Abstract memory journey of sequence of animals

General Memory Chat
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I’m trying to learn the sequence of 50 animals that are part of my reverse memory palace method.
Another update of reverse memory palace, animals is the way to go

After just two days I already have a sense of deja vu (like in the post Memory Postdiction); a certain awareness of doing something not quite efficient, like I have already tried to do on multiple occasions. It’s like a feeling of familiarity with a feeling of inefficiency.

I suddenly remember a comment in a recent post (for the love of god, I don’t remember what the thread was about), that sort of said that there is an advantage to having information on an actual piece of paper as opposed to having it in digital form; the idea is that the information on the paper has a location, namely somewhere on the paper (information on the very top or bottom of the page may therefore be better remembered; not sure if the poster also mentioned this).

Thinking of this post got me thinking: can I make that sense of location (on a piece of paper) more powerful and can I add something else. Well of course I can. To make a long story short: I’ve made a diagram consisting of line pieces, triangles and squares and a line connecting all (respectively representing animal chunks of 2, 3 and 4 animals). That wich I have added is a sense of direction. So I basically start by going down for a couple of animal chunks (1 line piece representing an elephant and rino, folowed by a triangle representing an aligator, lizzard and snake, folowed by a square representing giraf, zebra, horse and moose…) and than I take a U-turn and I continue going up and after a couple of chunks another U-turn going down again and finally an S-like move ending in a horizontal fashion with all sea creatures.

This diagram is suprisingly easy to learn and it seems to give a real advantage in not just memorising the animal sequence but also in keeping track of where I am in the sequence while actually using the reverse memory palace.

I guess the method is a bit like brain mapping, but with an added sense of direction. Are there forum members who have done anything simular?

Just in case you all are wandering why I have not simply made a memory palace for the animals, let me just answer that right away; I have used all my palace building energy and resources to make a 100 location palace for this reverse memory palace.

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Connecting locations, anyone with ideas?
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Sometimes, the beauty of theoretical elegance gets in the way of an honest assessment of a system. I have to admit this is the case with the method in my original post. It’s not all bad, but my ethousiasm has somewhat declined to put it mildly. After some training and some memorisation attempts, I am able to give some feedback:

  • learning the sequence of animals (using the abstract memory journey) feels to much like a struggle in comparison to learning the number value of each location in the memory palace.
  • When applying that sequence in actual memorisation of numbers, keeping track of that sequence is even more difficult.
  • Despite the struggle during the actual (much to slow for my liking) memorisation, the recall was magically easy on the first attempt (I knew where I put each animal, without any effort).
  • The second time, the recall was terible also; I simply was unable to distinquish between the first location (from first attempt) and second location (from second attempt). So in my experience the problem of ghost images is more of a problem in this system, than the standard system.

I still have hope, that using the number value of locations in the memory palace may be of great use in some version of the (reverse) memory palace system, but it has to be different than this animal sequence variation. And, I imagine, whatever is added (some other sort of sequence or …who knows what) to the numbered memory palace should be relative easy to learn, otherwise the magic of the whole method simply is lost.

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I have been rather busy the last couple of days (working long hours mostly), so I have not had much time and energy to spend on this system. But sometimes that turns out to be a blessing in disguise. During such a busy period it seems that my unconcious mind is still working out solutions to problems I have been facing. More to the point, I think I have an idea that might save this reverse memory palace: reduce the sequence of 50 animals to something like 15 and have each animal do 3 or 4 things (respectively represent a 6 or 8 digit number).

I don’t have a complete sequence of 50 actions in the above mentioned manner, but the start is promising:

  • elephant doing something with 1. his trunk, and 2. his tusks, and than 3. standing straight and 4. sitting;
  • giraf 1. licking with his giant tongue, 2. slamming his neck/head, 3 standing straight, 4 kicking;
  • lion 1. clawing, 2. lying on his back, 3 biting, 4 jumping.

It feels that this is much easier to learn than the 50 animal sequence in a very significant way. It also feels that after any amount of learning this sequence (of actions with the 15 animals instead of just the 50 animals without specific actions) can be visualised much faster.

Hopefully, I will have finished this system in a couple of days and than despite still being busy I will do a little bit of practice each day. I will let you know how it works out.

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Another week has gone bye and I have to admit I have not had much motivation to learn the new sequence of 13 ( each with 2, 3 or 4 actions adding up to 50) animals. This lack of motivation can be viewed upon 2 different ways:

  1. the method still sucks, so why bother;
  2. in my susconcious there is is something under development that is significantly better, so why bother (with the old version).

This morning I woke up with pretty much a complete idea of an improvement, that as far as I can tell, really is signicantly better. Let me just first give you the new sequence and after that I will give some reflections on it (between brackets are the number of actions for each person/animal):

  1. GYMNAST (9);
  2. elephant (4);
  3. giraf (4);
  4. polar bear (3);
  5. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (9);
  6. orang-utan (4);
  7. sloth (4);
  8. bull (4);
  9. BRUCE LEE (5)
    10 killer whale (4).

sequence of persons/animals:

In my imagination the GYMNAST is the leader of 3 animals, and likewise is ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER. The list is completed by BRUCE LEE who (simply) is a friend of the killer whale. In order to get the sequence really solid in my mind I create a stroy in which the GYMNAST does gymnastic tricks with his 3 animals like doing a human flag on the neck of the giraf. The story of ARNOLD and his 3 animals is heavily based on his charismatic and arrogant identity from the movie/documentary “Pumping Iron”. So for example in his interaction with the sloth he says: you lazy bastard (quote from the movie directed at his friend/training partner Franco Colombu) stop hanging around and start exercising. Because BRUCE LEE only has 1 animal conected to/following him there is no real need for story making.

sequence of actions for each person/animal:

All the animals (except the polar bear who has 3 actions) have 4 actions and they can be easily learned by just repeating. The GYMNAST has 9 actions, that are basically a floor routine in which each action logically and fysically flows from the action before. ARNOLD does 9 bodybuilding exercises and even though the flow of the actions is not as magical as the one from the GYMNAST, it still makes intuitive sense. And finally BRUCE LEE does 3 fighting actions (side kick, punch, nunchak hit) folowed by 2 trademark exercises (2 finger pushup and hamstring stretch which he does prior to his fight with Chuck Norris in the colosseum in Rome).