> In my memory palace, I walked through my house, starting at my front door, and placed these familiar people or numbers on my furniture.
> So for a grocery list, the example goes, imagine a container of milk overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get inside, perhaps two giant steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your living room to find pretzels dancing on your rug.
To people for whom this works: how vivid exactly are you imagining these things? I think I'm like this guy[1]; basically, I can't close my eyes and "see" anything, much less "imagine walking through my house."
I think the memory palace technique is supposed to help you remember things like this: you "walk" (via imagination) into a room and see a crazy scene full of memory prompts. Right? But... how automatic is seeing that scene? I can memorize "a wet lion on my bed" or something, but then I'm just memorizing it, so why shouldn't I just memorize the original thing? And if you can walk into that room and see the lion, and then go, "oh yeah, a wet lion, that means an Ace of Spades" can't you just imagine a poster on the wall with an Ace of Spades on it?
I guess, basically, the memory palace technique seems so far from useful it makes me question how my brain works vs. other people's.
Sometime last year, I read "Moonwalking with Einstein" which, despite not having been as educational as I would have liked (there are other books for that though,) was a great read, and did have some instruction in it.
One of the lessons in the book is was to memorize the memory champion's grocery list which contained some items I'd never remember on my own (pickled garlic, for example, I've never had or heard of).
My daughter and I walked through the list, doing as instructed in the text, and instructing my daughter to do the same. I never performed an image replacement (e.g., the ace of spades actually equals something else,) but did try to abstract the items. For example, for pickled garlic, I imagined a car-sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped. Instead of cottage cheese, I imagined (as instructed) Charisma Carpenter bathing in a large cottage cheese tub.
To this day, both I and my daughter can remember the list perfectly, by walking through the house and looking how we should.
I haven't gone much farther with it to the degree that I would have had to encode a lion into an ace of spades, but just exaggerating the image itself into a more memorable form works for me. I also have the same lack of visual imagination, but following the instructions in the book exactly as offered worked perfectly.
One of the catches though, is that numerous memory champions will tell you that becoming really good at mnemonic memory is really a game of who can be more imaginative.
Some routines (like memorizing a deck of cards) can become rote, as you already have the cyphers in your head, you just have to encode them. The more advanced mnemonists have partial encoding techniques such that one mnemonic image can encode a 3 or 4 card sequence. That doesn't take imagination, just discipline... but encoding things, on the fly, that you haven't predetermined the pattern to, is a game of imagination.
That said, you might suck at it, as I sort of expect to suck at it myself. Regardless, there are other, less imaginative techniques that may work well for you, and allow you to permanently remember things you would wish to.
Thanks for your response, very interesting! I should clarify, it's not really the imagination to create weird scenes that I lack so much as the ability to actually visualize them. So I'm really curious now, when you say:
"I imagined a car-sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped."
did that involve you creating a mental image of this? How clearly can you see it? Can you close your eyes and visualize just an ordinary pickle, for that matter? I wonder how integral that is in order for this technique to be useful, since I have trouble visualizing even a simple colored shape.
That said, it occurs to me now that I can imagine the feel of things very well, as well as the sound of things. So maybe I could prompt myself with a slippery trumpet or something, rather than an odd visual picture.
To be honest, I think I'm kind of in the same boat as you.
I don't really 'see' it, as I would a scene I was actually looking at. I don't see items in the periphery of it to the extent that I could describe non-essential items in the scene, but I know what I pictured, and I know it's there.
For comparison's sake, I know that my guitar is brown, and I know that it has chrome hardware, and I know it's got that classic Les Paul shape, but I don't really 'see' it in my mind's eye very well. When I look over at it now, I realize several details that I didn't envision in my head, but I generally know what it looks like.
In summary, it sounds like we might be similarly minded, and I can say that mnemonics have definitely helped me to learn certain things very well. I feel like it would be a bad all-around memorization technique for me though, because the act of creating the memory takes quite a bit longer to 'encode' than it does to just remember. While I realize that encoding is more reliable, it isn't practical for every day memories, and there are certain types of things I think I would be very bad at encoding.
Ah, ok. Very helpful. Your description of thinking about your guitar is exactly how I would think about it, so I think you're right that we might be similarly minded. I'll definitely have to check out Moonwalking with Einstein, then, if it worked for you.
"Moonwalking" is a good book, and I encourage you to get it, however, it won't train you on much more than how to remember that one thing. The book isn't about "how to train your memory", rather, it is about how one guy trained his. A subtle, but important distinction.
For something more instructional, I was recommended Higbee's, "Your Memory, How it Works and How to Improve It[1]".
I also noticed somebody else in this topic post a link to Memrise.com[2], which is a startup actually created by one the guy who actually taught the one bit of instruction in Moonwalking.
> So for a grocery list, the example goes, imagine a container of milk overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get inside, perhaps two giant steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your living room to find pretzels dancing on your rug.
To people for whom this works: how vivid exactly are you imagining these things? I think I'm like this guy[1]; basically, I can't close my eyes and "see" anything, much less "imagine walking through my house."
I think the memory palace technique is supposed to help you remember things like this: you "walk" (via imagination) into a room and see a crazy scene full of memory prompts. Right? But... how automatic is seeing that scene? I can memorize "a wet lion on my bed" or something, but then I'm just memorizing it, so why shouldn't I just memorize the original thing? And if you can walk into that room and see the lion, and then go, "oh yeah, a wet lion, that means an Ace of Spades" can't you just imagine a poster on the wall with an Ace of Spades on it?
I guess, basically, the memory palace technique seems so far from useful it makes me question how my brain works vs. other people's.
[1] http://dfan.org/visual.html