Except.. it is! By a fairly 'ancient' group of men: "I want to make clear to you is that such memory training techniques are not new. Whether used by actors, students, public speakers or Freemasons, some techniques go back to antiquity. Before the invention of printing, when manuscripts had to be copied by hand, writing materials were scarce and expensive, and many could not read and write, a trained memory was a valuable asset. Thus, ancient orators, aided by teachers of rhetoric, taught techniques enabling orators, politicians, priests, and others to memorize large amounts of material in great detail."

http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/memory-freemasonry.htm...

It is in fact studied, and I admit my "not studied enough" remark is indeed, wrong. There were about 150 papers citing method of loci since 2015: https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?as_ylo=2015&q=%22method+of...