Ok so I was hooked on the idea of encoding highlights out of every day of my life. And on May 25th I decided to do a week long test run to see if I could feasibly encode, review, and remember the highlights of each day during that time.
That week has since turned into 50 days worth of information stored. But… there are problems that I have tried to workshop and found unsatisfactory solutions to.
When I initially started, my method was simple: Find a palace with 1 loci for each day of the month (I started with a 7 loci palace since May was almost over) and encoded 10 events that occurred during the day, with the goal of 10 pieces of information each day. (Ten pieces of information proved to be WILDLY optimistic). At the time I had been poking around on the forum trying to find a form of “Loci Extender” or objects or pegs I could place at loci in order to get more bang for my buck per se. So at my very first loci there is a chair, and I got really creative with positioning on this chair and started sticking imagery to various parts of it. Then I used another chair for the next day, then a bedside table.
But very quickly I started to run into a problem. Firstly I struggled to find ten meaningful events daily to encode, and second I couldn’t think of terribly many pegs I could split into ten effective parts. Emphasis on effective. (I will return to this). (Future note here: The imagery I stuck on object pegs didn’t end up sticking that much better than the d8s).
So in time I switched to my old d8 style method of imagining a 8d style shape and sticking images at its points. Terrible for being a memorable loci, but cheap and easy to replicate endlessly (which was why I went with it, but it definitely doesn’t serve me well).
Well anyhow, a month down the line and I ran into a problem. I kind of thought to myself "Do I really know what’s in my palaces? Do I really have these loci down pat? I realized that I was hesitant to access my loci outside of review sessions where I could access the written information if needed. Why? BECAUSE IT WASN’T THERE. Subconsciously I knew this. Consciously I didn’t want to admit it. Well, it was kind of there.
What would happen during review sessions is that I would go to a loci and think to myself “What’s here” for like five minutes, and then I would get maybe half of the days images right (oh by the way I ended up dropping the number of events per day I would encode to an average of 6, sometimes more sometimes less). Then I would go to my journal of events and briefly glimpse the information I was missing. Because you see, the imagery wasn’t gone gone, just not accessible to me. The moment I looked at my journal I was like “ah, that’s what was there” and my imagery would snap into place again (or as much as it can snap on to abstract points on a shape I can’t visualize with much clarity). So the imagery was there if only I could remember it, which is horribly backwards from how it’s supposed to work.
So during that month I decided I needed to improve. Over the next three days I reviewed every single loci I had encoded up to that point until I could pick out the imagery and events on the d8 shapes much more easily. And that almost did the trick, it did a decent amount to solidify the information in my mind. Hooray! I could get back to showing off my wonderful memory of life. Except… That whole process of reviewing took work, like waaaay more than using true loci by themselves. When I encode information onto a loci without using any form of extender, it sticks, usually immediately and the first time. When I review it, it sticks and I’m not spending time fishing around for what’s there. My mass reviews may have pounded the information in there eventually, but it was way to much like route repetition for more liking. I had committed the greatest mnemonic sin: It wasn’t fun.
So after the mass reviews I decided I needed to make my imagery stick in the future. And so for the next month I use essentially a form of the linking method on my d8 structures. Each point’s imagery would have an element interact with the next point’s imagery. Which in theory is fine, but there was another problem. I was doing a terrible job with actually using good imagery in the first place. Rather than encoding the meaning of the event with a few memorable events: I would tend to just imagine a snap shot of the event occurring (and seriously I encoded some not memorable events, interesting ones, but absolutely not innately memorable ones). So I had bad loci extenders, and bad imagery, and after doing mass reviews I tried to use the liking method as a bandaid. Part of the reason for my increasingly worse imagery as well as my demoralization, the more harder it was to recall information on the loci, the more I gave up on encoding new information and just through stuff at it.
Which brings us today. I finished doing reviews about an hour ago and decided, you know what there is one place on earth('s internet) that I know is full of the most experienced people in the world when it comes to mnemonics. Why don’t I just bring my problem to them with full context and then explain what I’m looking for? So that’s what I’m doing.
Ok now that all the contextualization is done, I’ll get to my ask. Which is basically two fold.
The very first thing I am actually concerned with is something I mentioned earlier. I don’t have any form of selection criteria for what I do and do not encode for each day. And I have absolutely had moments where weeks later I look back at a random memory I have and am like “Wait, I have no idea which day this happened on but I totally should have encoded it during that day.” So what I’d first like help with is ideas for what I should look out to encode on a daily basis. So any ideas on that or a kind of checklist for it would be super helpful.
And second is the loci problem. Using my d8 structures isn’t working. Well I mean it is, but not in a way I want to keep doing for the rest of my life. On June 27th I encoded 27 pieces of information out of an incredibly useful book in a true palace with no extenders. It took maybe and hour and only two loci had problematic imagery. Each day that I went to review the information, it took maybe 7 minutes to go through throughly. Each loci was effortless and totally easy to recall (and it was fun). By contrast my modern life loci can take 10 minutes just to go through a 8 pieces of information because it is so hard to get a hold of.
So I ask if there is a way you all can think of to allow me to store information about my life without requiring me to decrease the number of things I am encoding for each day, because truth be told, I want to encode more about my days. Is there a way for reviewing my days to feel like reviewing true loci? I don’t want to look at any of my days as shallow just because I gave up on them through the difficultly of the current system, because in each day of my life while I live it I’ve found beauty.
To anyone who can help me, I thank you sincerely and absolutely,
Zellion
