How to memorize all the presidents

Even a 3-year old can do it

First a quick update:

I know it has been a while since I posted here, but Everest and I have been making progress on the History Bee adventure. Last weekend she competed in a regional middle school Quiz Bowl event. The youngest people on the teams she was competing against were in 7th grade, but I am pretty sure Everest was the strongest player in the competition in the history category (and she did surprisingly well in literature as well). Overall her team came in 3rd just behind two teams with nationals experience.

In less than two weeks she will be competing in the Houston History Bee regionals as additional practice for her preparation for nationals.

I will have more to share in future updates. But today I want to talk about memory palaces.

How to get started with Memory Palaces (especially if you are a kid)

Moonwalking with Einstein (2011) popularized the power of memory palaces (or maybe it was the BBC production of Sherlock Holmes that came out around the same time). But by “popularize” I mean that people have now heard of the term, but I have yet to meet another person in real life who actually uses them.

The idea of memory palaces is that humans are naturally good at remembering places and images — but not so good at remembering anything else. This makes sense because of evolutionary survival reasons. Memory palaces lean into those natural abilities and use location and images to remember other things that modern society thinks are important.

There are lots of books on how to build memory palaces (including the aforementioned Moonwalking). I have two problems with most of these books:

1. They assume too much initial ability on the part of the reader. The first memory palace they suggest building is just too hard for most people. It was too hard for me anyway, and it was definitely too hard for my kids.

2. The focus of most of these books is in using memory techniques for “memory competitions”. They focus on use cases like memorizing a deck of cards, or a long string of numbers. The idea is to push short term facts into long term memory for short periods of time. That is a valid use case, but it is different from learning and retaining the history of England

Most books will recommend starting with your own home for your first memory palace (which I agree with), and the recommend five “pegs” per room. A “peg” is a place in the room where you mentally place an image that will help you remember something. But when you are first starting creating even a single image in a single location is not intuitive or easy. My biggest insight was simplifying the entire thing, and focusing on a starting use case: Learning the names of all the presidents in order.

Once I did that, it was surprisingly fast to build a memory palace that worked and stuck. I have taught it to all my kids and now they all know all the presidents (my three year old still sometimes needs hints — basically help walking through the palace to remind him what the next room is — but he can list all the presidents, which he is happy to do for doctors and cashiers and anyone who asks. He often asks to review them with me before bed (maybe as an excuse not to go to bed)). My 6-year old not only knows all the presidents, but has added most of the vice presidents. All of the kids can identify the president by number: “Jules, who is the 27th president?” — “That’s easy. Taft!”.

Some people will complain: “But they are just learning words and syllables. They don’t know anything ABOUT the presidents, or US history.” That’s true. But this is a start. And once they know the names of all the presidents they get far more engaged in learning stories about the presidents. When going for a hike the kids will ask for stories about presidents the way they used to ask for greek legends or “the story of David and Goliath”. Their favorite right now is the assassination of Garfield. They also feel pretty good about themselves that they know the presidents better than almost every adult they meet — including their teachers, their grandparents and their mom.

How to Learn all the Presidents

Here is the technique I used to do it.

First I taught the presidents to myself. This took about an hour of work in front of a computer, plus practicing for an hour while I was on a run. To start with I mapped out a memory path. I started with the master bedroom in the house, and then followed a path through the house with a SINGLE peg per room (remembering ONE image per room is a LOT easier, even though it means you will need a lot more rooms). One of the rules of memory palace walks is that you never want to “walk backwards” or reverse direction. I mostly followed that rule, but I do have a technique of “looking into rooms” before going in different directions. And I also use “portals” to jump to new distant locations when I run into dead ends. Here is what my path looks like through our house (and down the street):

1. Master bedroom

2. Master bathroom

3. Shower

4. Master Closet

5. “Library” (another walk through closet we converted in book storage)

6. Laundry room

7. Pantry

8. Kitchen

9. Dining Room

10. Patio

11. (Look into) backyard

12. (Look at the) pond past the backyard

13. “craft room”

14. Office

15. Office Bathroom

At this point I have hit a dead end so I use the technique of “walking through a teleportation portal to a different point in the house)

