The method of loci — also known as the memory palace technique — is an ancient memorization strategy that has been shown to improve a person's ability to recall information by upwards of 20%, even months after first using it. But beyond the impressive recall numbers, this technique quietly reveals something far more fascinating: the strange, layered, and deeply personal nature of human thought itself. How do our brains create mental images? Why do some people think in words while others think in pictures? And what does any of this mean for how we experience our lives?
How Does the Memory Palace Technique Actually Work?
The method of loci works by anchoring information to specific physical locations within a familiar space you can mentally walk through. Here's the process broken down:
- Choose the information you want to remember — talking points for a speech, a list of items, key concepts for an exam.
- Pick a familiar route or space — your apartment, a morning commute, a walking path you know well.
- Place each piece of information at a specific location along that route, ideally visualizing it in an absurd, humorous, or emotionally striking form.
- When you need to recall the information, mentally walk the same route and retrieve each item from its location.
For example, if you need to remember five talking points for a presentation, you might map them to your bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, and front door. When it's time to speak, you take a mental stroll through your morning routine and the points surface naturally.
The reason this works is because it leverages what your brain is already exceptionally good at: forming connections between information and visual, spatial, emotional, or symbolic contexts. Your brain didn't evolve to memorize abstract lists — it evolved to navigate environments, remember where dangers and resources were, and associate meaning with place. The memory palace technique simply hijacks that ancient wiring.
How Many Thoughts Do You Actually Have Per Day?
You've probably heard the claim that the average person has around 60,000 thoughts per day. The honest answer? We don't really know — and that number almost certainly doesn't capture how thinking actually works.
Thoughts don't arrive in neat, countable units. They flow continuously, bubbling up in different forms depending on the person and the moment — from brief sensory flickers to deep, looping ruminations. Some thoughts are wordless. Some are purely visual. Some are just feelings that never crystallize into language at all.
What we do know is this: we think a lot, and how we think matters enormously. Research by psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that roughly 47% of our waking thoughts are not about what's currently happening around us. Nearly half of our mental life is spent thinking about the past, the future, or some imagined scenario that doesn't exist right now.
That's a striking number. It means the majority of your inner life is, by default, happening somewhere other than the present moment.
Does Mind Wandering Actually Make You Unhappy?
Killingsworth and Gilbert's research didn't just track where our minds go — it tracked how that affects our happiness. Their findings were clear: mind wandering is associated with greater unhappiness. In fact, how you direct your thoughts accounts for about 10.8% of the variation in moment-to-moment happiness, while the actual activity you're doing only accounts for about 4.6%.
In other words, what you're thinking matters more than what you're doing. A person washing dishes while mentally present is likely happier than someone on vacation lost in anxious rumination.
As psychologist and philosopher William James put it: "My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind."
Mind wandering isn't purely destructive — it can spark creative insights, help us process the past, and prepare us for the future. But it comes at a cost. Every moment spent in an imagined reality is a moment not spent in the actual one. That's a trade-off worth being conscious of.
What Are the Different Ways People Think?
Here's where things get genuinely strange. Most of us assume that other people's inner experience looks something like our own. But the science suggests that people think in fundamentally different modes — and some of those differences are so extreme that they're nearly impossible to imagine from the outside.
Researchers identify roughly five primary modes of thought:
- Internal voice — a mental narration or inner monologue
- Visual images — mental pictures, scenes, and objects
- Feelings and emotions — the push and pull of emotional states
- Sensory awareness — bodily sensations and physical perception
- Abstract concepts and intuitions — ideas without words or pictures
Most people use a combination of these. But research suggests that a majority have a dominant mode — a primary channel through which their thinking flows. Psychologist Russell Herbert estimates that 30 to 50% of people regularly think through an internal voice. Psychologist Linda Silverman's research suggests roughly 30% are primarily visual thinkers.
What Is Aphantasia and Who Does It Affect?
For most people, closing your eyes and picturing a red apple is effortless. For roughly 4% of the global population, it's completely impossible. This condition is called aphantasia — the total or near-total inability to form mental images.
People with aphantasia don't experience a blurry or faint image — they experience nothing visual at all. Their thinking is composed entirely of words, abstract concepts, or feelings. There is no mind's eye.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some people experience hyperfantasia — an extraordinarily vivid visual imagination where mental images can appear nearly as real and detailed as the physical world around them.
Animal scientist and author Dr. Temple Grandin, who thinks almost entirely in visuals, describes her experience this way: "I think in pictures. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies complete with sound which run like a VCR tape in my head."
For people who think primarily in words, this is almost impossible to fully comprehend — and vice versa. We are each, in some sense, trapped inside our own mode of consciousness, unable to truly step outside it.
Why Do People Think So Differently From Each Other?
The honest answer is that we don't entirely know — and the problem runs deeper than neuroscience. Even our language for describing mental experience is shaped by our own individual mode of thinking. When two people use the same word — "imagine," "remember," "feel" — they may be describing profoundly different inner events.
As the video puts it: we may all think very similarly but use different terms to describe the same mental experiences — or we may all think very differently and use similar terms to describe entirely different ones. Language is the guard that our mental experiences can never get past. And so, neither can we.
The fact that we communicate and understand each other as well as we do, given these potential chasms in inner experience, is remarkable.
Do Visual Thinkers Succeed in Different Careers?
Yes — and the patterns are surprisingly consistent. People who think with vivid visual imagery tend to remember precise details from past events more accurately, and they disproportionately pursue and succeed in art, design, media, and creative fields.
People with aphantasia or weaker visual thinking, by contrast, tend to gravitate toward and excel in STEM fields — mathematics, engineering, computer science, and data-heavy disciplines where abstract reasoning and verbal logic dominate.
Neither mode is superior. They're different cognitive tools, shaped by different mental architectures, suited to different kinds of work and expression.
What the Memory Palace Reveals About Consciousness Itself
There's something quietly profound about the memory palace technique that goes beyond memorizing speeches or grocery lists. It works because it taps into the brain's natural tendency to create meaning through context, space, and association — to turn abstract information into something that feels like experience.
And that impulse — to make meaning, to create rich inner worlds, to wander through imagined spaces — is at the heart of consciousness itself. Clumps of brain matter, neurons firing electrical impulses, somehow produce all of it: words, images, feelings, the sense of a self, the experience of a life.
We live entirely inside our heads. We spend nearly half of that time in imagined worlds. The least we can do is decorate both with as much beauty, wonder, and presence as our thoughts will allow.
