Building memory skills (& creating accountability)

Memory Training Journals
41

Days 22 & 23:

Health issues got somewhat in the way the past few days in terms of progress of anything really. However, my book on Advanced Memory Palaces by Joe Reddington arrived today, and to sing its praises, it’s an incredibly engrossing read. 100% would put it on par with Memory Craft.

The concept of a skip list to use for ease of navigation on a lengthy list that may necessitate knowing place and order, as well as using differing keywords/links to not confuse the order at all feels so straightforward when put out in front of me, yet it took the digestible and clear language of Reddington to explain how great of an idea it is.

I felt that, as someone who has tried to code and never really gotten anywhere with it, that I would maybe struggle with the jargon and approaches undertaken, but beyond the odd moment where I needed time to marinade my thoughts, it’s an incredibly easy book to pick-up, having read Memory Craft and other miscellaneous texts on the matter previously. 100% recommended when you feel like you’ve come to terms with some of the concepts!

I also tested my knowledge on the 118 periodic elements in my video game palace; I only fully failed to remember Dubnium, and the 4 others I couldn’t recall were due to my inability to spell (I can remember an image of a person called Fraser, praying with a dunce hat as an archaic way to shame someone as dim, yet Praseodymium will be the bane of my existance), so that felt rather satisfying!

I’m going to look at incorporating a skip list for every 5/10 elements, as though I signified in each spot which was the 5th to some success, not knowing the 97th element off the top of my head makes me want to improve the agility at that.

Overall, progress feels good! I don’t feel like I’m doing incredibly, nor do I feel like I’m lagging. If I can get into a routine of concentrated practice at some aspects, then I think that will be a real leap from how I feel to where I am.

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I try to incorporate a skip list that incorporates every single stop on a journey. Basically, I envision my 00-100 major peg list item at every stop. I think of this process of creating the associations between the peg list and the journey stops as “pegging” the journey through the palace. That way I don’t need to use the skip list and then count up or down, I can jump directly to the location.

Sometimes (but not all the time) I incorporate the peg list item into the visualization for what I am trying to memorize; for example, for element 22 in the periodic table, that’s a NuN in the peg list, and she’s on a bed in this journey. The nun is jumping on it with her titanium legs (like Captain Dan in the Forrest Gump movie). So element 22 is Titanium. 23 is a gNoMe on the night stand next to the bed, driving a miniature van and knocking things off the night stand; 23 is Vanadium.

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43

That’s a fascinating way to do it! My job is working as a video editor for a Pokemon YouTuber, and as a lot of the files I use are the number of the Pokemon instead of the name, I’ve been tempted to incorporate PAO/the Major System into my job by giving each Pokemon the link to a 3-digit combination. It sounds as if finding links and means to use that as a skip list and as a foundation only compliments the information you’re familiar with.

Will give it a try, thank you for the information!

44

Day 24 (kinda):

So, unfortunately work, personal life and a myriad of things somewhat got in the way of my dedicated memory things. I had my day 2 days ago to wallow in my self-deprecation, and thankfully I’m through that. I’m happier to have committed to it than to have not, and I’m going to try and get back on it with things I enjoy.

I practiced my Periodic table memory palace for the first time in a few weeks, and I managed to get 90/118, but a lot of eaerly ones slipped my mind. Somewhat funny in all honesty; I’d probably be able to remember Sodium had I not been focusing on my memoery palace, yet given I didn’t give myself a good-enough prompt to memorise it, that fell through the gaps along with a bunch of other obvious ones.

I’ve somewhat changed my goals from my initial ambitions a while ago - I’m looking to try and focus down on actually getting a PAO system in place to practice that, I would like to eventually integrate mnemonics into learning Japanese again, and I would like to go for more of a curveball to see how well I could learn chess, given I have a passing interest and there’s a book that speialises in it.

For now, I once again recommend Advanced Memory Methods by Joe Reddington; it’s a fantastic book to follow a base foundation. Outside of memory reading, The Dawn of EVerything by David Graeber and David Wengrow is a fantastic read to analyse and discuss long-believed narratives about human anthropology over milennia.

45

Day 25:

I’ve started to do some work on my PAO, starting with the people. Initially I was going to go with the Major System to use as a baseline, and while I may do that for the actions + objects, as well as people I struggle to find an association for, I hit a roadblock on the very first number: 00.

