I was lessoning to a podcast called superhuman academy and Harry Lorraine was on their he said that he did not use memory palaces I was shocked and baffled. I was wondering did he just image the mental images without a palace. Harry stated that memory palaces are out dated and only used for list of things. Anyone thoughts are information you give me ?
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Digging around the internets, it seems he prefers to use his pegs instead of a memory palace, and goes into detail in the book “How to develop a super power memory.”
Looking at the transcript of that podcast, he doesn’t directly address it but I think the whole story about remembering Pennsylvania was meant to show you something he does instead.
Think I can see where he’s coming from, when you just look at it as ‘encode what you want to remember, then attach it to something’, the memory palace can seem unnecessary, and in my limited experience often is.
I don’t agree with him on it being outdated though, or necessarily just for lists (assuming he means lists like grocery items). I encoded some details about the element argon in a memory palace over 4 loci, and with just a small handful of reviews (mostly when someone here mentions the table of elements I get curious and see if it’s still there) I only have to mentally “glance” towards the MP to tell you that Argon’s a noble gas with the symbol Ar and atomic number 18. It’s the third most plentiful element in the air, and has a mass of 39.948.
Far too easy and effective to be out of date, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick with it, if it’s not to your taste.
Found a post touching on it in these forums.
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I don’t know Harry Lorraine very well, but I believe that whether or not he used “memory palaces” depends on how you define them. In my opinion, memory palaces are essentially a type of “peg” system, similar to the mnemonic peg system. From what I understand, he often used the link and peg method. So, from a basic perspective (where loci in memory palaces serve as pegs), there’s no difference if he or anyone else uses the peg system or memory palaces, as they are essentially the same thing.
That being said, I personally prefer memory palaces over the peg system for the following reasons:
- It is generally easier to quickly generate a lot of “pegs” using memory palaces compared to the peg system. In the peg system, if you want to have, say, 100 pegs, you need to assign a mental image to every number from 0 to 100 (either using the major system or other systems). However, with memory palaces, you can simply pick a familiar mental location, mentally walk through it, and select some loci within it.
- In my opinion and experience, it may feel easier to navigate a spatial environment rather than just a list of pegs.
There might have been some other reasons that I don’t remember, but these are the main reasons why I prefer memory palaces. So, I disagree with him when he said, “memory palaces are outdated!”
It’s also worth noting that everyone’s brain works differently, so he might have felt more comfortable with pegs and links.
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For him the seats in the auditorium function like a memory grid which is a lot like a memory palace … he remembered their name and associated it to their seat location… including a peg
Am i right?
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