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Why do places unlock memories?

Places are strong cues for the memories of your own life. In experiments, a location brings a remembered event back more vividly than a person does and faster than a theme does. That is why walking down a childhood street can return things you haven't thought about in decades.

Updated

What is the short answer?

  • Locations are effective memory cues. In a 2016 study, locations cued memories of events better than people did, and events with a setting were remembered more vividly.
  • Place cues are fast. In a 2017 study, people reached a memory more quickly from a place cue than from a theme, and what they recalled was denser in specific detail.
  • The brain's memory and navigation systems overlap. The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the discovery of cells that form "a positioning system in the brain", in and around the hippocampus, a structure also central to memory.
  • The effect is useful, not magic. Most of these studies are small, and a vivid memory is not always an accurate one.

What do experiments show about places as memory cues?

Three studies from the University of Toronto and McGill University tested the idea directly.

Locations beat people as cues. Jessica Robin, Jordana Wynn and Morris Moscovitch (2016) had participants remember events that were cued by a location, by a person, or by both. Locations were the more effective cue. When an event had been presented with no location, people tended to add one by themselves. Events with a spatial context were remembered more vividly and in more detail. The authors describe space as a scaffold on which the rest of an event is rebuilt.

Familiar places work best. Robin and Moscovitch (2017) compared older and younger adults and found that the more familiar a real-world place was, the more detailed and vivid the memories it cued, in both age groups.

Place cues are quick and specific. Signy Sheldon and Sonja Chu (2017) compared place cues with theme cues such as "a time you were proud." Themes brought up a larger number of memories. Places brought memories up faster, and those memories had a higher proportion of specific episodic detail.

Do places help memories last?

One study suggests they help the fragile ones. Chang and colleagues (2024) collected 1,079 real-world events from 29 older and 12 younger adults and tested their recall about 6 weeks and 24 weeks later. For memories that began with few details, those first recalled with more spatial context were better retained at the later test. The study was observational, so it shows an association and cannot prove that place causes the better retention.

What is happening in the brain?

The hippocampus, a structure deep in the temporal lobe, is involved both in knowing where you are and in remembering what happened to you.

In 1971 John O'Keefe found "place cells" in the hippocampus of rats: nerve cells that fire when the animal is in one particular spot. In 2005 May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser found "grid cells" in the neighboring entorhinal cortex, which fire in a regular pattern as the animal moves and work like a coordinate system. The three shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain." The Nobel Assembly noted that the work "opened new avenues for understanding other cognitive processes, such as memory, thinking and planning."

One reading of the behavioral studies above is that the brain files an event under where it happened, so returning to the place, or even picturing it, gives you a way back in.

Why does the memory palace technique work?

The memory palace, or method of loci, is the oldest evidence that memory leans on place. You imagine walking a route you know well and put each thing you want to remember at a spot along it. To recall the list, you walk the route again in your mind.

It has been tested. Wagner and colleagues (2021) found that six weeks of training in the method of loci produced more durable memories than either working-memory training or no training. An earlier study by Dresler and colleagues (2017) compared 23 of the world's top memory athletes with matched controls, then trained novices in mnemonics for six weeks. The novices' brain connectivity shifted toward the athletes' pattern, and the degree of shift predicted how much their memory improved.

Do you have to be in the place for it to work?

Being there may help, but the evidence is mixed. In a famous 1975 experiment, Duncan Godden and Alan Baddeley had divers learn word lists either on land or underwater. The divers recalled more when they were tested in the same environment where they had learned. A 2021 replication with 16 divers did not reproduce the effect, so treat the original with some caution.

The studies by Robin, Moscovitch, Sheldon and Chu used named or pictured places, not physical visits. Naming a familiar place, or looking at it on a map, appears to be enough to act as a cue.

Why are childhood places such strong triggers?

Part of the answer is that people remember more from their youth to begin with. In a 1997 study, David Rubin and Matthew Schulkind asked adults for memories in response to cue words. The 70-year-olds, but not the 20-year-olds, produced a disproportionate share from between the ages of 10 and 30. This pattern is known as the reminiscence bump. The places of those years are attached to a large share of what an older person remembers.

Does this help people living with dementia?

Looking at familiar places and old photographs is used in dementia care under the name reminiscence therapy. The best summary of the evidence is a 2018 Cochrane review by Woods and colleagues covering 22 trials and 1,972 people with dementia. It concluded that "the effects of reminiscence interventions are inconsistent, often small in size," with some positive effects on quality of life, cognition, communication and mood, and no evidence of harm. It is reasonable to see reminiscence as a pleasant, low-risk activity. It is not a treatment.

What does this research not show?

  • It does not show that a place cue makes a memory accurate. Memories are rebuilt each time they are recalled, and a vivid one can still be wrong.
  • It does not show that mapping your memories improves your memory in general.
  • Most of the experiments involved a few dozen participants, and one classic finding did not replicate.

How can you use this?

  1. Start from a place, not a topic. To remember your own past, or to help a parent remember theirs, name a specific location and ask what happened there.
  2. Choose familiar places. A home you lived in for ten years will give more than a hotel you stayed in once.
  3. Look at the place. A map or an old photograph does some of the work of a visit.
  4. Write it down while it's there. A memory that surfaces today may not surface next time.

This is the idea behind Here My Story, a free personal memory map where each pin holds a story, a photo and a date. For a ready-made list of places to start from, see the 100 memory prompts by place.

Sources

  1. Robin, J., Wynn, J., & Moscovitch, M. (2016). The spatial scaffold: The effects of spatial context on memory for events. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42(2), 308–315. doi:10.1037/xlm0000167
  2. Robin, J., & Moscovitch, M. (2017). Familiar real-world spatial cues provide memory benefits in older and younger adults. Psychology and Aging, 32(3), 210–219. doi:10.1037/pag0000162
  3. Sheldon, S., & Chu, S. (2017). What versus where: Investigating how autobiographical memory retrieval differs when accessed with thematic versus spatial information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 70(9), 1909–1921. doi:10.1080/17470218.2016.1215478
  4. Chang, M., Hong, B., Savel, K., Du, J., Meade, M. E., Martin, C. B., & Barense, M. D. (2024). Spatial context scaffolds long-term episodic richness of weaker real-world autobiographical memories in both older and younger adults. Memory, 32(4), 431–448. doi:10.1080/09658211.2024.2334008
  5. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet (2014). Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014. nobelprize.org
  6. Wagner, I. C., et al. (2021). Durable memories and efficient neural coding through mnemonic training using the method of loci. Science Advances, 7(10), eabc7606. doi:10.1126/sciadv.abc7606
  7. Dresler, M., et al. (2017). Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory. Neuron, 93(5), 1227–1235. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.003
  8. Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1975.tb01468.x
  9. Murre, J. M. J. (2021). The Godden and Baddeley (1975) experiment on context-dependent memory on land and underwater: A replication. Royal Society Open Science, 8(11), 200724. Full text
  10. Rubin, D. C., & Schulkind, M. D. (1997). The distribution of autobiographical memories across the lifespan. Memory & Cognition, 25(6), 859–866. doi:10.3758/BF03211330
  11. Woods, B., O'Philbin, L., Farrell, E. M., Spector, A. E., & Orrell, M. (2018). Reminiscence therapy for dementia. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 3, CD001120. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD001120.pub3