I could get STeve Austin, SaNs, SaMus Aran, ZoRRo & ZeLda pretty easily, but when 06 came up and nothing came to mind, then reflecting on 00 still gave me nothing, I tried to see if something else resonated better for the people.

There’s a game in the Zero Escape trilogy of visual novels called 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors that has stuck with me since I played it; coincidentally, there are 10 major characters introduced to you from the start of the game, where each character is numbered 1-9, and the main antagonist is the number 0.

Upon reflection, this was perfect; the benefit of using games as a reference is that you can get colourful, vivid and unique characters imprinted on your brain, and though it might’ve taken me a few seconds to properly remember them, their characteristics and physical traits are (hopefully) going to stick with me for a while.

I already have an idea of what I want to do for 10-19, and 47 has a character pre-assigned in my brain that I think I can work the 40s around. I’ll be making my Anki deck for the people, and then it’ll be a matter of getting actions + objects attached to cards.

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46

ZeuS :wink:

Discovering what works for you is a big part of the build process! Cool to see you’ve found a way that may click well!

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47

Days 26 & 27:

I was tempted not to update the past few days due to the less-than-stellar performance I had, but I honestly feel it’s better to be upfront about my shortcomings in case anyone else can syampthise/empathise; my PAO training has been a struggle.

The initial concept of segmenting the 10 sets of 10 into siable chunks seemed to genius at the time, but I recognise that without a natural order that brings me to the number likewise to the first set of 10, then it’s an exercise in remembering what represents the number. I’ve expanded my people to 30 and actions to 5, but in reflecting on it, I’m really struggling for recall that doesn’t take a few seconds at first.

This tells me 2 things:

1). I need practice with PAO, 100%. I’m completely fresh with it as a concept, so actually getting some reps of some kind for flashcard recall would do me good.

2). I need to change how I structure my PAO list; initially I imagined using the Dominic System, then the Major system felt like a comfier fit, and then the segments felt like I was on the cusp of it, but now I’ve hit a deadlock super early onwards. I’m not sure how I can work on improving it, but I’ll keep at it.

Something needs to change, and so I plan to hopefully use this rather disappointing update as a milestone of where I was, to hopefully reflect on where I am in a month’s time.

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48

Mine is Sub Zero.

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49

Okay I’m going to stop updating with days because my schedule and life is frenetic enough to the point it’s a victory if I can update twice in one week!

Though things have been getting in the way unfortunately, my fascination and thoughts about memory still linger - I believe they might always do unless I consciously tell myself to move on from it, yet I don’t see that ever becoming necessary.

Instead, I’m going to bold a particular thought, or vibe, or conclusion I’ve made about memory when I come back to journal it. So, with that in mind.

PAO training is hard. But, I think I’ve come up with a system of my own that, at worst, instrigues me.

I’ve been playing around with PAO since the last time I discusssed it, yet I still don’t quite keep anything much at all. And I’ve concluded a few things:

  • Likewise to a lot of things I do, I’ve adopted too many things too quickly, and that’s overrided a process of going slower and steadier.
  • I’m also struggling to get a strong link to a number; that act of encoding from the Major System has been a tribulation, as to be expected. However, I always have to run through the relatively menial process of undrstanding what numbers mean what letters, and it keeps losing me.

So, I reworked my initial idea of lumping a selection of 10 relevant people to a set of numbers; now, I’ve started to construct what I consider a “logic” 00-99 person list. Here’s a (hopefully) simple explanation of how it works:

1). The base for encoding the numbers are still the major system, as that has stuck in my head firmly now.
2). The first number of each set correlates to a franchise with a similar starting sound in the major system (e.g. 30-39 all are characters in the Mario franchise).
3). The second digit follows a same rule; however, rather than being the name of a character, it is the name of an archetype/role, which would then fit a character within said franchise (e.g. the -8s across all the franchises, to me, are Villains. 38, in this instance, would be King Bowser).

In some ways, this probably sounds more complicated than my initial system, and I can completely see that; for me, however, it’s works.

  • The concept is more enticing, it feels like solving a puzzle almost; I call it a logic list because I have to find a character which intersects the franchise with the role, and that always seems to scratch an itch in my brain for early recall;
  • It’s actually been quite entertaining in the initial period of brainstorming, to find a role for each number, currently, it goes:

1). Doppelganger (currently the only one I think I’m going to try and change, as it’s not synonymous with a lot of franchises)
2). Antihero
3). Minion
4). Rival
5). Love Interest
6). Child
7). Comic Relief
8). Villain
9). Protagonist
0). Sidekick

Once I find a more befitting role for “1”, then I think I’m set;

  • Also, I’ve found recall to be far easier in this current setup; 90-99 is for Breaking Bad, and it’s so easy for me to come up with any of these numbers (excl 91 for now); 98 is Gustavo Fring, 94 is Hank Schrader, 99 is Walter White - these don’t take much for me to come up with, and these are going to stick with me, I’m almost certain of it.

So while I’d like to be further ahead than I am, I think I’ve come up with something that works for me, and that is far more important than my goals I set.

Fingers crossed this works!

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50

Great way to make the category system your own! You can apply the same logic to assigning categories and elements to playing cards too if that ever interests you.

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51

100%! Once I have a firm grasp on my PAO system I definitely want to move to playing cards next :grin:

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52

Work life and activism really has taken up a lot of my time recently, but after chipping away at memory-related thoughts and research every now and again, I finally found a tremendous asset for my PAO:

Josh’s Memory System.

Peeviously I tried a ‘logic’ based approach by assigning the first digit with a franchise & a second with a character type - its mileage varied and was too specific to slot in what I wanted, generally.

However, that idea of making it more ‘logical’ works far better in the system that Josh has; I found my issue with the major system was that I struggled to always follow a consistency in where each number would be located in the word.

e.g. 01 could be STeve, or SiD, or SwaT, depending on how I chose to go about it. And that made memorising the number more hassel for me due to the lack of an inherent pattern.

Josh’s Memory system circumvents this for me as I can always, assuming I don’t know, determine what the initial sound is going to be.

I currently have an Anki deck I’m gradually building up as I work my way through the people of PAO for now, but continuous revision feels like its getting there. This is unarguably the most confident and motivated I’ve felt in a long while about PAO.

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53

Yes, memory techniques are important today in an increasingly technological world where anyone who has knowledge is a valuable working citizen.

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Things have been a bit more stable recently! Anticipate that the next few months are going to be busier at work, but have been getting more and more into memory-related things again.

The Good:

Started reading both Memory Craft and Advanced Memory Palaces again as I thoroughly enjoy them, but I had a huge breakthrough of sorts from a point Reddington discussed.

In his chapter on memory palaces, he mentions how his main memory palace is the periodic table, as it’s so ingrained with him that he can use it to keep his lists in order. I thought it was a really fascinating perspective on memory palaces, that I didn’t really comprehend, until I put two-and-two together for myself, in a shockingly useful revelation:

Pokémon.

I’d already used the franchise previously; one time using the game’s locations to try and remember French cities (worked well at the time, alas I haven’t reviewed it enough), and the other as my take on the Visual Alphabet. Kelly’s comments about having a vibrant and interactive list of people and creatures encouraged that idea, and now I have a fairly solid peg system in place.

However, the next idea for using the franchise came with the exercise/example in AMP, to encode the 13 countries within OPEC; him using the Batman villains from films was a clever way to remember it, and I wanted to come up with something similar to see how it would go.

Coincidentally, there are typically 13 major trainers/characters in Pokémon games; 8 gym leaders, the Elite 4, and 1 champion. And all of a sudden, I’ve been able to encode Algeria to Venezuela, with relatively little issue thanks to knowing the franchise like the back of my hand.

Already this excited me - very much that same thrill when you first try the method of loci - but then the discussion on memory palaces, and usage of the periodic table, made me think about how Pokémon has a natural order in its Pokédex. Over 1000 distinct and unique creatures that I’ve kept up with, in a sequential order.

Just purely as a test, I tried the Linking Method between Pokémon in order of the Pokédex; the original games have 151 creatures, which I was able to cut to 81 (due to the other 70 linking to the ones kept in), and I just started a chain from the beginning.

Currently speaking, I can’t remember 151 Pokémon. That’s because I can remember 493 Pokémon.

The method worked so well - it is a touch fragile and I might forget one or two on occasion, but on the whole, I’ve been able to recall nearly 500 Pokemon in a link in a row - and without trying to come across as cocky, it didn’t take a massive amount of time. I think that’s largely at the behest of the vividness and malleable nature of Pokémon, as well as not needing to encode anything else with them, but this has galvanised me and then some.

