At least a decade ago I dabbled with some mnemonics with only modest success. Linking things didn’t work much better than my natural memory. Filling my house with a shopping list was maybe 75% successful (picturing my walls with pink salmon wallpaper singing “give me back that fillet-o-fish” is a mistake that will haunt me to my grave). Neat, but didn’t hold my attention for long.
At some point during the pandemic I ended up binge watching a bunch of memory videos. Most of them just used as background noise, autoplaying away. Sometimes I was smart enough to actually pay attention and apply it.
I’m going to start with the personal insights I can remember from dabbling in this.
The first that it’s actually pretty easy. The intention does most of the work, the images help with details. I suspect the reason it was hard the first time around is because I wasn’t focused on the purpose behind the images, just placing them.
It’s amazing how much context a mnemonic image can drag in with it. I remember one of Metivier’s videos playing in the background. He was memorizing viewer’s names. It was almost at the very end where I finally started paying attention and asked myself “Why am I not trying this? It can take me literally dozens of tries to learn someone’s name!” And now I remember Mustafa from Turkey, as easy as mustard on a roasted turkey, and Sapah, a girl having a big glob of pine sap fall on her shoulder and shouting “Ah!”
I might even remember some very minor details about the video, such as a casual speaking cadence, indoors in a white room with normal, white lighting (of course, could be falsely remembering bits of other videos here). Doesn’t sound like much, but my natural memory would throw away the fact it even comes from a video.
I have one image that has no context at all. I must have been experimenting with my bestiary, because one day when I got to Z I saw a random pug with golden horns. “Zorgi? What the heck is a zorgi?!” it offered up some blood flowers.
It’s interesting how that’s clearly a pug in my mind, but I know it was a corgi. No idea if I just imagined the wrong dog, or if my mind replaces other small dogs with pugs. Either way, it caused no problems.
Remembering shapes does not work well for me, but remembering objects that can at least loosely resemble those shapes does.
During drawing examples people usually break the subject into shapes (triangle, pyramid, circle, sphere, cone, square, box) which is really helpful, but not memorable.
Sometimes people will say something like “make a cross, and turn it into a kite” as part of drawing a horse head, and that sticks much better. Or something I got from Peter Han was to use a balloon and string for the head and spine. Not useful in the same way, that more helps you control the size of a drawing, and immediately get your line of action. Still, an easy technique to remember because you’re thinking in objects, instead of circle and line.
At some point I’ll get to experience the pain of learning anatomy and I expect this to make it possible to apply mnemonics beyond just the names. There’s no getting around having to actually model or sketch them, but I have faith it’ll really shorten the “everything is just lumps” stage.
Generic things can be memorable, but specific ones are usually much better. Robot vs C-3PO.
I see people ask how to remember “abstract” things like love. I recently realized when you create a scene to represent something, you can later come back and make a symbol out of it, if you want.
Looking up the German word for love, liebe, it kind of sounds like Libra/libre, and lee-bee. The symbol for Libra is a set of scales but that doesn’t seem memorable to me. Lady Justice holing a set of scales is. I can imagine focusing on those scales, intend for them to mean Libra, and watch Bruce Lee and Maya the Bee having a romantic date on them. I can have someone beside me point at them and say “Liebe!” to try and remember the actual sound of the word.
Later on I could associate that whole thing with honey coated nun-chucks, or maybe some kitchen scales.
Note: It’s been over five hours since I wrote the above. Testing the imagery, it’s more or less intact, with both kitchen scales and honey coated nun-chucks representing it just fine. In this case the woman saying liebe is not too clear, I’d have to find the voice sample and re-encode her. Still, enough to use and increased my German vocabulary by 33%.
I can kind of tell liebe is at risk of fading without being pinned to a loci. Things don’t always have to be in a memory palace, I have a word pinned to a TV without involving the rest of the room, or house.
Standing next to a TV is Dr. Metivier. That’s unexpected, but not unwelcome; he wasn’t supposed to be part of the encoding, but I’ll know it came from one of his videos. On the TV I actually see a lot of things as I was trying to pick the imagery: a lathe, a garbled mess that was supposed to be logic gates, a flowing river of mist, a Vulcan. The word is lethologica, and now when I forget a word while talking, I’ll sigh, instantly see that TV and say, “Great, lethologica.”
That scene will give way after a second to show a zombie sitting at a table with a crossword puzzle, groaning “uhhhh” as he can’t quite remember the word for something at the tip of the tongue.
It’s almost impossible not to do active recall. I’ll get curious and peek to see if something is still there.
I read through the pdf a few years ago. I still kind of remember some of the linked words but without much sense of the order. There is a library, an apple cooking in a fireplace, a clown? book? a rhino and a sunflower. At least, I hope those are there.
I can kind of remember the little graphics on the image of a room, mostly because I created a “real” imaginary memory palace out of it. An otter stands on the nightstand, staring at me expectantly. I can almost forget to look at the “snap-off” toolbox above the bed, but then I know something was skipped. Left side of the bed, a pile of red kidney beans. Right side a shell- the birth of venus to be exact, but I know it’s the shell that matters.
I’m assuming the otter is 3, toolbox is point, beans 1, shell 4. They aren’t encoded that way, I just remember the next section of the book promised to teach you to turn them into pi, and how I didn’t bother learning the major system.
I’m still very much a novice at this. I have proven to myself that it’s mostly easy, effective, and valuable… Yet I haven’t done much. Without psychoanalyzing, we can just blame it on being lazy, and finding 99% of the joy in being passively entertained by information, rather than engaging with it.
Think I’m out of history and lessons learned. Next time I’ll talk about Blender 3D, how I have applied memory techniques to it so far, and my hopes for them in the future. If it’s not too long, other memory goals.
