Why does storing memories in places work so well?

Human spatial memory is huge, automatic, and ancient — the palace borrows that machinery to carry information it wasn't built for.

You can walk your home in the dark, recall which drawer holds the forks, retrace a route you drove once years ago. That's evolution: our ancestors survived by remembering where — where the water was, where the predator hid. Abstract lists of words are evolutionarily new and stored poorly. By attaching facts to well-known locations, you piggyback them onto a memory system that is effortless and enormous.

Tip: This is why it beats brute-force repetition — you're not building a new memory from scratch, you're hanging cargo on one you already have.