Culture January 1, 1

According to the sixteenth-century Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci, a memory palace is a complex mnemonic system, a mental structure kept in one’s head and not a physical (literal) structure to be constructed from real (concrete) materials. The purpose of such mental constructs, he explains, is “to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the sum of our human knowledge.” Each thing we want to remember is assigned an image, which is then committed to a location in the memory palace, where it rests until we choose to “reclaim it by an act of memory.”