The Ars memoriae, "art of memory," practiced in the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance periods relied on the capacity of the brain for recalling spatial detail. The principle was to initially memorise some large building, the more architectural elaboration of rooms, passages and niches the better - the so-called `Memory Palace' Mnemonic images could be placed about this palace to link to items that you wanted to remember, ususally in symbolic form, with the images as striking as possible to enable recollection. To recall something, the practitioner mentally moved around the palace, reviewing the images in order. This was an essential technique of rhetoricians and preachers.
There are also ways to remember information by trying to code it in the form of meaningful words. Like the famouns pi mnemonic, "May I have a large container of coffee?" If you count the letters in each word, and put the decimal point in the obvious place, you get 3.1415926, a close approximation to pi.