How to Memorise (Almost) Anything for a Quiz

There's an old legend that memory champions repeat to themselves like a mantra. Around 500 BC, the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos had just stepped out of a banquet when the hall collapsed on the guests, leaving the bodies unrecognisable. Simonides, though, remembered exactly who had been sitting where. From that grim scene, so the story goes, was born the method of loci, the famous memory palace. Twenty-five centuries later, it's still the tool the aces of the world memory championships reach for.

Good news: none of this requires an exceptional brain. Just a few techniques, a bit of practice, and the urge to never again blank on the capital of Australia (Canberra, not Sydney, we saw you coming).

The memory palace, your house full of knowledge

The principle is simple and a little magical. Your brain is hopeless at holding on to abstract lists, but fearsomely good at recalling familiar places. You can close your eyes and stroll through your flat room by room without any effort. The memory palace puts that gift to work.

Pick a route you know by heart: your hallway, your living room, your kitchen. At each stop, you leave behind a piece of information in the shape of an image. To memorise the order of the planets, picture Mercury melting on your doormat, Venus taking a bath in your sink, Earth perched on your sofa. To recall them, you take the walk again in your head and pick up your objects along the way.

It sounds far-fetched, but the studies back it up. Research published in 2017 in the journal Neuron found that after six weeks of training with this technique, novices retained twice as many words, and their brains started to resemble those of the champions. Talent, here, is something you build.

The absurd sticks better than the logical

Your brain loves anything out of the ordinary. A flat image fades; a ridiculous one clings on. That's the fuel behind memorising by association.

Want to remember that the Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci and stolen in 1911? Picture her fleeing the Louvre on a bicycle, chased by a Leonardo doubled over with laughter. The more exaggerated, colourful and animated it is, the better it works. Dates, those old nemeses, become easy to swallow once you transform them. The 1515 of Marignano rings out like a nursery rhyme, so hang an image on it: François I riding two hens (fifteen, fifteen) through the Lombard mud.

The golden rule: get your senses involved. An image that smells, that snaps, that moves, imprints far better than a word jotted on a flashcard. Your memory isn't a filing cabinet, it's a cinema.

Revising at the right moment rather than for longer

Here's the discovery that ought to be taught from primary school onward. In the late 19th century, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus subjected himself to thousands of nonsense syllables to measure his own memory. The result: his forgetting curve shows that we lose roughly half of a new piece of information within an hour, and a good chunk of the rest within a day.

The cure isn't to revise more, but to revise at the right moment. This is spaced repetition. Instead of rereading a list ten times tonight, you see it again tomorrow, then in three days, then in a week. At each recall, just before it fades, you reinforce the memory and stretch out its lifespan. Flashcard apps run on exactly this principle, but a simple notebook and a calendar will do the job.

The classic trap is confusing rereading with remembering. Rereading your notes gives you the illusion of knowing. Forcing yourself to retrieve the information without looking, now that's real memorising. Test yourself, get it wrong, go again.

Cutting it up to swallow it whole

The last tool is chunking, or the art of the small piece. In 1956, the psychologist George Miller published a now-famous paper on "the magical number seven, plus or minus two": our immediate memory holds barely more than seven items at once. Beyond that, it overflows.

The trick? Grouping. A ten-digit phone number is unbearable in one lump, but broken into pairs it slips right in. Same goes for general knowledge. Rather than swallowing the kings of France in one block, sort them by dynasty. Rather than memorising fifty flags, group them by continent, by dominant colour, by symbol. Your brain handles five big folders far better than fifty loose sheets.

These four techniques don't compete, they stack. A memory palace stocked with absurd images, revised through spaced repetition, with everything neatly chunked: that's what turns a quiz night into a masterclass. The rest is just practice. And if you're after a playground to test all this under pressure, you know where to find us.