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Comment by justsocrateasin | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of all the research/talk about the brains of London Taxi Drivers: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/the-bigge...

I imagine something similar has happened to many/most people. For me, I got rather obsessed with cycling ~5 years ago, and as time has passed on I've found that I can traverse entire 80 mile routes in my head with a lot of detail and accuracy. Further still, I listen to podcasts when I bike most of the time, and it's interesting to do a route twice and remember snippets of conversation from the podcast of the last time I road the route.

Brains are truly spectacular machines. Makes me wonder what cell phones / social media / all those free dopamine hits are doing to my brain and consciousness over all these years.

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If you can traverse one of those 80 mile journeys in your head, you already have the hard part of a memory palace. Check out a method book, they're cheap and fairly common, and you can probably set up loci for a couple hundred items within your first two weeks.

Our brains evolved to store memories with locations as the index. Through some mechanism involved in cortical wiring, we evolved to abstract locations, so we can imagine places and things incredibly well, and our basic biology automatically sorts and traverses memories using 3d maps, real or imaginary.

With a minimal amount of practice and effort, you can gain what amounts to a superpower.

Things like this are so trivially easy I don't know why method of loci isn't taught in kindergarten and improved throughout formal education into adulthood. A society that embraced this would produce an astonishing culture.

I watched this video[1] about a driving game track designed to be as long and boring and reptetitive and self-similar as possible, as a challenge of patience. The streamer is trying to be the first person to complete it, moving carefully over a flat grey pipe just as wide as the car, with only 90 degree turns, in gray fog, without making a single mistake for three hours.

After 42 minutes, he fell off, and had to go back to the start. After that much time and getting a bit complacent, he was not happy.

Then restarted, kept driving, faster this time. After about 30 minutes he suddenly says "wait, was it this corner? Wait, does this look familiar? This looks familiar to me; I think it was here. I'm just having flashbacks. I think it was exactly here where I fell. I just had deja vu. I'll never forget the moment I fell here. I think it was here".

Check out the video and see there is no way a casual glance would tell any corner from any other. He beleivably seems to have encoded a "whoa" memory from a negative experience, which triggered then. (I'm not really interested in "is it fake", even if it's fake it's perfectly relatable. That after 45 minutes of concentration, he can tell where he is on the self-similar map much more accurately than the viewer with a video open on a second monitor, and that there could/would be an emotional "beware" kick at that place next time).

[1] https://youtu.be/0oEtbjFHVo8?t=555 (16 min highlights)

These London taxi drivers started to experience actual cognitive tradeoff at some point.

We could spend a lifetime of study in other fields and yet not see any cognitive tradeoff.

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