How to Remember Lists of Words With the Roman Room Trick

Do you ever need to remember a list of items, but don't have a pen and paper on hand? Using the Roman Room trick, you can remember a great many things. Basically, you make a room in your mind. Mentally, you go to your room and look at it every day to make sure you remember everything. Whenever you want to remember a new item, you change something in your room, and when you revisit that room in your mind, you'll remember that item. Here's how to make this work for you.

1. Create and memorize a room in your head. Make it as big and beautiful as you wish. Smaller rooms are easier to remember, but big rooms work too.
2. Spend time each day going through your room. Don't change anything; just memorize every detail about your room.
3. Test yourself by making a list of 10 words to remember tomorrow. For example, consider the following list:
   • a shoe
   • a dog
   • a desk
   • the date 12/09/1990
   • a cow
   • your grandpa Billy Bob
   • a turkey
   • $20 you owe your landlady
   • a computer
   • eggs
4. If you want to remember all these things, just change things in your room in ways that will remind you. You can add an ugly shoe pattern to the walls, have a barking dog on your couch or table, put an elaborate desk against the wall, write the date in neon pink on the frame of a famous painting on the wall, put a fat cow in the doorway, have Grandpa Billy Bob eating sloppy joes on your new white carpet, have a Thanksgiving turkey on the dining room table, have your landlady standing there yelling with a bill in her hand for $20, a broken computer on the floor, and eggs smashed into the door. These are all just ideas - you can use anything you want to memorize.
5. Try to remember your whole list the next day. If you didn't remember some of it, it could be because you didn't make the change noticeable or memorable enough. If you just wrote the date on the wall, you won't remember it, but if you wrote it in big neon pink letters on the bottom of the Mona Lisa, you'll have a better chance of remembering it.
6. Review your Roman room regularly, until you know it like the back of your hand. That way, when you make a change, it'll stand out, just like if somebody made a drastic change to your bedroom, you'd notice immediately.

• If you want to store a vast amount of information I'd advise you to use the memory palace method for storing and recalling information.
• The Roman Room is better for short lists, but can be used for long lists as well.
• If you want to be able to remember longer lists, try the Memory trick (see related wikiHows below).
• Try not to memorize it all at once. Take baby steps, gradually moving up.
• Try to find someone else willing to learn this technique with you.
• This exercise may have originated as a Buddhist meditation. You can find this entire exercise in the book "Path Notes of an American Ninja Master" by Glenn Morris.