30th
Memory Palace
It was used in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, as is sometimes mistakenly attributed to Cicero himself as Cicero describes it in his work De Oratore. (Yates 1966) According to De Oratore, the method was invented by Simonides of Ceos. As the story goes, Simonides was attending a dinner with a number of notable Greeks, after which he had stepped outside. Suddenly, the roof of the building collapsed, killing everyone inside. During the excavation of the rubble, Simonides was called upon to identify each guest killed. He managed to do so by correlating their identities to their positions (loci) at the table before his departure….. A reference to these techniques survives to this day in the common English phrases “in the first place”, “in the second place”, and so forth.