An ultimate guide to memory palaces

Do you use the same memory palace for different "groups" of things to remember? If so, do you ever get items confused because they are at the same location in the palace?

so many questions :)

> So I memorized books. Convert a book into 100-250 bullet points, memorize them in a memory palace

do you have one palace per book? Many bullet points per location? Very big memory palaces?

do you memorise as you read, or do you take notes and learn those?

any guides that you found particularly useful?

Have you seen this?

"Ancient Australian Aboriginal Memory Tool Superior to ‘Memory Palace’"

https://neurosciencenews.com/aboriginal-memory-technique-184...

How did you start training your memory? Is there one helpful book or website? Or did you just take the basics ideas and start applying them and get better with real world practice?

I was into memory training after reading "Moonwalking with Einstein" (Excellent book btw). But it gets a bit cumbersome at some point.

> I used to read a book, maybe take notes and hopefully take some new action. Next year it's gone, maybe I recall 3 ideas. How could I get more out of reading? So I memorized books.

I built something that exactly solves this problem:

1. You read book or watch video lectures

2. 1 year later, you remember less than 5%

I propose using a conversational learning system, that forces learners to respond. Their responses then act as "memory breadcrumbs" which helps to retrace the entire context. Think like your own chats on Whatsapp or FB. It's not a perfect system, but it works.

You can read my comics-based blogpost on the same: https://primerlabs.io/comics/memory-breadcrumbs-comics/

And if you want to try out, I have released two free courses on Conversational Learning Platform:

1. Python

2. Fundamentals of Computing.

You can try out https://primerlabs.io (No signup is required)

We create self-paced courses to teach yourself computer science and it's an excellent way to do that, IMO.

I wonder if this has more to do with IQ than the alleged efficacy of memory palaces

IQ vs. ability does not scale linearly, so the difference between 100 an 140 IQ is not 40% greater performance but maybe many multiples for certain tasks.

This sounds awesome! Makes me want to have a look at memory palaces again.

In your experience:

Do you ever "refactor" you maps to show updated understanding? Or do you find that this happens naturally?

Do connections between different areas stand out or form?

Do you have examples of notices patterns or structure in knowledge because of it?

Thanks

Thanks for sharing, I find this stuff quite inspiring.

How much time would you say you spent on training over the years? (Hours/week when you were building this up, or whatever)

Excellent resource, especially for numbers.

Great idea. I do this in a notebook. Left page: a list of items to recall, right page: a quick sketch of the palace. Rooms are simple squares. If I can't go back to the palace, then I paste in some printed photos.

Genius. It never occurred to me that I have a huge pool of palaces available in Counter-Strike maps.

That's awesome. Did it change your relationship with or experience of birds?

Came here just to comment this, but yes, memory palaces don't really work for people with aphantasia

With aphantasia, you simply cannot "visualise" the way other people "visualise". But you can still "visualise". Not using images but using the other mechanisms you developed.

Many people with aphantasia are unaware of it because they can function just fine and have workarounds that fills almost all their needs. They simply cannot add an image to it.

Personally, I can make memory palace work fine. There's simply no image, so it rely a lot on the same "path finding" the brain uses to allow me to walk around town without getting lost. I like to joke that my GPU is broken but my CPU works fine.

So, for the sake of etymology I guess it would not be visualise but factualize or some other word.

Yes, that's mentioned in the article that this method might not work for people who have a hard time visualizing spaces.

In the renascence there was a standardized system of memorized hand symbols to recall music. For guitar you can memorize fingerings by creating a person action object system in a way that tells you the fingering, the string and the fret number in one image. You can then use this to memorize classical music. With music you are going from conscious to unconscious procedural memory. But you can "double encode" using memory palaces and systems for a "backup". (It can actually help you learn it faster because you can get rid of sheet music)

The circle of fifths can be studied (and often is) with the loci method. Visualising the circle of fifths, with the relative minors, as a real space that can be moved around in is very helpful.

Music theory is full of little mnemonics, and is itself a sort of system of mnemonics:

Instead of an infinite gradation of frequencies, they are reduced to 12 repeating notes within each doubling, so that a 440 Hz vibration is an A, as is a 220 and an 880 Hz vibration.

If instead of doubling a frequency, we add a half to it again for a 2:3 ratio, we get a perfect fifth. By repeating this process (with some fudges) we end up with twelve notes, the circle of fifths, and the vast majority of Western music.

Rather than simplistically giving these 12 notes 12 letters, they get 7, in a clever system that allows for all 24/30 major and minor scales to have one of each letter A to G.

The 7 notes in any particular major or minor scale can be combined with each other to form chords. Major and minor chords each share a root and a fifth; the third is different by a single semitone. The combinations of three notes that sound nice together are thus greatly simplified.

Once the circle of fifths is internalised, all 24 (or 30 - ask Wooten) major and minor chords can be constructed, transposed, and played with.

So, when an experienced musician hears a song they can put all of that background to work. Instead of remembering each indivudal note played, the notes are chunked into chords, hich are chunked into keys and progressions. Once contextualised with similar pieces the memorisation becomes easier and easier. By the time all of that contextual data is assimilated, with music that is _felt_, there isn't much need (I'd imagine) for good musicians to use memory palaces for fingerings or performance details. I'd say a lot of that knowledge is in the hands, the breath, and the whole body.

Disclaimer: I am not a very good musician (yet).

As someone who, back when I used to play (semi-professionally) I preferred to memorise all my music, I would say that memorising pieces for me was "effortless", and thus needed no technique, provided that when I would first study a piece, the intent was specifically to memorise it, rather than, say, to sight read, or analyse it.