16. Upstairs bathroom

17. (look into) Guest bedroom

18. Everest’s bedroom

Teleport from Everest’s closet to…

19. “Media Room”

20. “Play room” (that has been turned into a shared bedroom for my middle children

21. Upstairs Hallway

22. Stairs

23. (look into) Downstairs bathroom

24. (look into) 3-years olds’s room

25. (look into) storage space under the stairs

26. Garage

27. Driveway

28. Tree in front yard

29. Street in front of house

30. Swings in park across the street

31. Post office boxes

32. Path in the park

33. Homes across the street

34. Intersection

35. A home across the street that was recently under construction

36. Parking lot of the community center nearby

37. Playground at the community center

38. Inside the community center (“The Den”)

39. Outdoor BBQs at the community center

40. Pool at the community center

41. Down the Street

42. Beginning of the running path

43. On the running path in the trees

44. The turn around point of the running path

45. The part of the running path that is super flat and the kids can run fast

46. The start of the dead end street

47. The end of the dead end street

48. (jump to) the big mansion down the street

49. Up the top of the hill

50. The gate to the golf course

Note that we only use the first 47 locations for presidents, but I like to have an even fifty for reasons I will discuss in another post.

I have bolded every five locations. It is important to create giant visual queues in each of those five. That way if you need to find the 26th president, you can quickly jump to position #25 and then just move forward one room.

When I was building this memory palace I messed up. I completely forgot to put in at least two rooms in the house — by the front door (should be location #27) and the main living room (which could have been before or after the patio, or even an alternate location #27). When I realized my mistake I tried to add them in, but it was too late. I had already placed the presidents, and I realized right away that trying to move the images would have been a disaster (Teddy Roosevelt is on his horse in the garage. Moving him under the stairs would have confused everything!). So it is worth spending time being very considered as you map out your locations — you only get one chance at it. There will never be a president in our living room.

When I was building my second palace I felt better at my abilities and I increased the density of locations. For example the kitchen in the second palace has four locations; The basement has six. I can see why when someone gets good at this they create five pegs per room. But I still don’t recommend anyone start there.

Once you have the locations, the next step is to assign a president to each location, and then create an image for that president. The key for making images it is to make them as crazy and weird and inappropriate as possible (this may be why schools do not teach this technique). Many books recommend NOT telling people what your images are, so that you don’t limit yourself to images that would not be embarrassing. There was apparently a big debate in the medieval period when clergy were unsure if it was appropriate to use vulgar images in memory palaces. They decided that since they were memorizing sacred texts, that vulgar images were fine given that they were the most effective.

Once you have your choices, then you start memorizing. I recommend doing five at a time. Read through the five. Really work to imaging the image in the location, then move to the next location and repeat. Then try and repeat all five. If you miss one, go back and look it up. Once you have five, then repeat with the next five. I did this part while out on a run and within the hour run I mostly had all 47 memorized.

When I tried repeating all 47 that evening I think I was able to do about 42-43 of them. The ones I missed I looked up. Generally at that point I realize that the image was not strong enough, so I made the image even more extreme. Now when I lie in bed at night I will review one or more of my memory palaces. I will sometimes miss one peg out of fifty and need to review it, but mostly I have everything stored now in long term memory.

Once I had all the presidents nailed myself I taught the kids. We actually walked from room to room in the house (we did not walk the streets outside of the house, but we stood in our driveway and pointed to the places or the direction of the places).

It took longer and more reviews for the kids to learn all the presidents, but it was not HARD. And it is fun for all of us to do the reviews.

And that’s it.

Once you have the presidents down, you can use the same memory palace for other things. Eventually a single palace will get “too crowded” and you will want to create a new palace. But you can add a surprising number of things to your first palace without too much interference. Right now I use the first palace for seven things:

1. Presidents

2. Vice Presidents

3. The top 50 countries ranked by GDP (actually 51 because my first list did not have Taiwan on it and I had to squeeze it in between Poland and Argentina)

4. All the US States and capitals in order of when they entered the union

5. Roman emperors (only a selection of the most important ones)

6. Art styles (and 1-3 artists and their major works per style/room)

To this palace I am going to add all the people the presidents ran against (request from my 8-year old). I will also add the capitals of all the countries. I will also add additional artists and art works, and likely extend the roman emperors into the Byzantine emperors. And I will add more facts related to all the things that are already there. I have experimented with this on the Philippines. Philippines (location #33, with Truman) has images for the Haiyan cyclone, Pinotuba volcano, Mount Apo, Luzon and Mindanao islands, and politicians Rizal, Aguinaldo and the Marcos. The beauty of a memory palace, unlike say a rhyming song, is that it is infinitely expandable and you can keep adding information that “sticks” to that location.

