It’s been a while since I’ve been thinking of mnemonic devices and memory stuff, but I was reminded of them recently and thought I’d revisit things here.
One thing I remember struggling with in school was historical dates. I was good with numbers, but not exactly names or the connection. If someone told me that person X did thing Y in year Z, I’d remember that something important happened in year Z, but not really know who it was or what it was or why I should care.
I’ve also been incredibly out of practice due to life and just general forgetfulness of mnemonics existing, so I decided I’d revisit my own strategies.
I was fairly decent in school, but I was never really given strategies past “repeat it ad nauseum” or existing mnemonics like Every Good Boy Does Fine. So it was interesting that I encountered memory strategies some time ago.
I’m recalling the more traditional methods used here and what people tend to need to remember.
First, numbers. Long strings of digits like 3.14159265… My personal favorite is the Major System as it is phonetic and you can generate actual imagery. For this one, I’d encode the first 3 as the adjective “my”, 14 is tree, 15 is dial, 92 is pen, 65 is gem. So I could imagine my tree, reaching over on some kind of control panel to adjust a dial, then getting a pen and writing the result down, only for the pen to fracture apart and reveal that inside is a precious gem.
I am also aware of a system that encodes numbers as faces, but I am horribly face blind. Human faces all kind of blur together for me without any distinctive markings or rough indications of race/ethnicity, sex/gender, age, etc. I cannot picture most people in my mind unless I have seen some kind of image of them before. Being an introvert doesn’t help much either.
Another thing I’ve realized people often need to do is recall a sequence in order, not necessarily numbers, for example the periodic table. Hydrogen could be a fire hydrant, helium a balloon, lithium a battery, etc. The problem is then putting these images in the correct order.
This is where the memory palace comes in. I have thought about it from time to time, and perhaps if I were more serious in the future I could revisit it. I have stronger spatial memory. I’d just need to reconstruct a space in my mind and place images there. For example, I could take the four corners of the space on the floor, the four corners on the ceiling and have eight spaces. One thing I did realize some time ago was I could have twenty-seven spaces. Nine on the floor (one in each corner, one at the middle of each wall edge, and one in the center of the floor, forming a bit of a grid). Nine on the ceiling the same way, and nine at mid-height leaving one floating in the middle of the room. Though this might not be ideal, it is a good first pass.
I also realized like I do not mentally construct an automatic “route” through a space. My visualization of a space is more of the space itself, this room attaches to that, this room is this big, kind of like a skeleton of the body but no route of like which bone is the “first bone”, which is the “second bone”, etc.
Most of what I actually tend to do is unfortunately brute force repetition, then after a few days see what fails to be encoded, and focus on that specifically to test my recall. Spaced repetition. If it truly fails I tend to resort to mnemonics as a last resort. Though I am seeing that perhaps this isn’t ideal.
I am kind of getting back into this after a massive break and kind of forgetting almost everything. Ironic.
Absolutely ironic.
But I am starting to get back into studying my own mind and how it remembers things naturally and thinking how I can exploit it to be better.