How Do Memory Athletes Study Differently? The Science of Memory, Imagination, and Thought

ResearchJuly 14, 2026By Cho Shinyoung9 min read

Memory athletes select key information from what they understand, organize it with practiced structures, and retrieve it again. Memories that can be recalled when needed become material for review, simulation, and discovering new relationships.

A student once asked an insightful question: after one or two years of mnemonic training, could someone remember a book quickly while reading, then continue understanding and reorganizing it in the mind?

The question points to something important. Once mnemonic techniques become familiar, it becomes easier to close the book, bring back concepts and cues, compare them, change their relationships, generate examples, and run mental simulations. The biggest change is that selected information becomes easier to organize and retrieve.

The short answer: encoding and retrieval change

Both an untrained reader and a skilled mnemonist pay attention to a text and understand its meaning. A memory athlete's advantage is a set of well-practiced structures ready to use when new information appears. Those structures help select key ideas and connect them to images, locations, and order, creating a route for later retrieval.

Memory athletes turn digits, cards, and words into familiar images, then connect those images to a well-known place or sequence. Each item is paired with a route for finding it again.

In a study of world-class memory athletes, Maguire and colleagues found that exceptional performance was strongly associated with spatial learning strategies. The athletes' core advantage was a trained system for organizing information and finding it again.

What actually changed in studies of memory athletes?

Dresler et al. (2017) compared 23 top-ranked memory athletes with untrained controls and also gave novices six weeks of method-of-loci training. After training, the novices' functional connectivity patterns became more similar to those of the athletes, and those changes were associated with memory gains months later.

In a related study, Wagner et al. (2021) recruited 51 male university students and analyzed 50. The loci group completed forty 30-minute sessions across six weeks and improved both immediate and 24-hour word recall. At four months, 45 participants encoded the same word list used at the initial test. The study directly showed that participants used the trained strategy again on a word-list task four months later.

A 2025 review pooling 3,006 adults found that the method of loci greatly improved immediate recall of ordered information, but the studies had many design limitations, so the finding is best understood as evidence for this specific kind of task (Ondřej, 2025).

These studies show that training can improve the ability to encode selected information with a practiced structure and retrieve it later by following that structure. Most of the research tasks focused on word lists and ordered recall.

How does this change the way someone studies?

Drawing on these findings, research on retrieval practice and self-explanation, and my training experience, I use the following practical sequence:

First pass — build the map: read quickly to identify the topic, chapter structure, key questions, familiar ideas, and unknown ideas.
Close the source and recall: explain what you just read in your own words and see how much of the overall structure you remember.
Second pass — choose the anchors: select the concepts and keywords that matter for the exam, project, or understanding.
Stabilize them with mnemonics: connect those selected ideas to images, locations, stories, or a number system.
Retrieve after a delay: recall without the source, then compare with it to repair details and relationships.

A major strength of a skilled mnemonist is keeping useful concepts available after the source is closed and retrieving them reliably when needed.

If you are new to spatial encoding, start with how to build a memory palace. For a system that turns digits into images, continue with how to memorize numbers fast.

Why does remembered knowledge expand the range of thought?

Working memory actively handles only a limited amount of information at once. Studies that separate this core capacity from the help provided by rehearsal and chunking estimate that young adults can hold roughly 3–5 meaningful items; the exact number depends on the task and on how an item or chunk is defined (Cowan, 2010). Experts use this limited space efficiently by activating organized knowledge from long-term memory through retrieval cues. Ericsson and Kintsch's long-term working-memory theory is a classic account of this skill.

The mind can retrieve one relevant concept, connect it to the current thought, and then move to the next. Memories that are easy to retrieve give the mind a working set of ideas it can inspect and connect.

Learning research repeatedly confirms the value of actively recalling and explaining what was learned:

A classroom retrieval-practice meta-analysis covering 222 studies and 48,478 students found that quizzes and recall improved learning.
A meta-analysis of retrieval transfer found that recalled knowledge can carry into new problems and inference.
A self-explanation meta-analysis found stronger learning when students explained causal and conceptual relationships in their own words.

A practical learning sequence is “remember it → recall it without the source → rearrange it → change the relationships → discover a new structure.” Memory preserves the materials; retrieval and self-explanation bring them back into motion.

What changed in my training: a code editor in the mind

This section describes my personal experience from more than 10 years of training and teaching mnemonic techniques.

