Having Trouble Connecting the Dots... Help? (Overwhelmed with info)

General Memory Chat
1

Hi folks,

I'm feeling overwhelmed trying to come up with a learning strategy/plan to get me to my goals. I've read through the Getting Started page, but I'm still not totally sure where to begin.

So I thought I'd ask for a little help. I'll try to explain this in terms of both my weaknesses and my desired outcomes. Hopefully that way you can give me some guidance and I can get started. You'll also find below some extra information about who I am, what I do, and a general look at what my behaviours are like.

I'll be happy to share my progress as well.

My Weaknesses

The weaknesses I present below are ordered in descending level of which struggles have had the most negative impact on my life, from most to least.

  • Names of people, places, and things: This drives me nuts. I'll find myself talking to a person I have known for years and just lose my ability to recall their names. If this was an occasional thing, I wouldn't care so much, but it happens almost every day. My "emotional" vocabulary is very strong. I can describe how I feel or how another person feels with ease. I remember words that describe concepts. But when it comes to physical things I keep forgetting.
  • Numbers:Hoo boy. My girlfriend is amazing with this. She sees a number or hears it and it sticks so well. I'll forget a number three seconds after I've heard it. The reason this impacts me so significantly is that I suspect it causes me to make poor purchasing decisions. I never remember what a product cost before, I can't keep the numbers in my head for math, and so I wind making poor purchasing decisions. I'll get to the counter and not even recognize when I've been overcharged for something (unless the total is truly absurd).
  • Lyrics and Song Names: Not so critical, but certainly impacts me. I can listen to a song once (maybe twice) and remember the melody, the bass line, the percussion, all of that. If someone gives me the first few notes of a song, I'll give them most of the rest of it. I can even sometimes remember the harmony. But I won't recall the words, and I'll butcher songs as a result. Now, this is why it's bad: I love to sing. I sung in musicals throughout High School, even as lead roles, participated in an International Honor Choir and remembered those lyrics just fine. In the context of a story, the lyrics just made sense. But so many songs have words that seem to have no relationship to one another. I have nothing to hook the words onto so I end up picking a word that sounds similar just so I can keep singing along. I'll often decide not to sing because a musician will offer me a song name and I won't remember anything about it.
  • Directions: I'm awful at remembering street paths and names. I won't remember the order of streets, the intersections, which way streets run, none of that sticks. I can be in the same place over and over again, but not recall what I'm seeing. Not sure if this is a memory problem or a geospatial awareness issue, but there it is.

Desired Outcomes

Basically, I want to be able to overcome all the weaknesses listed above. But let me get more specific:

  • Never forget a name.
  • Become more accurate (specific) in my speech.
  • Store key numbers permanently in my memory and have a way of improving recall of new numbers
  • Quickly learn lyrics.

Existing Behaviours

Just as an idea of who I am, I spend the majority of my time writing and reading. My eating habits aren't particularly sound, and I'm overweight. Working to improve both of these, since I understand that good physical health helps with mental health.

The nature of what I do means I can start working whenever I want to, but I'm trying to set a much more consistent schedule. I've found so far that a consistent schedule makes it easier to remember what Iv'e done throughout the day.

And that's about it!

Apologies for the incredible length of this post, hope I didn't bore you all to tears and someone can help me clarify where I should start. I'm really looking for the one or two things I can do right now that will have the widest impact across all of these areas.

Thanks so much! Omar

2

Reread what you have written and identify phrases and words that you repeat frequently. When you repeat stock words and phrases, you are taking the easy way out rather than expressing yourself accurately. It doesn’t reflect negatively on you because we all do it. But changing those habits is a good place to start. Identify them, and when you find yourself writing those phrases again, just don’t. Not yet. Stop and ask yourself if that same phrase is really the best you can do, because the odds are that you could do better and avoid selling yourself short.

