Building a mind palace with Xmind: A new approach to learning at scale

Most people use mind maps to organize a single meeting or book. Mykola Kotliarenko uses them to organize his entire mind.

As an AI product manager drowning in backlogs, research papers, and unstructured data daily, he needed a personal knowledge management system that could keep up—and built one by combining an ancient memory technique, a MIT creativity framework, and Xmind.

The mind palace, known formally as the method of loci, is an ancient Greek memory technique that was largely abandoned after the printing press made external storage easy. The idea is simple: you associate information with specific locations in a familiar space, allowing your brain to navigate and retrieve it the way it navigates physical environments.

Mykola pointed out that recent research from the Alberta Institute confirms that virtual spaces work just as well as physical ones—meaning you don't need an actual building. A well-structured Xmind map functions as a digital palace with the same neurological benefits.

This new Xmind blog explains how it works: