I would like to create a mental “dictionary” for common abstract words (e.g., love = heart, justice = scales). The goal is so I can practice associating 100-200 frequent abstract words with consistent images to reduce encoding time. For random words and whatnot’s. I was wondering if there already pre-made dictionaries here? Someone alrdy made them before?
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I did (or rather I’m in the process of doing) a visual dictionary for abstract key words of the new testament, for example for the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5.22.
Time will tell how much I like it, I’m still in the beginning (I fill it up while studying/memorising, so on an as needed basis).
If I notice it works well, then I may follow a list, but I wanted to start small to see how it goes.
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Be careful with heart for “love” when a heart can also be used represent other ideas, e.g., "the coward had no heart, or “the heart of the matter,” etc.
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I’m not reading in English anyway (well most of the time)…
I have different images for agape, eros and philia… The point is not only to choose images for quick memorisation, but to study what the concepts mean, in their (cultural and textual) context. Its a way for me to get closer to the original texts, without actually going all the way to learn the texts in the original (because it would be too much work and wouldn’t fulfill one of the goals of the project).
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I study law, so I pretty much always need abstract words like ‘guilt’, ‘jurisdiction’, ‘whole’,‘together’,etc. Of course, this leads me to reuse certain images, so created a PAO for the most frequent ones.
For example, jurisdiction would be Luke Skywalker (since he is the ‘chosen one’ and the court (among others) which has jurisdiction is the one ‘chosen’ by the law) swinging his Lightsaber at one of his training drones.
If you need the negation of a concept, you simply take the person’s rival or nemesis. In this case, no jurisdiction would be Darth Vader.
But for the latter two examples (‘whole’ and ‘together’), that is, some form of logical operators, it may be expedient to have it be not part of a PAO but instead some sort of effect, vapor, fluid, accessory, etc. which can easily be added to the relevant parts of an image. So ‘together’ could be signified by a chain binding the relevant parts of the image while ‘whole’ could be a ‘hole’ straight through the chest of whatever unfortunate person happens to represent a given concept. Of course, one should still make these things ‘part of the action’ so they’ll stick. I haven’t experimented too much with this concept yet, but it’s probably better than having 30 Shadow the Hegehogs running around a given location.
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makes perfect sense
Not sure if it will help, but if you read Bruno’s On the Composition of Images, you’ll find a few ideas for encoding that are beyond the norm.
As a side note, I personally remove the idea that anything that can be encoded is “abstract.”
This will helpful when I was studying a non-classical logic called dialetheism. It has a whole bunch of symbols and I kept telling myself they were abstract.
But when I simply decided that everything I was seeing was concrete and relatable, the next think you know the symbol for condition looked very relatable to an air conditioner, totality to a totem pole, etc.
In terms of dictionaries that exist, it’s maybe not what you’re looking for here, but the old Bruno Furst courses came with Number Dictionaries.
I found mine interesting to look at, but the risk of deskilling the very skill we mnemonists wish to build was too high to use it.
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I was thinking of toki pona for this and the glyphs as visuals.
BUT my conclusion was that learning an entire language may be over kill at present for me.
I wrote about my approach here, in case you haven’t seen it:
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Hi I don’t uderstand well my English is not the best. How you use that system of Luke and Vader to remember? I used to number things. Like passive subject was 1. So to studying was easy to say 1 instead the concept.
It’s not all that different from any other mnemonic, you just have some already formed beforehand. So if I need to memorize something related to “jurisdiction”, but can only think of a person to represent that related thing, it is quite useful to have an image for “jurisdiction” that is not a person. That way, they can be combined easily and the images are less repetitive.
For example, if I wanted to remember that the district courts have jurisdiction over (ie are responsible for) civil disputes under 15.000 Euros, I could imagine that as Luke (Jurisdiction) licking (15) George Washington (as in Washington, District of Columbia). Or I could have Washigton (disctrict) swinging his lightsaber (jurisdiction) at a large bowl of ice cream (15). The combinations go on.
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