I am maybe reacting a bit late to this message, but are you aware that
this just brings us back centuries ago ?
To the antique tradition of "the art of memory"
(ars memoriae, ars memorandi, ars memorativa, etc) ?
People were trained for milleniums to use well-known
architectural space and populate them with objects
linked to words in order to memorize them.
There have been hundreds of books on the design of 'loci' and 'imagines' ...
The founder of this tradition is said to be Simonides of Ceos, the most
celebrated poet of antique greece, certainly better known to you by his words
"ut pictura poesis" (BTW, he meant that poesy could equal painting, not the
contrary) and, as always in greece, there is a nice tale about this with
the dioscouros (Castor and Pollux) as guest stars.
Then Cicero wrote a famous treaty and there is the famous "ad herenium"...
Anyway, this strand was rather strong in antique and medieval scholarship
until the late Renaissance and Baroque.
For those interested (by the fact that old horses, especially dead ones,
can shed a new light on contemporary problems), see
F. Yates "the art of memory" (1966), P. Rossi "Clavis Universalis" (1960)
or U. Eco "The quest for the perfect language" (1995).
If some are interested by an application of this to our contemporary
environment, I point to my paper "the semiotics of the Web".
Philippe