One change I have experienced through years of training and teaching is the ability to continue simulating detailed processes in my mind after closing the source.

During a period when I was studying programming intensively, I would first look up the concepts and syntax needed for a feature, then open a code editor in my mind before typing. I placed lines of pseudocode, followed the execution flow, and only then wrote the real code. It usually behaved as expected. When an error appeared, I could recall earlier code and look for likely points of conflict.

The concepts, syntax, and structure of earlier code remained available enough for me to recombine and run through them mentally. Much like pinning notes and photographs to a board in different arrangements, I could keep the materials of memory in mind and rearrange them as I thought.

A second change I experienced concerned mental imagery itself. As I repeatedly turned what I saw into images and reconstructed those scenes during retrieval, I felt my imagination become richer and my mental images increasingly clear. In my own practice, both encoding and retrieval became active exercises in imagination.

What does “memory is imagination” mean scientifically?

Episodic memory reconstructs experience from cues, sensations, places, and semantic knowledge. When imagining the future, the mind draws people, settings, actions, and emotions from past experience and combines them into a new scene.

A neuroimaging meta-analysis by Benoit and Schacter (2015) found that remembering past events and simulating future events recruit a shared core network including the hippocampus. Schacter and Thakral (2024) describe flexible recombination as a process connecting memory, planning, and imagination.

In the language of mnemonics:

In visual or scene-based mnemonics, unfamiliar information is imagined as a scene during encoding.
During retrieval, the scene and its relationships are reconstructed.
During review, the same scene becomes faster and more stable to summon.
During application, elements of the scene are changed or connected to other memories.

“Memory is imagination” is a practical way to say that imagination becomes a central working tool for making, retrieving, and using memory.

Can mnemonics work without a vivid picture in the mind?

Imagination can work through several forms: vivid visual scenes, position and direction, language and rhythm, sound, movement, and bodily sensation. The form that fits you best can become a strong retrieval cue.

Research on aphantasia, the difficulty or inability to form visual images in the mind, illustrates this range. In a drawing task, participants with aphantasia recalled fewer visual object details but preserved spatial placement as accurately as controls (Bainbridge et al., 2021). Reeder et al. (2024) showed that nonvisual spatial and sensorimotor strategies could support precise visual working-memory performance.

The goal is to find the form of imagination that works for you. Use scenes when visual imagery comes easily, locations and routes when spatial sense is stronger, or sentences, rhythm, and narrative when language is stronger. A memory palace gives those cues a stable order and relationship.

Memory and creativity: retrieving materials and rearranging them

A 2026 individual-differences study found that details retrieved from episodic memory and semantic knowledge were both associated with future imagination and divergent thinking, with semantic memory the strongest predictor of divergent thinking (Thakral et al., 2026). When knowledge is rich and easy to retrieve, more material is available for comparison and combination.

This study links accessible episodic and semantic memories with future imagination and divergent thinking. Whether mnemonic training itself improves general creativity can be tested in a separate experiment that directly applies the training.

Creativity often emerges when remembered elements are placed in new relationships. Placing a concept in a different context, reversing cause and effect, or applying an old code structure to a current problem are all forms of rearrangement.

The role of mnemonics here is to organize material so it can be retrieved when needed for thought. New relationships emerge as the thinker compares, transforms, and tests that material.

A five-step routine to try today

Read one page or section quickly and choose one central question.
Close the source and recall its structure and keywords in your own words.
Read again to correct missing points and misunderstood relationships.
Connect only the essential concepts to images, locations, stories, or another cue system that fits you.
Recall without the source one day and several days later, then compare with the original.

For concrete timing and recall settings, continue with training short-, medium-, and long-term memory. For the underlying capacity, forgetting, and spacing effects, see how memory is stored and why we forget.

The answer in one sentence

A skilled mnemonist selects important information from what they understand, builds strong retrieval routes, and keeps using that knowledge after the book is closed—to review, simulate, and create new relationships.

When memories remain strong, imagination has more material. With more material to draw on, the train of thought can continue even when the source is out of sight.

Key research

Research

How Memory Is Stored and Why We Forget: The Science of Working, Short-Term, and Long-Term Memory

Working memory, short-term storage, and long-term memory play different roles and work together. Understanding the forgetting curve, serial-position effects, and spacing makes each training goal and method clearer.