Roman Room Technique to Learn Lists (Grouped Information)

One of their most popular systems made use of objects in a room. Such a system is easily constructed. Try to imagine an enormous room with a door. Now fill tins room with as many items of furniture and other objects as you wish—each item of furniture will serve as a link word. Don't make a mental rubbish-dump of it, though! Your objects should be very precisely ordered.

For example, you may decide to start on the immediate right of the door as you enter the room, placing there a finely carved coffee-table, on which you might put anything from a statue to an attractive lamp. Next to this you could have an antique sofa, and so on.

You can see that the possibilities are almost limitless—but make sure that your objects are memorisable and that you can keep them mentally placed in the right order.

How is such a system used? When you are given a list of objects you wish to remember in order (it being not necessary to remember reverse, random, or numerical order), you simply associate the items to be remembered with the objects in your room. Suppose, for instance, that your first three items were 'oil', 'insect', and 'girl'. Using the examples given, the oil could be imagined flowing all over the coffee table, the insect could be enlarged and perched on top of the statue or could be flying around the lamp, and the girl could be draped seduct­ively on the sofa!

Example
I can use my sitting room as a basis for the technique. In this room I have the following objects:
table, lamp, sofa, large bookcase, small bookcase, CD rack, tape racks, stereo system, telephone, television, video, chair, mirror, black & white photographs, etc.

I may want to remember a list of World War I war poets:
Rupert Brooke, G.K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, Robert Graves, Ri/dyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, W.B. Yates

I could visualize walking through my front door. Within this image, someone has painted a picture on it showing a scene from the Battle of the Somme. In the center of the picture is a man sitting in a trench writing in a dirty exercise book.

I walk into the sitting room, and look at the table. On the top is RUPERT the Bear sitting in a small BROOK (we do not need to worry about where the water goes in our imagination!) This codes for Rupert Brooke.

Someone seems to have done some moving: a CHEST has been left on the sofa. Some jeans (Alphabet System: G=Jeans) are hanging out of one drawer, and some cake has been left on the top (K=Cake). This codes for G K Chesterton.

The lamp has a small statuette of a brick WALL over which a female horse (MARE) is about to jumping. This codes for Walter de la Mare.