I do NOT think I will add any fundamentally new things to this memory palace. I have already built a second palace that has a few things in it (it currently has countries 51-100, top 35 explorers and British monarchs from 1000 AD to present), and I am going to build at least two more palaces so I have all the countries in the world in a “place”.

For reference, here are the images we are using for the presidents:

1. Washington washing himself

2. Adams doing math on a chalkboard (adding)

3. Jefferson writing the declaration of independence in the shower

4. Madison yelling and being mad

5. Monroe rowing a boat with the number FIVE

6. Quincy Adams in a mini-Quinjet (look it up)

7. Jackson popping out of a Jack-o-lanturn

8. Van Buren in the freezer (“buuuuuurrrr!”)

9. Harrison a hair monkey

10. Tyler tying TEN knots

11. Polk poking holes in our yard

12. Taylor in a fancy tailored suit (all wet)

13. Fillmore filling glasses of water

14. Pierce stabbing with a spear

15. Buchanan firing FIFTEEN canons and saying “boo!”

16. Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address in a top hat

17. Johnson pooping on the bed (see — inappropriate!)

18. Grant — a genie granting wishes

19. Hays giving a hi-five “Hey Hays!” in a room full of horses and hay

20. Garfield (the cat) eating TWENTY lasagnas

21. Arthur writing a book as an author

22. Cleveland with a giant clever cutting corn

23. Benjamin Harrison is another monkey

24. Cleveland again!

25. McKinley is Ronald McDonald with a crown (king) giving our TWENTY FIVE hamburgers

26. Roosevelt is on a horse with a belt made of roses

27. Taft is stuck in taffy

28. Wilson is a zombie coming out of a coffin with his will

29. Harding is a giant metal man in the middle of the street

30. Coolidge is in a leather jacket smoking THIRTY cigarets

31. Hoover is on a hover board with a Hoover vacuum cleaner

32. FDR is in a wheelchair with his belt of roses

33. Truman has nuclear bombs going off behind him and he’s not lying about it

34. Eisenhower is in a tank with binoculars that make his eyes look big

35. JFK is with Barbie and Ken in his house labeled THIRTY-FIVE

36. LBJ is pooping

37. Nixon is playing tic-tac-to with his son and nicks him on the face and his son is bleeding (inappropriate!)

38. Ford is in a Ford mustang

39. Carter is pushing around a cart full of peanuts

40. Reagan is firing a Ray-gun at FORTY airplanes(the kids all know about the aircraft controller strike)

41. Bush is a giant bush in the middle of the street

42. Clinton has a giant metal “C” and his is hitting it against metal that goes “clink, clink, clink”

43. Another bush. This one shaped like a giant W

44. Obama is a leprechaun setting off bombs (inappropriate!)

45. Trump is playing a trumpet, and has FORTY-FIVE trump cards (Aces)

46. Biden is waving good-bye

47. Trump again

Note that sometimes we come up with new ideas. Mostly when that happens it gets added to the image. There is not a lot of point in taking something away. The crazier the image the easier it is to remember. I think the only images we eliminated was in Grant’s room. Originally Grant was handing out money (grants), but the kids did not understand what grants were. Then it was a fairy godmother, but the kids preferred the genie since “Grant is a boy!”.

If you decide to do this yourself or with your kids I would love to hear how it goes! If people are interested I can share some of the other memory palaces I have built.

Everest on Instagram

We have pulled back on making these videos. Originally they were to help her remember the material, but we have found they they are not an efficient way to do that. But recently we have been talking to media (more on that in a future post) and there were requests for specific content — very short videos that demonstrate Everest’s range. We created a couple last night. Here is a new video in the new shorter and tighter style. Less content, more fun!

theeverestera2015

A post shared by @theeverestera2015

Keep learning,

Edward (and Everest)