Game · The Mind

Recall

The classic memory match, redrawn in ink. Flip the cards, find all six pairs, then meet the 2,000-year-old trick your brain just used to win.

Flip two · find the pairs every fact sourced

Flip the cards two at a time and find all six matching pairs. The fewer flips, the sharper your memory, try to beat your own record.

Flips: 0

Our sources

// every fact this game reveals was checked before it went up

✓ Remembering where the cards sit relies on spatial memory, the basis of the 'method of loci' or 'memory palace', a mnemonic that dates back to the orators of ancient Greece and Rome, who placed ideas along a familiar route to recall them in order. , Method of loci; classical accounts (Simonides of Ceos; Rhetorica ad Herennium; Cicero, De Oratore)

✓ People with superior memory (e.g. memory-championship competitors) generally do not have structurally different or innately better brains, brain imaging shows they overwhelmingly use spatial mnemonic strategies like the method of loci. , Maguire, Valentine, Wilding & Kapur, 'Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory,' Nature Neuroscience, 2003

✓ Training ordinary people in the method of loci sharply improves recall and measurably reshapes the brain's memory networks, the ability is largely a learnable skill, not a fixed trait. , Dresler et al., 'Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory,' Neuron, 2017