I’m currently looking into sub-lists and how they can stack with memory palaces, so I might be getting ahead of myself, but I’ve started to map in my mind’s eye what I’d hope to achieve with this. Nonetheless, Pokemon is a fantastic resource for me; not only for its creatures, but also how you can categorise certain elements to make a coherent list.

Just as another practice, I encoded the 11 London Underground lines to the villains of the Pokemon franchise, and I’d hope that my usage of specific elements can go much further. Early days, but really optimistic about it’s possibilities.

The difficult:

Don’t want to call this section “the bad” because it’s ultimately just practice at the end of the day - that being said, PAO is a beast of a system that I’m still working towards. The best way I can describe it is that I’m able to make a connection of some kind to a number, but cannot make the connection to said number for the life of me.

As a change of pace, I started coming up with objects instead of people, and I’m already up to 80, which I’m happy with. Josh Cohen’s system works wonders for me, and I again used a Linking Method to give myself another connection to these objects. Unfortunately, while I can eventually ascertain that 38 is a mace, or 53 is a Labrador (not sure if people use animals in their O for PAO!), it takes its time, and I can see myself now using the linking method as a crutch more than a resource.

First thing I’m going to do is make a skip list for the objects, as I hope that the easier navigation with number associations will be beneficial; then I’m going to just get them on flashcards and review them, as I imagine there’s not a lot else one can do beyond that.

Lastly, I’m going to start re-reading Moonwalking with Einstein again. Not only as I really enjoyed it when I was reading it, but also as that may have some really good insight on how people in the memory championships trained to get to their level, that I can use for my own goals. I’ll also look around on the forums for any other recommended reading - posts, books, or otherwise - that can help me hopefully keep going up this mountain.

Apologies to whoever if you read all of this but I appreciate it! Memory training is a lot of fun.

55

What a fantastic post. Those are really interesting observations and experiments. Please keep reporting what happens. I think the stacking memory palaces works well, but you seem to be taking it further. Wonderful reading this!

Lynne

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Thank you Lynne, very much appreciated! Really hoping to eventually have 1000 subjects for 1000 Pokemon, each with their own sublists of things I want to remember.

Will see how it develops, but think it might serve as a fantastic starting point, with the first Pokemon containing all of my geography-related information.

Thanks once again for your work on memory, it was a huge push in the right direction for me! :grin:

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Currently starting to try and form some Geography/Country-related lists as my first ‘subject’ I want to keep. Has been going well! If not a little slow in the latter list.

UK Cities

Currently there are 76 cities in the UK (also had to consider the 5 other cities from Overseas Territories & Crown Dependencies), which I encoded alphabetically with Taskmaster UK Contestants. It worked quite well! An immediate review is fantastic for me to recognise what is/isn’t working, and after the first attempt missed 5-10, the next attempt got them all. Tried them again before this post, and still got all 81. Will keep to revising it, but happy with that.

My only thing is that I’d like to encode more into each city, like its founding date and maybe its population, but keeping it simple for now.

US States - Class

I’ve done a linked list of the US states before, when reading the Harry Lorayne book on memory. I could somewhat keep at it, but wanted to try and improve it; so, I took the class system from Advanced Memory Palaces and have come up with this system.

State

  • Capital
  • Largest City
  • State Nickname
  • Next State

Process: State is a person, with a physical feature/alteration related to the Capital. They’re wearing the largest city, in some capacity. They’re located at nickname, before they’re attacked/destroyed by the next state.

E.G. California - Ronald Reagan:

  • Crosses on his cheeks and head, like he’s going to be sacrificed - Sacramento;
  • Has angel wings (very ironic) - Los Angeles;
  • Is stuck in a room of gold - The Golden State;
  • A collar latches round his neck from the floor, and takes him to hell - Colorado.

Feels weird that a lot of politicians are the person representative of the state in my examples, but considering it’s encouraged in Memory Craft to use people you don’t like, it works out quite well!

It’s very slow going to get these all encoded (understandably), but it seems to be going okay? I was going to try and add the dates the states were created, but think I need more work on my PAO & encoding numbers before that.

An issue is that I may already start crossing wires with which person is from which state, but hoping that’ll iron itself out with regular reviews. Might need to incorporate something ancillary about the state in the future, but going to go to bed and review everything I’ve learnt so far, and will keep at it tomorrow!

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58

Had a few days to marinate on what I was doing, and it’s been interesting!

UK Cities: Memory Palace is working well! Lags at some points but never fail to recall all of them in order (+ I’ve added the 5 cities from crown dependencies/overseas territories). Tempted to try and use the palace again for English counties in alphabetical order, but think that’s risking it. Need to really look into reusing memory palaces at some point to know how to use them more!

US States + other info: Find this fascinating - the class system for remembering more information is really good, and definitely has helped things stick - but the relationships I link between what I want to know still needs some work. I originally thought the idea of using political people tied to the state (and wrestlers as a worst case scenario) was a bad idea in retrosect, yet I’ve been able to recall Alabama to Michigan fairly okay? But places like New Hampshire and newer ones are becoming harder and harder to make work.

Going to strip it back by isolating 50 people for each state first so I don’t struggle on that part anymore, then I’m going to try a better way to encode the other information. Giving the person a facial feature or item didn’t seem bad at the time, but when I can’t recall a person for Mississippi, their link to ‘Jackson’ as the state capital then becomes a blur.

PAO: Still really hard haha

Pokémon: The major success was definitely Pokemon - I challenged myself to name all 1017 Pokemon currently in the Pokedex, and though it took 40 minutes on a quiz site because my stubby fingers kept typing it wrong, I was able to get there! Excited by the fact that I can recall them so well without it being too difficult, but unsure where to go with it.

  • Like the idea of it as my central array to review what I’m learning, but don’t necessarily want to limit it to just that.
  • Not sure if I can use it/how confident I am in using it as a separate memory palace too. Really, this all is telling me I need to learn about resuing memory palaces. So that’s what I’ll be doing to wind down this evening!
  • Also, I want to use it in a/my PAO somewhat; I’ve been intrigued by the title ‘Grandmaster of Memory’ since reading about it in Memory Craft, and I think that, given I can recall 1000 Pokemon in 40 minutes, the challenge to remember 1000 random digits in an hour would have good synergy with them too. I could theoretically take the first 250 Pokemon, then assign them each 4 digits (first 2 Action, second 2 object), but if I can get into a groove of recalling Pokemon by their number, then I can use the first 999 (I have a secret Pokemon for 000) to increase my utility of recalling the digits.

Still loving memory stuff! Hoping that I can take it far.

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Been preoccupied with video-editing, both for my hobby and as a job recently; memory is in the forefront of my mind though!

UK Cities: Practiced again just before I made this post, think that it’s pretty locked in, so that’s a good sign! Might reuse the memory palace for English Counties now when I have some more time next week.

US States: Still need to revisit and practice, but want to try and build frm the top-up in a better system.

Pokémon: Should probably practice some of the more recently memorised Pokemon, as ther’s about 400 or so that may be easily forgotten, but feeling great with memorising all 1000 recently. Might try and recall them as all as some pre-sleep practice. Also, not sure if this will upload well, but here’s an image I made of my visual alphabet “in action” - I used it in a video I made recently to try and illustrate memory techniques and it looked a bit better on there, but I still understand the ebbs and flow of this just by a still image.

My Visual Alphabet in Pokémon
My Visual Alphabet in Pokémon1920×276 67.5 KB

Moving onto a fairly ambitious project now, however:

Japanese Kanji meanings: There’s ~2200 Japanese Kanji used in everyday language if I recall correctly, and they’re listed in a slew of books. I’ve tried my best to retain them in any way I know how, often doing things wrong or burning myself out on the process. However, there’s a book called
Remembering the Kanji that focuses solely on attributing a meaning to each symbol, as opposed to other books that also assign a reading to them, and othertimes vocabulary on top of that.

I really wanted to crack a system that could encode the meanings and readings, and I imagine someone more well-versed and experienced with memory could find a way to package it all perfectly together. I, on the other hand, have decided to try a new goal: encode 2 kanji and meaning attributed to it to 1 Pokemon, in order of Pokedex entry.

This should give me 2034 kanji encoded in some way, and I’ll use alternative forms to encode the rest. I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about this, but was motivated enough to encode 100 today, and I remember them fairly well!

I doubt I’ll keep at the pace of 100 a day - think it’d do some good to slow down and marinate - but honestly Pokemon as a vessel is really doing wonders for me, and if I’m able to effectively reuse them, I’m feeling very hopeful about my memory goals in the future.

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Delighted to hear this!

Lynne

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