The Origin of Memorization

The discovery of these memory techniques is accredited to a poet and theologian named Semonides. The story goes that the exact second he stepped out of a banquet hall to talk to some servants, the roof collapsed killing everyone inside. Being the only survivor, the loved ones of the mangled victims begged for his help. He realized that he could recall the location of everyone in the hall and directed the loved ones to the location in which they had been seated. This is how the art of memory was born. Semonides realized that if he replaced the images of people in the banquet hall with objects that he wanted to remember, he could easily memorize hundreds of items in a list with little work. Many people elaborated on this idea and these ideas have become what is known as mnemonics.