Say you’ve been tasked with memorizing the U.S. presidents in order. Your mind turns to an unlikely place: your childhood bedroom.
A beloved stuffed bear sits on a bookshelf—its tiny shirt sports the number 26. You remember: Theodore Roosevelt was the 26th president. Your mind’s eye shifts to a poster for the film Sixteen Candles. Abe Lincoln, the 16th president.
This is how one might use a memory palace—using a familiar location, like a childhood home, to mentally place information for later retrieval.
According to existing literature, using a memory palace can improve recall. There’s also evidence that emotions help memories stick.
In a new study published in Emotion, researchers from the University of Chicago have combined the two.
The study, conceived by then-undergraduate student Nicholas Chiang, SB’24, tested whether a memory palace works more effectively if it evokes positive or negative emotions. To find the answer, Chiang built his own virtual memory palaces—for which he used the wildly popular game Minecraft.
“Minecraft is a really flexible option; it's a sandbox game where you can build anything,” he said. “I realized that it could be a really valuable tool when it came to psychology experiments, especially designing stimuli that are visually based.”
The study’s senior author Akram Bakkour, an assistant professor in the UChicago Department of Psychology, said the research is significant because it confirmed that the method works—and that it’s possible to “be the architect” of our memory palaces.
“No one has really asked the question; can we engineer the memory palace? Can we build it in a way that maximizes our memory performance?” he said. “It's brilliant.”
A memorable proposal
Both Bakkour and Chiang have seen the fragility of memory up close.
Bakkour, whose lab studies memory and decision making, spent his early days as a researcher working with patients with Alzheimer's disease
“I got a first-row seat to how devastating it is to a person to lose their ability to learn new information, memorize things and have access to their memories,” he said.
Likewise, Chiang, a neuroscience major, spent time in high school volunteering with children with cognitive disabilities.
“If there was a way that we could improve how these children learn, that would be very valuable,” he thought at the time.
During his third year, Chiang studied abroad in Japan. In psychology and Japanese architecture courses, Chiang was first introduced to the concept of a memory palace—he also learned how design elements, such as tinted glass and color, can affect emotions.
When he returned to campus and joined Bakkour’s lab, Chiang was inspired to combine what he’d learned.
“When it came time to do my neuro thesis, I put those two things together and came up with a proposal to see how we could optimize memory palaces,” he said.
Crafting a mind palace
To test memory palaces, one has to build them—and for Chiang, Minecraft offered prime real estate.
Bakkour worked with Chiang to design the experiment, creating the controls needed to isolate the variables they were most interested in.
In the study, participants were divided into three groups: positive, negative and a control group who didn’t use a memory palace at all.
The two test groups were first taken on a video tour of a two-story house built in Minecraft. The positive group “walked” through a building with a light-colored exterior, lush flower beds and clear glass windows with plenty of light. The negative group toured a gray, drab building that was dark and overgrown.
After a training video on how to use the memory palace method, participants were asked to memorize a word list. Those in the test groups were asked to place words around the house as they saw fit. When later tested on their recall, they were instructed to move through the house and “pick them up.”
In a second task, participants repeated the experiment with the steps of making a flower paper weight. Both tasks were designed not to arouse excitement, since researchers wanted to test emotional response—something psychologists call valence—rather than how excited or calm someone felt.
Ultimately, negativity won out.
“A negative memory palace works better than a positive memory palace,” Chiang said, “and both of them work better than no memory palace at all.”
However, researchers caution that everything is a balance, and it’s not worth flooding your brain with too much negative emotion.
The process of taking a research project from proposal to publication, Chiang says, taught him to be resilient—a useful skill in medical school, where he’s currently applying.
“This project taught me not to give up,” he said, crediting his professors and lab mates for their continued support. “Even when things aren't going your way, to keep moving forward and find solutions to the problem. Overall, I found it a fulfilling experience, and I really developed as a person during my time at UChicago.”
