Yes, you can use the Memory Palace technique without visualization.

I’ve been doing so for years as the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method. I’ve also succeeded beyond my wildest dreams as someone who experiences very limited visual imagery.

At first, I struggled with this technique, however. Until my research revealed that the Memory Palace technique was never purely visual.

No, from the beginning, the technique was taught in multi-sensory ways, including one powerful approach that is purely logical and conceptual.

And that’s the approach that helped me earn my PhD in Humanities at York University.

It also helped me learn languages, pass multiple certification exams and substantially expand my knowledge base.

And I’m not alone.

Today, accomplished memory athletes with no “mind’s eye” (aphantasics) prove that Memory Palaces work without inner pictures.

So how did the technique get mischaracterized as primarily visual? And how can you rapidly create well-formed Memory Palaces in just minutes?

Whether your imagination produces high-definition images or nothing at all, the methods I’m about to share will help you use the Memory Palace technique to learn faster and remember more.

Let’s dive in.

Why Visualization is Incorrectly Emphasized in Memory Palace Training

If you’re new to the Memory Palace technique, its ancient roots might not be on your radar.

Yet.

But we know from the historical science writer Lynne Kelly in books like The Memory Code and The Knowledge Gene that this technique had non-visual foundations for thousands of years.

For example, humans “offloaded” information they needed to remember onto rocks arranged in particular ways at sites like Stonehenge.

People also used objects covered in beads called lukasa to feel where they had encoded information in space.

As the Aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta shares in Sand Talk, elders used their hands as Memory Palaces. In some cases, they used each finger to remember an individual rule of conduct during a meeting.

Rather than visualize anything with the mind’s eye, bringing the thumb together with a particular finger sparked recall.

And these are all examples of the Memory Palace technique using an approach that is not inherently visual. It is spatial, kinesthetic and conceptual.

Fast forward to the Ancient Greek and Latin memory tradition, Simonides of Ceos emphasizes location as a concept above all things.

And St. Thomas Aquinas insisted his students imagine that they were inscribing information into the walls of their Memory Palaces as if writing on the surface of a wax tablet. He borrowed this idea from Aristotle and extended it with other useful ideas I have covered in this tutorial on Aquinas and memory.

So how did visual imagination come to be so prominent?

Misrepresentation by Modern Interpreters

In 1966, Frances Yates released an important, but deeply flawed study of the technique called The Art of Memory.

Don’t get me wrong. As a history of various mnemonic devices, it’s an important work. It has also inspired thousands, if not millions, of people to give memory techniques a try.

That said, we shouldn’t brush the problems she introduced under the rug.

By her own admission, she never actually used the techniques she wrote about.

As a result, she missed the importance of orientation, physical sensation and conceptualization discussed multiple times in her historical sources.

How was this mistake possible?

Besides not actually trying the techniques, I believe Yates may have been influenced by Dorothea Waley Singer.

Although this point might seem like an unnecessary detour, bear with me. It will pay off.

In 1950, Singer published the first edition of Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought.

Singer’s biography influenced and inspired Yates’ own book on Bruno. Yeats in fact wrote The Art of Memory as background for her own book on the infamous mnemonist.

Here’s the problem:

Singer utterly dismisses the influence of another mnemonist named Llull on Bruno. She in fact suggests that Bruno was an utter fool for tinkering with Llull’s memory wheels.

So you don’t think I’m exaggerating, here’s exactly what Singer says:

Capable of hero worship, Bruno sometimes chose heroes who would have been strangely out of touch with him, as for example that saintly and mystical, muddled and truculent Franciscan, Raymond Llull, on whose worst works he wasted many years.

I wish the joke was on Singer and Yates. But it isn’t. Their mistaken dismissal and failure to deeply explore the techniques led a major problem to spread everywhere.

Due to Yates’ enormous influence in particular, uncountable numbers of people have misunderstood the non-visual art of combination so necessary to effectively using Memory Palaces.

As you can learn from this tutorial on Giordano Bruno, he wasn’t wasting his time on Llull at all.

Far from it.

The Influence of Memory Competitors & Stuntmen On the Mass Market

I’ll never forget when one of the most successful authors of memory books told me, “Whatever you do, don’t tell them about the science!”

This was Harry Lorayne, an influential popularizer of memory techniques like linking, the Major System and the story method.

Sadly, Lorayne believed that most people could not rise to the challenge of learning the most robust methods available (like the 20 memory techniques I describe in this tutorial).

He also thought that using memory science to prove that the techniques work only caused eyes to glaze over.

Although Lorayne may have been right that many people just want a fast solution to their memory problems, my point is that he and many other memory teachers took shortcuts.

Rather than lay out all of the multisensory, Lorayne went so far as to cut the Memory Palace from his training until his final book, Ageless Memory.

For years, he stubbornly insisted that he didn’t use Memory Palaces despite all evidence to the contrary. I give some of that evidence in this tribute video I made about Lorayne following his passing:

On top of constantly using words like visualization and teaching people to see pictures in their imagination, Lorayne created the impression that Memory Palaces weren’t needed at all.

Another influential memory improvement author named Tony Buzan avoided this error by carefully detailing both Memory Palaces and multi-sensory mnemonic imagery.

But like Lorayne, who was a kind of stuntman of memory, many memory competitors flooded the market with books that refused to challenge readers.

Nelson Dellis is one of the few exceptions to the rule. As a 6x U