For digits, I am a fan of pure object systems for their simplicity and versatility in memorizing strings of digits of different length, such as addresses, phone numbers, etc. You can do that stuff with PAO also, but PAO takes more work and is not necessary. When using a 2-digit system, which is what you need for your purposes, PAO might allow for quicker memorization of digits in the short run. But it doesn’t look like you’ll be racing anyone, so making a PAO list might be overkill for you. Instead, just make 100 objects that are unique and somewhat interesting for all 2 digit numbers 00-99. By “interesting” I mean it should have mobile parts or a specific function. A stick is an okay object, but a slingshot is probably better. You don’t have to rack your brains trying to find the perfect objects, but unique, wacky, colorful, mobile, meaningful/sentimental images will usually be easier to remember and easier to make interact with the other objects.

For names, begin making an image for every name, first and last, that you see in real life. That’s your homework from now until you decide that you’re ‘good enough’ at remembering peoples’ names. You will encounter many names, and within a relatively short period of time, you’ll have a database for hundreds of names. It sounds like a lot, but it really isn’t. You don’t have to sit down and do any work, just think of an image every time you see or hear a name. It could be a celebrity or a friend with the same name, or an object that rhymes or nearly rhymes (Karen->carrot) or anything else that comes to mind. If something comes to mind quickly, that’s usually a good image to stick with because it will come to mind quickly the next time you hear the name as well. In your country, you will encounter the same names over and over. So after you have these images, and you are about to meet a person, get yourself ready to hear their name. Know that you are about to hear their name and that you’re going to use it by coming up with a short movie in your head in which that person interacts with the object that sounds like their name. Understand that the next time you see this person, you are going to think of that video that you made the first time you met them. That will remind you of their name.

Just paying attention and getting ready to hear their name makes a huge difference in itself because usually when you meet someone you are trying to be respectful and listen to what they want to tell you and try to think of interesting responses. In other words, you think about the conversation and more or less ignore the name.

That’s a start :slight_smile:

1 Like
Objects, 2 in 1 and combination questions
3

LociInTheSky, thanks for such a thorough response!

I’ll apply the names and numbers ideas immediately. I wanted to ask something about the first suggestion, with regards to repeating stock words or phrases.

I rarely repeat myself in conversation or in print. In fact, I’m sensitive to even using the same complex word twice in the same paragraph.

Where I struggle most with accuracy or specificity comes from not remembering the names of things and relying instead on the words I do know to describe them. I might look at a tree and not remember that it’s a pine tree. So I’ll call it the “spiky green tree.”

Worse, when I pause in conversation to figure it out, someone will inevitability jump in to supply the word and I lose the opportunity.

Any suggestions for that?

4

Here is a great article on names

I agree with Loci that a casual user should start with a 0-99 system, especially for numbers
That allows you to ability to expand to a PAO (which has 300 items to remember) or a 1000 object system later
Here is a link on objects 0-99 with an example list
http://www.the-number-thesaurus.com/Introduction.asp
However, objects usually “stick” in your mind better if you make the list yourself
(and just use someone else’s list when you cant come up with a good image)

5

If you strip what we do on this forum to it basics, there is:

  • making associations of a thing we know to a thing we don't know.
  • coding cards and numbers into images, persons or actions and then associate this to stuff we know

This is true for the memory palace, for the peg list, for the linked list, etc.

That is all there is to it.
So together with the advice already given, focus on that.

Do the examples from the beginners guide. This will make you familiar with making associations.
If you can do that, all the rest is extra knowledge, and specialisation.

6

1 - That’s good. Most people aren’t so conscious.

2 - Sorry, I don’t know anything about that.

Palaces can be great for lyrics. Put a line in a locus, or two loci if it’s a long line. Verbatim text is very difficult to memorize, but a few key words in the line can easily be placed in a locus. Since you say you can remember the rhythm and such, recalling the content of each line may be enough to remind you of all the words. It might be a fun thing to try since you don’t need any pre-made images to do it. You just need some loci.