a whole lot more.

Of course remembering a deck of cards isn't just as simple as knowing how to implement the Loci method. You must train using the technique in order to get better at it, and eventually it will become second nature to you.

In order to practice you first need to know what it is. Basically with Loci (location). A person will take something they are very familiar with and associate an item they are trying to remember with that location. The idea is to take something like your house or city and pick out spots that stand out to you. The best approach is to not just pick random locations but to start at one spot in your house or city and move through it in your mind in a method that is logical to yourself. For example if you are picking your city as a location, you might start at your house then in your mind travel through your city picking the spots that stand out to you the most and "filing" them away, then you can easily go back through this trip in your head and remember these locations in the correct order.

Now that you have a location or a mental trip, the idea is to associate the items you are trying to remember to spots on your mental journey. You change the item you are trying to remember into something that stands out to you. Make it very vivid and the more odd it is the easier it will be to remember, then you tie it to one spot on your city. So if you are trying to remember a list of presidents you could start at your house, the first president is Washington so you could imagine a washing machine or something like that - its similar to washington and the idea is to trigger your memory to remember washington. Now you have to tie it to your location which is your house. So maybe your washing machine was very huge and it was filled with too much soap, and its overflowing and filled your house so much that bubbles are coming out of the windows. Now you will remember that Washington is the first president because its the first stop on your mental trip.

Now for the second president, Adams. Adams is the same as "a dam", I am choosing this because it was an example given by Ron White from his course and it kind of just stuck with me so any adam is a dam, but yours can be whatever. So now you pick the second location. Ok I don't know where you live but lets say near your house is a gas station, and you chose a gas station as your second loci. So you need to tie the gas station to the dam. So lets say when you approach the gas station it is now a giant dam that holds the gas as storage instead of underground elaborate on that if you need to but that might be enough to make it stick, as its pretty vivid. So now you came across a dam on your second location and you can associate that too adams, john adams by the way so if you want to picture a toilet as the gas pumps and you have to flush it to get the gas from the toilet to your car you can see john, John for me is toilet, toilet and john are the same right (sorry to any johns, that was ron whites example as well and it stuck so why change it). So you have john adams at the second spot.

So you can see how this can work. In very little time you can use this method to remember lists and help to remember things that might be on an exam or whatever. It is very easy to use and within minutes you will improve your own memory without any effort just by using this technique. If you practice and it becomes natural to you the amount of stuff you will be able to remember is almost limitless.

By training with the loci method you can easily rember lists of 50 to 100 or more. Its very possible to mix in some images for numbers and you can remember numbers with 10, 20 30 100 or even more digits. This seems crazy since most people can only remember 7-9 digits (phone numbers). Its all about becoming comfortable with it. So give yourself a list and give it a try, remember the key is to make everything vivid and larger than life, the crazier the better.