The world's best memorisers all use a 2,500-year-old trick a poet stumbled into

After a banquet hall collapsed and crushed the guests beyond recognition, the poet Simonides of Ceos reportedly identified each body by recalling exactly where they'd been sitting. Cicero later credited him with inventing the method of loci: mentally placing items along a familiar route, then 'walking' it to retrieve them in order. It's still the core technique behind competitive memory records today.

— Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Oratore — 55 BCE; earliest surviving account of the method of loci