I have found that some memory techniques that work for others work well for me too — while others that work well for others turn out to be a total flop when I try to use them. I wonder how much of this could be a result of my inability to construct anything beyond the most rudimentary of memory palaces. For this reason, I have decided to discuss here what I suppose is at the root of my inability to use memory palaces.
I have one room-construct in my head that I’m not sure where I got it from (though I think it is from a theater I visited a few times in my youth) that I am able to use to construct memory palaces of no more than four pegs each. Beyond that, I’m not able to create memory palaces. I do have hypotheses why - and the reason is not due to an intellectual deficiency, but an aversion — or more accurately, a set of aversions.
Why not my childhood home? Because it is located in my childhood state — a state that I left very recently to escape the traumatizing life situation I was enduring there. It’s kinda a pity, because I’m certain that if I could easily fit 20 to 40 pegs in there. Same story for my previous residence (also located in the same state) where I’m sure I could easily fit 15 to 20 pegs - and I mean easily. However, since both places are located in a state where I endured a very traumatizing life situation, I fear that those locations would store emotions of trauma ---- and therefore I don’t dare use them as the bases for memory palaces.
But what about the state that I currently live in? Here the main problem is ---- I haven’t lived here long enough — and there are only two places I know well enough to use as the bases for memory palaces. Neither is as large as the fore-mentioned places I lived in in the past - but I could use one of them. I am sure I could safely use my parents’ current residence as a basis for a memory palace ---- only I have been cautioned not to use the same place as a basis for too many memory palaces because then the various memory palaces might bleed into one another.
My own current residence I am hesitant to use because it is still currently a mess — and I am paranoid that using it as a memory palace would cause me to freeze it in it’s current state — which I don’t want to do. I want to get it neat and nice-to-live-in. Of course I could try to place the pegs in such a way to steer clear of the apartment’s contents and focus only on the structure of the apartment ---- but in a small studio apartment (which is where I currently live) how much does that leave? Maybe I could expand this to include not just my own apartment, but also the common areas of the building — but where will that leave me when those settings are altered?
Also — in general, the caution against recycling the same setting for too many memory palaces is intimidating to me. As mentioned, not having lived here for very long, there are not many places in my current region of residence that I know well enough to use — and certainly not enough to use for all the information I need to keep, and would prefer keeping in my head rather than a cell-phone. As a matter of fact, there is a good chance that I will use up two or three of the settings just practicing getting the hang of the memory palace technique — which would mean that I’d run out of settings before getting to put it to any practical use.
Anyway — I kinda spilled my guts here in this post ---- but if I get answers, it will be worth-while.
It sounds to me that you are making this too difficult for yourself. You might be overthinking this.
Just take one journey you do a lot so that you know it well.
This can be the trip to the library for example.
If you cannot decide on a journey, create one.
And another. And another.
Things change. This is a fact of life. If you take your house as Roman Room, then if you make a change in it, you have to decide whether you want to make the same change in your memory palace or not. It is fine to leave your memory palace the same for ever.
These techniques need to be practiced. Especially so in the beginning.
Set out to create at least 1 journey in the next days and use it.
Then create another.
I am reading other posts by you and you seem to have a lot of issues with rooms you were personally attached to.
Maybe try using not so personal rooms, like the office you work in for example?
If you like cafes, you could create 10 or 20 (or more) locations while sitting inside. If you see an interesting house or building outside of your window or around town, you can create 10+ locations on the front of it. 10 buildings with 10 locations each is 100 locations.
You could probably fit 10+ locations on an everyday object if you make the locations small.
I once memorized a poem using locations inside of a car.
Using your own body as a memory palace can produce 10 or more locations. You could also turn the body of an animal (or stuffed animal) into a memory palace. (At the moment, I’m in a store where there are a lot of stuffed animals.)
Here, I wrote an answer to this question around a year ago(r30 added a bunch of stuff). See the wiki page for a several paragraph response, one that gives many different ways to expand.
If need more guidance after all that, ask. Previous commenters are correct.
That is a great idea — I am sure I can think of a few coffee-shops that I know well enough to fit at least a few pegs there.
Hmm. Interresting.
I suppose you could say that I did that when I memorized the sizes of wrenches I need to remove the front and back wheels of a bicycle I am working on repairing at the local bicycle co-op. Granted, it was only two numbers that I had to memorize — but now that I think of it, when I did so, I was using the body of that bicycle as a memory palace. I suppose I could attempt to remember more than two things using bodies of that level of complexity.
Granted — I wasn’t thinking of using the bicycle as a memory palace — I only pegged the mnemonics to the bicycle because it was also the subject of what I was trying to remember. However, now that you mention it, that is what I was doing (even if I didn’t realize it at the time).
Hmm. In short what you are saying in your post is — my answer is to apply more creativity to finding things to use as memory palaces.
I use my shopping walk. If there is any shopping centre you go to regularly, that can work well, especially if you do one shop per location. There is so much that can be associated with each shop space. The fact that they change tennants sometimes has not been a problem. I also use the houses, carparks and roads to and from the shops I walk to.
I like to spread my locations rather than have too many close together with lots of pegs within them. A shop or a house, as a single location, has heaps of pegs already there.
Or a park. I have the park I walk around for exercise all staked out!
These things will survive no matter where you live and have less connections than you varying life.
I am not sure about your worry about too many attributes to the same palace. I have three sets of data to one palace, and four to the first dozen or so locations. I find they work together nicely and just get mixed up with each other, but that is no hassle when I am withdrawing the information. I don’t think I will go over the four, though. But I haven’t tried it, so can’t comment further. I’d just rather walk a different way to the shops and create a new palace.
I want to point out an important distinction in this post because two separate issues are glued together here, and these should be stated clearly to be made as apparent as possible. Inability does not follow from aversion. Reluctance and unwillingness may follow from aversion, and those are the things I believe I am seeing in this post.
The inability to do something can sometimes be very difficult to identify. In the case of using memory palaces for practical purposes, there could never be a final demonstration of a functioning mind being incapable of this. There could be evidence for the belief, and as far as I can tell, strong evidence for inability would only take the form of some certain number of failed trials, and that number ought to be fairly large since failure goes hand in hand with learning a new skill. And it doesn’t look like there have been a large number of failures following from genuine attempts here.
If you have only been able to make palaces of four loci each (and your original post suggests that you believe you are incapable of making a palace with more than four locations) then I challenge you to make a palace of five. I’ll walk you through that process.
Go to your nearest coffee shop. The first locus is the front door. Whether it is merely the doorway or the door seen from the outside or the inside is not important. If you can’t decide which is better, flip a coin. Heads is the door as seen from the outside, and tails is the door as seen from the inside. Include one chair and one table as evenly spaced as possible leading up to the register. Move from the register straight to the bathroom door. That’s a genuine five-locus palace. Five isn’t many, but it is more than four. With it, you can work at memorizing ten items at a time, placing two per locus. If you don’t get it at first, keep trying. Remember that you can review as many times as you want.
When you see improvement in speed or efficacy, add the toilet and the sink in the order which makes the most sense spatially (in linear order). That’s 7. Not too bad. Memorize 14 things per day at least once per day. You’ll find that this palace will begin to work for you. You can use it as a model to build more later. I have a whole lot of stop signs throughout my palaces. They all look the same, but I never get confused if I’m only memorizing information in a single palace. It would be illogical for a person to skip to a stop sign on the other side of town rather than the one within 20 feet of the current locus and then skip back to this side of town to continue on the path. That also goes for doors, chairs, tables, registers, toilets, and sinks.
