Regarding your question about why this works : I urge you to read at least the first chapter of Frances Yates The Art of Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory - how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page.
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Thanks for the book recommendation, I've started to read it. It's nice to get some history and depth to concepts I had some awareness of.
I do wonder how method of loci strategies stand up to bricks and mortar sticky note use in collaborative environments. In my day job I've felt other people moving and adding things to a wall as almost destructive if I didn't experience it happening (purely in terms of memory). As changes in Temin are written to a ledger a fringe benefit is you can play back what's happened while you were gone, which seems to sooth that.
For work, I also spend a lot of time writing/drawing/thinking with a pen, and most of the artefacts in my metaverse are created with a Wacom not a keyboard. Being able to remember where things are I put down to Temin, being able to remember what's there I put down in some part to that. I'm not going to trying to convert people who prefer to use keyboards, and I expect pen-first users will very much be a minority, but the research on retention when it comes to pen vs. keyboard is pretty compelling.
Regarding your question about why this works : I urge you to read at least the first chapter of Frances Yates The Art of Memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory - how people learned to retain vast stores of knowledge before the invention of the printed page.