I always found it extremely odd that, if the memorisation intent was not there, no amount of exposure would lead to effective memorisation. E.g. I could sight read an accompaniment 50 times and I would not remember most of it; once I decided to study specifically with the intent of "memorising" the piece, typically a handful of passes would be enough.

Scott Adams recently said something similar in one of his coffee podcasts. He made an experiment with himself: he has a short "skit" he always starts his show with, and he made a bet with himself how long it would take, if ever, to memorise that skit, simply by reading it, with no intentional effort to memorise it.

So far it's been over a year afaik :)

I use a mnemonic technique to remember song forms when I'm playing drums. I draw a map of the song, each measure is a square. Squares are arranged in lines in such a way that it makes sense musically (usually 4 squares per line). The parts of the song (verse, chorus, etc.) are separated. The squares are mostly empty, except when they contain something important to remember.

The drawing takes up more space than the typical informal drummer notation (for example: intro 4 bars; verse 8 bars; chorus 8 bars, etc.), but it is much easier to remember (at least for me).

If I'm learning a song that isn't recorded yet, I sketch this map during rehearsals. Before each rehearsal I try to visualize the maps of all the songs.

If I'm learning a challenging song from a recording I use a simple python program that draws the map from a given text file and allows me to play a loop over selected measures. This way my brain starts constructing a map of the song without conscious effort.

This sort of maps are some kind of constructed memory palaces in 2 dimensions. I personally wouldn't use an existing memory palace to remember a song, because the songs already have enough structure.

I need this technique only to remember the big picture. When I need to learn the changes or the melody, I try to rely more on music theory and "audio memory". If you are interested in learning jazz standards, you might want to check the book "Insights in Jazz" written by John Elliott.

Interesting, I found this link that looks like a promising starting point: https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Mnemonic_Peg_System/#:~:text=A%....

Agreed! I finished it recently and it did a good job explaining how to make the memory palace really work instead of just explaining the technique.

Yea it really shows it's a skill not some weird hack that will change your life in one sitting.

There are 2 types of information for me:

- For fun. Often not relevant and not practical. It's easy to forget because I don't use it. Though, I may intentionally review the information to "beat" the forgetting curve. Thus, this kind of information will be stored for more time. Artificially forced.

- For practical use. This kind of information is easier to retain because it's not raw: a practice will add more "missing dots" and solidify what's learned.

A forgetting process is a good filter of what we use and what we don't. The retained information indicates what things one should keep in mind.

The memory palace technique is more about forcing even impractical information to retain. I'd say one should define what kind of information should be remembered in this case.

I imagine my set of login credentials would be a good candidate, instead of relying on a password manager.

Define "understood"

I use flashcards to memorize things. Sometimes I use mnemonics to memorize flashcards. I used memory palace once, to memorize something for a Romanian language exam back in highschool.

Things that I memorize now: Bible verses (I've memorized all of Galatians and I'm working through Ephesians right now), a couple of important phone numbers, credit card number (I don't want to save the details on every website), and some programming concepts that I use on a roughly monthly basis - frequently enough to save time by memorizing, infrequently enough so that I can't memorize them purely by using them.

> If there are people here that utilize the memory palace (or any other memorizing method): what do you put inside the palace?

Your memory palace won’t store information indefinitely. Not unless you keep reviewing it, at which point it might be best to instead consult your notes.

A simple use case is memorising a shopping list for an hour and letting it fade. In addition to utilitarian, it can be fun as a creative exercise because you invent interesting visual combinations.

I recommend the book “Moonwalking with Einstein”[1] if you’re interested in the subject.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein

> what do you put inside the palace?

That's the question. You have to want to collect something. I tend to collect random connections between disparate things (i.e. the answer to an everpresent "how does this affect the price of rice on Sunday?"). The other side of it that complicates it all is that your brain works this way normally. The mind palace is just a frame you can use to access a particular subgraph of thoughts. Once you do it long enough, it becomes second nature and you realize your normal, undisciplined thoughts are just residents of a different palace.

You can use it to accelerate language learning. So you'll put in the words you want to learn (and have explanations or pronunciation hints attached to it) and you'll use this as a base for reviewing and learning words.

I'm told you can reach a speed of +200 words/week with this approach.

I used to store:

- Casual thoughts and ideas to review and ponder about them later. In case I didn't have a smartphone or notebook near me, I could put them into a palace, into the so-called "random room"(a place that you should review periodically to sort the remaining things out, i.e. categorize, put images into other places). However, it's simpler to spend time looking for a notebook to write the ideas down.

- Phone numbers. In cases such as losing my phone, to call my relatives, friends.

- Information about people I met. Sometimes there were a lot of people I met in a day/week at university. I wanted to remember their names, some general info. The problem with names is they may repeat. One may use an image of a known person with this name and add a few more images to describe the person better. E.g. a place where you've met, hair color, a hobby, other peculiarities.

- First medical aid.

- Books' summaries.

Rather fun to store than useful in real-world situations:

- Bus numbers and their schedule. Also, a schedule for a local airport and railway station. E.g. where this man with luggage is going to? It's winter, yet he wears a Panama hat. Let me check the possible routes...It was fun to guess. p.s. I didn't haunt people.

- Birthday dates.

- Other random information, e.g. historical dates.

Learning something is different than using a memorizing technique. The former is for understanding and the latter is for putting impractical information. However, we may utilize the techniques to speed up or enhance the learning process.