There is one thing that keeps troubling me. What if I forget my memory palace in future. Here I am specifically taking about those memory palaces that are meant for long term use. The thing I recently tried recalling some locations from past but found out that I don’t exactly remember some of them.
This made me concern that if every time I shift home or city will I have create my memory palaces again?
As I am not an experimented user of the technique, my answer may be not entirely accurate. But…
Well, rebuilding your memory palaces from scratch would be tedious, wouldn’t it? Let me talk about my p(a)laces
I still remember, with lots of details, all the places where I grew up and lived since I was 5. In fact, as I am building several memory palaces these times, I’m amazed to see how I know precisely homes or workplaces, where I haven’t set foot for up to 37 years. I lived only for a few months in some of them! And that’s a lot of places (current number: something like 20, with various sizes and different levels of “hooks”).
So, I don’t think that moving in another place would make any of your palaces obsolete. You lived there; you breathed there; you heard there: these places, if these are real, involved most of your senses and memory processes most of the time, for a long time.
Trust your memory on that.
There is another track: why not building an imaginary palace? Try. It’s a very interesting experience. If you don’t trust your ability about keeping your places alive, make out one that will follow you anywhere, and doen’t rely on your current location. A little weaker maybe for some people (less sensorial stimulation), but it could be worth it.
Do you mean you don’t remember them in great detail or not at all? Some details will always be lost over time, but if you use the places that are easy for you to remember in the first place, it will be much easier especially for long term palaces. What helped me for long term palaces, was creating them a week prior to actually using them for the information I need to memorize. Then reviewing the palaces from memory before putting the information there and just stick with what’s in my memory (not actually looking at the real place again), so I can make sure I only use the locations in the palace, that I remember effortlessly. When I put the information there I review it with spaced repetition which is very important in my opinion (you can find my personal review schedule here: Long term memory palace - #3 by SilvioB , of course there are other schedules; you can find some on the wiki or by searching the forum)
I would strongly encourage you to keep written walk-throughs of all your memory palaces, complete with the images/story you’re storing there. This will be invaluable if you stop reviewing your palaces and later find that you’ve forgotten something.
Bob
First things first: a memory palace is -not- a duplicate of the real life place.
If you are doubting if a couch was green or yellow, go with the most memorable. My memory palace of my childhood home looks like a place that it never was, it looks like how I memorized it later in life.
Secondly, a memory palace that you have used a few times is hard to forget. You may forget a single locus if you really dont use it, but it hardly ever makes a big impact.
Well thanks guys, that was some useful advice.
By the way is it advisable to use one location for 2 or more different memory palaces?
What exactly do you mean by one location for 2 or more different memory palaces? Do you mean you would reuse the same locations for different kinds of information?
If you mean to use a place like your home for multiple different palaces, you can do that, but there is a catch.
Imagine your loci like hooks. Every hook can hold information, a lot of information, but it can’t hold two thinfs in the same place. You can attach multiple things to one hook, but similar to how multiple coats can hang on one hanger, they have be in different places. With loci this can be a different place completely (one interacting with the cabinet doors, the other with what is inside the cabinet) or just a different kind of image (like is the case with every PAO image).
But there is a way to get around that.
Palace 1 is normal, just your own home as it is. Palace 2 is the same place, but everything is on fire! So don’t you let poor Morgan Freeman sit on your couch, that thing is a complete comfortable pillow-inferno. Palace 3 is completely submerged. Palace 4 is your home in a caveman style. You name it.
I hope to soon upload a few palaces here where I do this. At least something like this. It is an apartment building, and most loci will be similar in every room. You will find a bed, dinner table, toilet etc in all, but all have “markers” that make them stand out.
For a sneak preview of one of the three palaces, I already uploaded one to youtube.
I think we need to review also memory palaces. In youtube channel of Nelson Dellis, he memorized 31 decks. He mentioned that some of his palaces he used their are palaces he haven’t used for i while.